What does it mean that the creative act as meaning-making?

The process of creation is itself meaningful independent of the result.

Example: A retired schoolteacher begins writing a novel. She works on it every morning for two years, filling notebooks and then word-processing files, revising scenes, researching historical details, rearranging chapters. When a friend asks how the book is coming, she describes the writing itself — the feeling of discovering what a character would say, the satisfaction of finding the right word for an emotion she had never named, the way a morning of writing makes the rest of the day feel more vivid. When the friend asks when she plans to publish, she pauses. She has not thought much about publication. The question makes her realize that the writing has already done what she needed it to do. It has given her mornings purpose, sharpened her attention to human experience, and connected her to parts of herself she had not visited since her teaching years. The novel may or may not become a book other people read. The creative act has already produced its primary meaning — not as a product to be evaluated but as a process that reorganized her relationship to her own life.

Try this: Choose a creative act you can complete in a single sitting — writing a short piece, sketching something you see, composing a brief melody, arranging objects into a deliberate composition, cooking a dish without following a recipe. Before you begin, write one sentence describing what the finished product should be. Then set a timer for forty-five minutes and work. When the timer ends, stop — regardless of whether the result is finished or good. Immediately write three paragraphs. The first paragraph describes what you noticed during the process itself: where your attention went, what surprised you, when you lost track of time or became most absorbed. The second paragraph describes the gap between what you planned and what emerged. The third paragraph answers this question: independent of the quality of the result, did the act of creating change something in your experience of the last forty-five minutes? Most people discover that the process generated its own meaning — attention sharpened, time restructured, something internal shifted — regardless of whether the product met their initial description.