I have sometimes confused creativity with unpredictability in my own work.

Unpredictable can be good…SURPRISE!… for the listener. But I don’t think it’s a good thing for the performer or creator. However late the decision is made to play a particular note, or use a particular word, or improvise a particular riff, that “unpredicability” should be deliberate, not accidental.

Of course every writer and performer has at some point done something accidentally which seems to enhance a creation or a performance. And we want to hear risks taken in which deliberate creative decisions, could potentially back-fire.

But I’ve come to believe that the vast majority of the creative work and performances we admire, are born out of one thing. Consistency.

A reliable, repeatable technique, and a confident knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work. And it would have been easier to have sorted all that out at the beginning, I’m finding.

But whenever we do it, it’s always worth taking time to work on the consistency.