Creativity Is Messy, And It’s Supposed To Be
Creativity isn’t an exact science. When you start building something, you want it to be perfect from the very first spark. And nothing kills your momentum faster than realizing what you just made sucks.
But it’s supposed to suck! It’s not fully formed yet - it’s just this delicate mass of ideas and features trying to find its form. It takes many iterations to figure out what it really is. And there’s no shortcut you can take to get there faster.
Creativity is messy… and it’s supposed to be. It’s those who stick with their project through this early, ugly phase that come out the other side with something valuable. Stick with it.
You Don’t Know Where You’re Going Until You Start.
It was my 3-year-old niece who gave me the best advice about creativity I’ve ever heard.
She was sitting on the floor with a crayon in her hand drawing, and I asked her what she was working on. Her response stunned me:
“I don’t know. Let’s find out!”
This is an incredible insight into the creative process from a child. Because she’s right. Often, you don’t know where you’re going or what you’re making until you start. You find out as you’re playing, not before.
A lot of people get frustrated when they can’t see exactly how all the pieces of the project fit together. They want a perfect vision before they start, and then abandon their idea when the process isn’t what they thought it would be. They’re trying to organize before they create.
Create with abandon first. Then, you can organize and see how the pieces fit together.
My wife and I experience this every day in our writing. When we start a new scene in a screenplay, we have a general idea of what the scene is and where it needs to go.
BUT, we don’t cling to it. If the characters want to say something different or do something different that we hadn’t planned on, we let them! Only after we’ve ridden that wave to the end do we examine how / if it fits into the larger context.
Create first, then organize. And don’t get hung up on knowing exactly what you’re making. You’re not supposed to. Like my niece - go find out!
The First Draft Of Everything Sucks.
Everyone wants the thing they’re creating to be good right now. But it’s never going to be. Because writing is rewriting. Designing is re-designing. Coding is re-coding. And the first draft of everything sucks. The key is not to get discouraged by this universal fact of life.
This is why you must do everything you can to protect your early work from outside criticism. If you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this:
Never show your work too early.
If you do, and you get constructive feedback that is too much, too specific, or too critical, you will destroy your momentum. And in the early stages of any project, momentum is everything.
Tara and I learned this harsh lesson recently when we let our writing out into the world too early. Our producer had so many (mostly valid) notes, that it destroyed our momentum. And also hurt my personal confidence in the project.
It took me a solid week for my enthusiasm to return. AND we had to rework the opening pages for me to feel good about it again.
Trust me: never let your project out too early. Because the early drafts always suck.
To Make Something Better, Iterate On It Over Time.
Just because your project starts out being bad doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Iteration is a powerful force. The more often you come back to your work over time, the better it’s going to become.
It’s not the amount of time you spend working on something that counts. It’s the number of times you come back to it over days, weeks, and years, and improve it. It’s iterations that matter, not time spent.
Because it’s the slow, incremental, constant improvement that drives big gains over time.
There’s a profound difference between working on something for 14 hours one day vs working on something for one hour over 14 consecutive days. The work produced over two weeks will be many times better than the marathon creation.
My wife and I only write for about 3 hours a day. That’s as much focus as we can muster before the quality of work falls off drastically. BUT, we do this 6 days a week when we’re really pushing. And it’s that frequent, day-after-day improvement that drives progress.
We worked on our first screenplay for two years. I checked my drafts folder and found 51 unofficial drafts. For fun, we even went back to read the very first pages we wrote… and they were terrible. Night and day from what our producer is going to market with now. That’s the power of iteration.
So it’s okay to start off bad. Just stick with it and touch it as often as you can. Pretty soon, you’ll have something workable. Then, share it with the world to get feedback. And keep going.
Thanks for reading.