How Ambiguity Fuels Creativity and Avoids Audience Capture
Artists are often associated with utterly uncompromising creative convictions. Picasso reinvented painting multiple times rather than repeat himself. Prince went to war with his record label for total creative control, and James Joyce spent seventeen years writing a single novel. In the modern era, however, few people better personifies this than writer and director Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino's style is singular - a unique alchemy of razor-sharp dialogue, obsessive pop culture reverence, and visceral violence that's equal parts grotesque and darkly comic, all orchestrated through meticulously curated soundtracks that function as the very soul of his films. As the writer Chuck Klosterman observed in The Nineties, “He became the most important filmmaker of the nineties by making movies exclusively designed for his own idiosyncratic pleasure.”
That unwavering conviction and self-belief often meant defying the studio system entirely. His confrontations with studio executives are legendary. When Pulp Fiction was being developed, executives pushed back hard on its now-iconic nonlinear structure. They wanted a conventional timeline. Tarantino refused. He was adamant that the fragmented narrative was the film, and there would be no compromise.
As he put it: “Having that Bravado, that uncompromising vision for it, of not asking for permission..This is how I want to work. When I write something, it's like “boom”, if you want to make this, this is it, there will be no changes”.
The creative realm, though, is from a straightforward place. Creativity does not necessarily flow from one’s deepest and most closely held artistic beliefs. For many, the creative process comes not from an uncompromising conviction, but from its opposite: ambiguity; a fascination with something vague, ethereal and almost completely imperceptible.
How does ambiguity drive the creative process? Let’s dive in
Ambiguity and Vagueness as a Source of Creativity
Artists engaged in the creative process cultivate a north star which is found neither in their audience, nor in themselves. Instead, it begins with a fascination with something - an idea, an image, a feeling. Crucially, this something isn’t concrete or understood, but vague and mysterious. It sparks curiosity and examination.
The writer Joy Williams has described this best, “The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve … something. Somethingness.”
This idea of “vagueness” as a source of creative fuel seems to be what Joan Didion describes as being compelled by the “images that shimmer around the edges”. As she elaborates,
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means … Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
These mysterious images, external to us and treading the boundaries of our worldviews, can become a creative spark.
This approach is also described in film as well. An ambiguous kernel in the mind of the screenwriter can be the source of a two-hour cinematic work. As the acclaimed writer Don Delillo describes, “The scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s visual, it’s Technicolor - something I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into the breach.”
The Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi beautifully describes the creative process with reference to a suit tailor. As he described to The New Yorker, writing a script is like “finding a suit for a button”. As he described to The New Yorker, “the starting point is often a single image”.
One of his most famous films, “A Separation” was born from a memory that one of his brothers had shared, or crying as he bathed their ailing grandfather. That moment, Farhadi said, was like “a magnet that starts attracting all the experiences from the subconscious, and I gather these things, and it begins to shape the suit”.
From Ambiguous Creative Sparks to Ambiguity as Strategy
Vagueness and ambiguity is often the spark of a creative fire. By moving towards this ambiguity, becoming curious with it and becoming engrossed in it - instead of retreating or dismissing it - can often lead the artist on a fruitful, artistic venture.
Ambiguity though, isn’t merely an inspirational spark. It can also be employed once the creative project has begun, as a larger, strategic director. How can ambiguity be employed to guide creativity?
One creative in particular has leveraged such an approach, and he does so through a very specific means: By creating for a divine, ambiguous audience.
Rick Rubin on Audience Capture
Rick Rubin is arguably the most famous music producer of all-time. After co-founding Def Jam Records out of his dorm room at NYU, Rubin started out working with Hip Hop artists in the early 90s, collaborating with the likes of Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J. Over the course of three decades, the prolific behind the scenes genius has worked with artists ranging from Adele to Kayne West, System of a Down, Beastie Boys, to Red Hot Chili Peppers, to Tom Petty.
Having produced so much commercially successful music over the years, you might think that Rubin - like most producers - would be great at assimilating audience preferences into these creative works. This approach, after all, is endemic to pop music. However, Rubin has taken the opposite approach: Ignore your audience.
The idea of changing one’s art for the audience, is, according to Rubin, insane. As he described on The Honestly Podcast, “The Artist already told you how they see it. To change what you do for them is odd. It’s like if you write a story, and then the audience says, we would like the story to be different than the story you wrote - it’s odd. It’s insane, it’s a crazy idea.”
Instead, Rubin argues, we need to convey the art as we see it. “Art is: this is how I see what I’m seeing” And ultimately, in pursuit of this personal expression, we need to be willfully oblivious to how the audience may interpret this. This isn’t just good for the artist - it’s done for the audience as well. As Rubin distills: “In the service of your audience, you must ignore your audience”
This again, is easier said than done. We are, after all, social creatures, prone towards the influence of other people. It’s a challenge not to anticipate the response of the audience and for these ideas to seep into the creative process itself. After all, if we’re not making it for the audience, who are we making it for?
An Ambiguous God as a Creative North Star
Rick Rubin has a singular response: You’re making it for none other than God themselves.
Rubin, who is a regular practitioner of transcendental meditation, isn’t referring here to a specific God, from any particular religious tradition. This isn’t the Abrahamic God, and he’s not evangelizing. Instead, the idea here is to consider your creative work an offering to a much more personal conception of a higher power.
As he described on the Jay Shetty podcast,
“I came to realize recently that it’s all an offering to God. And if you’re making an offering to God, you’re not thinking about the budget, and you’re not thinking about ‘this segment of the audience is going to like it’. You don’t think like that. You think - we’re making the best we can make, to the best of our ability, out of love and devotion. And there is no, “I’m changing it for someone else” because it can’t be better than this devotional act that we’re doing”.
It’s a powerful approach, and one need not be devoted to any particular religious tradition to leverage it. You can just as easily replace it with your own symbolic entity of love and devotion. What’s crucial here isn’t the semantics, but about giving your creative process a north star for which you hold deep reverence for.
Perhaps the most important feature of this “divine north star” is that it is one that you don’t fully, and explicitly understand. It’s inherently mysterious and outside of your direct understanding. People’s conceptions of God differ widely, but what they share in common is an almost complete absence of simple numbers and best practices. Unlike say, YouTube, whose analytics can be studied and unlocked, one’s conception of a higher power can’t be dissected and mastered. It can’t even be grasped.
What this also means is that you’re creating for an entity which you don’t fully understand and is therefore completely orthogonal to your audience. In this way, creating something beyond oneself is liberating. It removes the creative act from the realm of transaction - from the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) influence of metrics, reactions, or external validation. It offers a means to resist the gravitational pull of audience capture.
Final Thoughts on Ambiguity and Creativity
On the surface, Tarantino’s creative convictions may seem worlds apart from the vague images that haunted Joan Didion or the fragmentary memories that inspired Asghar Farhadi. But creativity doesn’t always draw such clear boundaries. Certainty and ambiguity aren’t necessarily rival forces - they’re companions, often trading places along the way.
The creative realm is vast and capacious - large enough to contain Tarantino’s bravado and Joan Didion’s shimmering half-images, and everything in between.
Some ideas arrive fully formed, others barely perceptible. Some artists begin with conviction and coax it into an offering for an unknowable, ephemeral entity. Others start with a shimmer of ambiguity and shape it into something unmistakably their own.
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
If you're curious about the psychology of ambiguity and how it shapes our perceptions, decisions, and experiences, sign up for my newsletter. Each edition dives deeper into the fascinating ways our minds interpret the world - and how we can harness these insights to think and live better.
Be the first to read the next segment by signing up to the newsletter (for free)
References for The Psychology of Ambiguity and Uncertainty
Ruggeri, K., Alí, S., Berge, M. L., Bertoldo, G., Bjørndal, L. D., Cortijos-Bernabeu, A., ... & Folke, T. (2020). Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk. Nature human behaviour, 4(6), 622-633.
Ellsberg, Daniel (1961). Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms. Quarterly Journal
of Economics, 75, 643-669
Ball, T. S., & Vogler, R. E. (1971). Uncertain pain and the pain of uncertainty. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 33(3_suppl), 1195-1203.
