The creative process starts with an inkling, an intuition, a suspicion, a flash of an idea. You think of something funny and you don’t know how you thought of it, but you start laughing and your wife is half-curious, half-annoyed because you can’t stop laughing and you can’t talk to her right now.

The “something funny” becomes a joke when you tell it and then retell it, tweaking it, changing a word or two, adding a sound effect, gestures, a sense of timing. What was the flash of an idea becomes a sort of object, even if it’s purely verbal. You’ve constructed the joke from insight up and out.

Telling the joke is a way of sharing your intuition or your flash of an idea. Other people will go on to tell your joke themselves, through a cycle of propagation and maybe variation and transformation. Your joke makes people happy, unless it makes them irritated, unless it leaves them fuming. The important thing is that you’ll share the joke with others, and the joke will travel.

And people will let you know how clever the joke is. Maybe you put it on social media and get a few likes, or a lot of likes. Behind your back, someone might say to someone else, “A guy told me a very funny joke.” Your creative work is now acknowledged and validated.

Intuition.
Fashioning.
Sharing.
Acknowledgment.

This is an archetypal process—I mean, something that happens very often and in a thousand different ways, and to a lot of people or even to all people. The joke is just an example, perhaps a small or shallow instance. Having a child is a bigger manifestation of the same process. The first step is conception, the strange messy intimate incomprehensible thing that happens “behind closed doors.” Then you care for the baby, toddler, and adolescent; you do tens of thousands of things over the years to protect your child and to help her grow. Your child goes to school, makes friends, develops her own style. It’s like the sharing of a joke: your child occupies her space in the world. And you get acknowledged, practically and metaphysically: you achieve a sort of immortality, because when you’re gone your child will “carry your name.” Plus, she looks just like you, except for her nose, which comes from Grandpa (who’s also immortal, by proxy).

On May 13, 2017 I was practicing the piano at Studio Bleu in central Paris when I had an intuition, a flash of an idea: How about I write a piano method? It came suddenly to me, “behind closed doors,” as it were. The moment was exciting and a little scary, because it altered my frame of mind and created “possibilities with consequences.” My piano practice immediately changed; that very day I started having other ideas, inventing exercises, improvising tunes.

At first I thought I’d create a simple method with a few exercises and prompts for improvisation, maybe with some barebones explanations. No big deal! But it didn’t turn out that way. The fashioning of my method needed thousands of hours of practice and work over years and years. It required that I test dozens of exercises. Some of them seemed excellent when I invented them, but over time I’d come to see them as awkward, redundant, pointless, my mother is turning in her grave, counterclockwise. Pedro, it hurts! Why can’t you make me turn clock-damn-wise once in a while?

Meanwhile, I shared. I taught my exercises to various pianists, including my own piano teacher; to beginners, to concert artists; to the bored and to the indifferent. I started performing some of my piano compositions informally, then more formally. I’m a visiting professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, where I had the opportunity of giving a recital of my own music in 2018. I played the cello and sang, and also played the piano. The president of the Conservatory sat in the front row, the head of the piano department a few rows back. I employed two concert grands, a Steinway and a Bösendorfer. Do you know how big a concert grand is? About the size of a food truck, though less greasy.

Along comes acknowledgment. Students make remarkable improvements thanks to some of my concepts. Pianists record my pieces and express their enjoyment. Oxford University Press gives my method the Imprimatur (which the dictionary defines as “an official licence issued by the Roman Catholic Church to print an ecclesiastical or religious book; a person's authoritative approval; an ‘okay, we go ahead, Pedro!’”).

The method is under production, all the 40,000 words, the 300 music examples, the 150 compositions, the 48 video clips. Production is a slow affair. My editor and I have to get rid of every wart, pimple, and zit. And some zits are, like, obdurate. Obstreperous. Obnoxious. Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Life is made of “possibilities with consequences and responsibilities.” Telling a joke is a serious business. What if you make someone die of laughter? What if the president of the Conservatoire comes to his senses and fires you? What if your mother comes out of the grave yielding an axe and “offers to change your diapers” for you?

I’ll play her one of my lullabies, so help me God.