The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: you need an idea. It’s not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (the rare times when it has stands out like april blizzards.) You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun - paint into painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.

Twyla Tharp — The Creative Habit