Writer and game designer Matt Colville tells a story about a friend of his, an illustrator, inking a pencil drawing. Of the probability cloud of lines he’d sketched, that illustrator followed the best one with ink, and a professional drawing emerged. Matt Colville asked how he knew which line to follow. His friend replied, “Four years of art school.”
He said:
I generally think that, if you are someone who has it in you to lead a creative life […] I think the path you choose tends to be which, of all the different ways you can be an artist, did you first realize there was a person on the other side of.
Creativity is an impulse — some take it, some leave it — but it’s something that can be practiced. Maybe the path to a creative life starts by realizing that other people like you have gone before. The obsession with artists who change everything, go tortured into the bleak crags of unknown, goes down with the same flavor as the obsession with serial killers. Weird, dangerous, sort of sad. Idolize artists whose life you actually want to imitate.
Then, make like an illustrator, sketch thousands of lines of lead, and practice seeing the picture that already exists.