5 Unhelpful Questions For Your New Creative Project
// January 26th, 2010 // 8 Comments » // Uncategorized, creativity, curiosity
At the start of a new creative project do you ever find yourself facing down a barrage of shaky thoughts designed to prevent you from even beginning?
I certainly do. Sometimes the starting line can feel like the finishing line where, just as one last burst of energy is required to break the tape at the end of the race, a similar burst of energy is often required just to break self imposed barriers at the start of a creative journey.
These barriers often appear as questions, which is a big clue: it’s almost as if they’re designed to divert me from creative action and send me elsewhere looking for the magic answer that will make things go smoothly.
Here is a small selection of those questions from my head:
1. Do I Have Everything I Need?
Possibly the sneakiest question, and often the first to come up for me.
Here’s where the part of me that’s scared to create offers to ‘help’ by planting a doubtful seed which gives the option of ‘preparing’ rather than ‘creating’.
It’s sneaky, because sometimes we do need to gather a few things, research, prepare ourselves before we sit down to create.
But more often we need to just sit down and write/draw/sing/strum/move–whatever the action is that moves us into our creative project.
And if we don’t have everything we need? I’m often surprised when caught without my note book or preferred art supplies at how innovative I can be on the spot.
I’ve written snatches of poetry on napkins, sketched with coffee and fingers, made impromptu toys for my sons with cardboard boxes, formula tins. I’ve seen amazing Aboriginal cave art in Australia that was accomplished with sticks, spit, and crushed rock.
2. OMG! Where Did I Put The Map?
That fearful part really wants you to lay the path out exactly, wants to know where this is all leading. Because if the distance from point A to point B is comprehensively mapped out and all the dragons are banished to the edge of the page then nothing scary (ie: creative) can happen.
True creativity is always about discovering something new, no matter how incremental that discovery may be. If that newness is missing, then nothing has been created.
Needing to know the exact layout of the terrain means eliminating any risk of tripping over the unknown. Safe, but definitely not creative.
I think this is why planning, or having an exhaustive outline for a creative project is so tempting–it gives a sense of security. But writing an outline or hanging onto a predetermined plan for your project shuts out opportunities for new learning and creative growth.
It’s O.K. to have a sense of where you might want to go, but more important than that is a willingness to go where the creative project asks you to go.
If you’re surprised and thrilled by where your art takes you, then your reader/viewer/listener is more likely to feel surprised and thrilled too.
3. Can I Do It As Well As They Did?
If I listened to that one every time it came up I’d be a grown man sitting in a crib. Unfortunately, I’ve listened a lot. It’s a pointless question, comparison is not the point of creativity. Creativity is.
The best antidote I’ve ever seen for this question was reading a Gary Larson collection (the ‘Far Side’ cartoonist) that had a brief history of his cartooning career. He showed some of his first cartoons that ran in local newspapers way before he took off. The drawings were crude and a bit amateurish, but you could see the seeds of his unique style and great sense of humour in them already.
The important thing wasn’t whether his cartoons were as skillful as a Charles Schulz, or as funny as Bill Watterson, it was whether or not he was creating his own unique viewpoint and style, at whatever level he was at, which is what eventually made his work seem so effortlessly brilliant.
4. Will Everybody Like It?
It’s the most natural thing in the world to want everybody to like something that’s important to you. You’re bravely putting yourself out there in an art-form you’ve come to love and want to work at.
But this is entirely the wrong question to be asking at the start of the process. Probably in the middle and end too, but especially at the beginning. It’s like setting the handbrake, bricking your wheels and slashing your tyres all at once. You’re guaranteed a fast trip nowhere.
I used to post a lot of poems up on poetry critiquing sites, I liked it when the poems got a good reception, but I always learned more when people let me know what didn’t work.
The best response I ever got was when a whole lot of people loved a poem I had posted and another significant group absolutely hated it. To me, the fact that people were strongly engaged with the poem, some of them to the point of being pissed off, was more important than what they thought of it.
5. Will It Be Perfect?
Um, no.
This question is rarely asked via an actual ‘voice’ in my head. It’s more of a visceral question in the form of a general unease, because I know it won’t be perfect and imagine all sorts of consequences: shame, ridicule, low grades, loss of status.
Of course it won’t be perfect. And that’s a good thing. If everything I created was perfect, creating art would be a sterile experience not worth pursuing.
Not only will my creation not be perfect, It’s pretty well destined to fail, at least partially. That’s a good thing too. Failure is the Vitamin F of creativity, it’s good for your heart and your eye, your bones and your soul.
*****
All of these questions seem to have my best intentions at heart, and in their own way they do. Taking creative action means putting myself out there, and I find that scary. At some level I want to be protected from that.
At the same time I want to be vigilant in keeping focus and diving in as deep as I can when I create. And that involves letting go of any expectations I might have for the end result.
