In the beginning, there was no Word – only a blank page. This editorial was no exception. And look, three sentences already! As readers, you usually encounter only the finished product, while our authors, and we at Verfassungsblog, have to face that blank page. So what actually happens before a text is published here? This question has been on our minds all the more since AI seems to be filling the blank page for us. We’ve therefore made it our job to protect this endangered creative process. Our strategy is the same as in conservation biology: visibility. Instead of cute photos of orang-utans, we’ll be sharing short pieces from our editorial team and from our authors describing the creative process: how do we come up with ideas? Where are we when ideas come to us? How do we sow and water them, and how do we know when they’re ripe? I have the honour of making the beginning today.

Creativity, then. I grew up believing that there are people who are creative and people who are not. What a dreary world that would be! By now, I’m convinced that creativity is our state of nature: we don’t lie in wait for each other like hungry wolves – we scrawl funny figures on cave walls, rub twigs against each other until they burn, and then dance around it.

The German word for idea – Einfall, literally an “in-falling” – captures it nicely: an idea suddenly falls into my head. I used to think I had to do more: read more, know more, write more, more more more (it was a tough PhD phase). And please get everything right. But here’s what I’ve learned: fear chases what’s right; joy finds what’s true. I don’t really have to do all that much – I just have to be there at the right moment and joyfully catch the idea as it falls. Creativity is a way of being, as Rick Rubin sums it up in my creative bible. In beguilingly simple words, he reminds us how we perceived the world as children: playful and curious. Oh, right, that’s how it was – back then, in our state of nature.

And indeed, my creative process begins with the very first of my inner recordings. The material is out there: forest landscapes, adventure novels, snatches of conversation, colours, shapes, scholarship. My body files away a selection – obeying an inscrutable Zettelkasten system I’ll never fully understand. But it works. Time and again, I’m struck by what I find in the archives of my subconscious – and by what gets sent up the dumbwaiter unwanted (2000s ad jingles during my law exams, for instance). The name says it all: just waiting like an idiot. Something is happening down there in the archive, and if I wait long enough, a tidy and surprising file package comes up.

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The timing is out of my control. When does an idea come? In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert imagines ideas as autonomous beings whirring about us, looking for a willing human partner. Once they’ve found someone, they try to make themselves noticed. I like that: ideas as wilful, flighty creatures, the creative process as teamwork between inside and out. Perhaps my archive staff are simply responding to the call of these bats – a call I can’t hear myself. That is my experience: sometimes an idea is just ripe, and if I don’t want to connect with it, it’s not unusual that it’ll materialise somewhere else a few months later – exactly the text I’ve sent back down into my archive basement, as an unwritten draft.

Stephen King advises descending into the basement yourself. That’s where his muse lives, as he writes in On Writing: “There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish the apartment for him to live in.”

And it’s true, we have to make it cosy for the muse. A nice environment helps me. Right now, for instance, I’m sitting in my favourite coffeeshop; soulful jazz is playing softly, there’s pottery being thrown next door, and the air smells of wet clay and pistachio cake.

My archive staff also don’t seem to work well when I’m watching them too closely over the shoulder, stopwatch in hand. The moment I put myself under pressure, they go on strike. What helps instead is pretending I’m busy with something else: keeping the creative task gently present while I get on with undemanding things.

In a way, I’m a bit like Claude – a black box with insane computing power, untraceable chains of associations, and plenty of hallucinations. I don’t process every file package that arrives. And here I differ (thankfully!) from Claude: I have a body. My stomach has to tingle, my fingers have to itch – the idea has to move me, or nothing comes of it. That’s why good things often come to me in motion: walking, washing up, hanging out the laundry. And if the idea then won’t let me go, I have to make space for it: the blank page.

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I do use AI, but only as an additional service to my own archive. It can look up the redacted passages for me, the memory gaps in my files (very handy!), and otherwise check whether what I’ve written is nonsense. Should both my natural and my artificial intelligence end up hallucinating, I’m counting on you to tell me.

With the blank page, the process becomes more active – but even here, I never quite take the lead. It’s like partner dancing: I hold the frame while the idea dances on its own. Every dance is different – one light-footed, the next more ponderous – but you always end up somewhere other than where you started, a little sweaty, with a full heart. If you take me for a romantic now, you’re absolutely right. Which is also why it remains a mystery to me why anyone would rather use AI than dance.

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