The Best of Process Junkie: 2024 Edition

The process is the reward -- here's what we covered this year.

Dec 27, 2024

When I launched Process Junkie, I had one goal: to figure out why creative people do what they do and share my own insights and advice on the creative process.

The existential spiral started with How do you decide who you're going to be when you get up in the morning? — a question that hits different when you've just spent three hours scrolling through sketchbooks on Pinterest instead of drawing. After laying down The 3 Tenets of Process Junkie (+ Downloads and Swag!), which is really just me trying to justify my creative neuroses with a manifesto, we got practical. It has been very rewarding to hear from those of you who are finding this helpful.

What's in Your Road Kit? tackled the tools I carry when I’m out of the studio, which has already changed several times since publication. (Because of course.) This was followed by Stick Your Neck Out! (but not too far.), a guide to calculated physical risk-taking that I probably should have absorbed before starting this newsletter. [Click! pop! Crack!]

The first Process Junkie Book Club: The Work of Art by Adam Moss proved that at least some of you actually read books instead of just arranging them artfully for Instagram. I’m still re-reading this one and getting a lot out of every page. Speaking of books, The one drawing book I read every year without fail revealed my own creative security blanket; I’m happy to share the warm corner of it with you. Just don’t put your cold feet on me.

Then we went deeper.

Thoughts on creative partnerships explored what happens when you let other people into your creative bubble. Creativity Requires Quiet and On Turning Down the Volume to Hear Your Own Voice both tackled the art of shutting up long enough to hear yourself think — a lesson that led naturally into A Skeptic's Path to Creative Enlightenment: What I Learned from 10 Years of Daily Meditation Practice. Not all creative advice is about pen choices and ink recommendations.

Learning to say NO might be the most important thing I wrote all year, if only because it meant saying no to writing even more articles about saying no. And AI Tools in Creative Work: Maintaining Humanity in the Process reminded us that while robots might be coming for our jobs, they still can't capture the pure chaos of human creativity.

We rounded out the year with some advice you’ve all been asking for since day 1: My Process for Submitting Cartoons to the New Yorker. I hope this gets some of you over the line from ‘wondering how hard it is’ to ‘knowing exactly how insanely hard it is.’

Looking back, it's been a year of examining why we do what we do, how we do it, and whether we should be doing something else entirely. Thanks for coming along on this strange journey of creative self-discovery.

Here's to another year of making things, questioning everything, and occasionally remembering to actually do the work instead of just writing about it.