When I first came to New York Magazine more than a decade ago, I thought of the task of editing as mostly shepherding and curating the ideas of others. It was New York‘s famed editor Adam Moss who made me see editing itself as a creative pursuit. Adam was always pushing us to think up new forms of storytelling and new ideas to build a story around. He was obsessed with the creative process, and we assigned a lot of profiles of directors and novelists. Was it a surprise to learn he was semi-secretly teaching himself to paint? Yes, but it also made a certain sense. When you think about creating all the time, eventually, you’re going to want to do it yourself. After he stepped down in 2019, in classic Adam fashion, he didn’t just want to paint, he wanted to understand how good art is created at all, how architects and playwrights and novelists and musicians take a kernel of an idea, push past frustration and disappointment and dead ends, and make something truly great. So he started talking to creative people about how they made some of their most significant work. Those interviews, along with ephemera from their efforts, are collected in a new book, The Work of Art, which will be published later this month. Today, we’re giving you a taste of three of those interviews, with the artists Kara Walker and Cheryl Pope and the poet Louise Gluck.