Here's a good analogy for some aspects of the creative process.
Suppose you wanted to make a flying machine. You might start by emulating a bird and you might construct a vehicle with flapping wings. And people might call you a moron and you might feel like an idiot because the thing looks like a bird but doesn't fly at all. Eventually you might get it to work a little, but not much.
Sooner or later, however, you make some adjustments and now the wings are static and the airplane is invented. You started with the idea of the bird, but what you really needed to make was an airplane. Yet, you had no idea what an airplane was in the beginning. So you had to start with the bird, even though you couldn't really make a mechanical bird
The interesting thing is that, in the final product, the bird is there after all. The airplane has wings. People say it looks like a bird. But you had to focus on the lift and the soaring of the bird and find a different way to propel the craft. It had to be kind of like a bird, but its own thing. The flying machine you finally invent does share attributes with birds, but obviously not all of their attributes.
Art is similar. You start with a strong idea, like the idea of the bird. You try hard. You try too hard. The idea is too prevalent, too prominent, too central. You work too literally around the idea. And the result is very weak art. It just doesn't work. It won't fly.
But then, through the process of working out what works and what doesn't, through this process of elimination, you end up somewhere just a little to the left of where you started. You arrive at something you couldn't have predicted, but which, undeniably, satisfies your initial goals. Like the bird in the airplane, the idea is intact, integrated in a way you had not expected, and you could not have foreseen.
