The creative process is a journey of 95 percent intuitive, seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain. — George Saunders
—What lingers after this line?
The Unscripted Core of Making
George Saunders presents creativity not as a tidy formula but as a lived, improvisational act. At the heart of his claim is the idea that most artistic choices arise in motion, before the mind can neatly justify them. In other words, the maker often senses the right next step rather than logically deriving it, which makes the process feel mysterious even to the person doing it. From this starting point, creativity becomes less like executing a blueprint and more like feeling one’s way through fog. Saunders’s phrase “seat-of-the-pants” captures that vulnerable immediacy: the artist works forward by instinct, trusting small judgments that may only reveal their meaning afterward.
Why Explanation Comes Later
Building on that, Saunders highlights a gap between doing and explaining. Many creators can describe techniques, influences, or goals, yet the decisive moments often happen too quickly and too deeply to be translated in real time. A novelist may cut a sentence because it feels false, or a musician may change tempo because the piece suddenly asks for it, even if the rationale emerges only later. This pattern appears throughout artistic history. Henri Poincaré’s reflections in Science and Method (1908), though focused on mathematics, describe sudden intuitive breakthroughs arriving before formal proof. Likewise, Saunders implies that explanation is often retrospective: analysis tidies up what intuition first discovered.
Trusting the Inner Compass
As a result, Saunders’s view asks creators to trust an internal compass that may not look respectable from the outside. Intuition can seem unreliable because it lacks the visible structure of plans and outlines, yet in practice it often reflects years of absorbed craft. What feels like a leap is usually a compressed judgment built from experience, reading, failure, and repeated attention. This is why seasoned artists often appear spontaneous while actually drawing on deep reserves of knowledge. Jazz improvisation offers a clear example: a player seems to invent freely in the moment, but that freedom rests on countless hours of listening and practice. Thus, intuition is not the opposite of discipline; it is discipline made fluid.
The Productive Role of Uncertainty
At the same time, Saunders’s quote preserves the uncertainty that makes creation both difficult and alive. If 95 percent of the process consists of unexplainable decisions, then confusion is not a sign of failure but part of the terrain. Artists frequently move ahead without certainty, discovering the work by making it rather than by mastering it beforehand. Virginia Woolf’s diary entries, especially those surrounding the writing of Mrs Dalloway (1925), reveal a similar pattern of searching, doubting, and suddenly finding form through experimentation. In that sense, uncertainty becomes productive: it keeps the work open, allowing surprise to enter where rigid intention might have closed the door.
Craft Hidden Inside Instinct
Yet Saunders does not reduce creativity to chaos. His emphasis on intuitive choices suggests that craft often operates below conscious awareness, shaping taste and judgment from within. A writer who has revised hundreds of pages may instantly recognize when a paragraph drags; a painter may sense imbalance in a composition before identifying the exact technical cause. Therefore, instinct is often invisible craftsmanship. The psychologist Gary Klein’s Sources of Power (1998) describes how experts make rapid decisions through pattern recognition, and a similar principle applies to art. What cannot be fully explained in the moment may still be precise, trained, and intelligent.
A Humane View of the Creative Life
Finally, Saunders offers a reassuring philosophy for anyone intimidated by the myth of total control. If creation depends largely on in-the-moment choices, then not knowing exactly what one is doing is normal, not shameful. The artist’s task is less about commanding inspiration than about staying present enough to notice what the work seems to want next. Seen this way, creativity becomes a conversation rather than a conquest. One listens, responds, adjusts, and proceeds. Saunders’s insight ultimately dignifies the messy reality of making: art grows through felt decisions, accumulated trust, and the courage to continue before certainty arrives.
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