Why is it taking me so long?
Or
Everyone else’s is more (interesting, polished, coherent)
than mine…
Or
I wish I had natural talent….
The judgiest judge comes out most when it comes to writing.
It’s something I’ve studied so a lot of rules for how to BE A GOOD WRITER live
in my head. The rules feel like a lead blanket; they weigh me down and make me
forget that writing is a creative venture and can be fun.
All this judgment got me thinking about my own creative
process. I recently listened to an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast
Revisionist History where he talked about the two different kinds of creators:
those who put a piece into the world fully formed with what seems like minimal
effort and those who labor over their art, refining and perfecting and not
allowing others to gaze upon it until it is completely complete.
Strangely, but not surprisingly knowing myself, I straddle
this line. I’m more of a spurt-of-inspiration-and-fully-formed kind of girl.
But the time leading up to that involves days, weeks, sometimes years of
turning ideas and words and images over and over in my mind until they reach
full gestation. The problem with this is that, until recently, instead of
realizing and accepting that this WAS my creative process, I viewed myself as
lazy. A procrastinator. Unambitious. The judgment was so overwhelming that it
made me incapable of creating anything at all. But the truth is that I was not
honoring my process.
This week I hand built a skull out of clay. If I ever made
anything with clay before it was in an elementary school art class. Now, at 41,
I chose to sit in a studio with a bunch of artsy ladies and play with clay. And
be really bad at it. Or at least feel really bad at it. The truth is, I am
pretty uncomfortable doing most things I haven’t yet put my 10,000 hours into,
and this was no exception.
The first step in working with clay is wedging. This is a
process where you knead and throw the clay on the table in an effort to pull
out the moisture and prepare it for sculpting. As I sat in the studio forming a
primitive skull (think Jack Skellington), I found myself glancing across the
table to compare my novice clay to that of my artsy compatriots. In doing that,
I started to feel the lead blanket covering me. Why was I making this so hard?
I tried to think about times when I was able to go with the
creative flow. When I didn’t think myself into a state of inaction. When I was
able to play. I can sit down with a pile of magazines and craft paper and let
them tell me how they want to be arranged. I can stand in front of the rainbow
of beads at Michael’s and let them tell me which ones should come home with me.
I do these things often and with ease. Remembering that allowed me to let go,
at least a little, and play the crap out of that clay.
The metaphor of wedging is not lost on me. I can choose to
look at the length of time it takes me to get through a creative project as
laziness or procrastination (and there have been times when that has been the
case, but those were usually shitty projects). Or I could think of it as
pulling out the moisture so that my ideas are malleable and easily sculpted.Or
percolating. No one wants a hastily brewed cup of coffee. Why should I give my
creative process any less time than it deserves?
So here’s what I know about my process. When it’s a visual
art (aka putting pretty images together), my thinking brain is mostly
comfortable taking a back seat and letting spontaneous creation take place.
When it’s an art form that I am either too comfortable with (e.g.writing.
Because: RULES) or not comfortable at all with (e.g. sculpting. Because: I
DON'T KNOW THE RULES), I need to wedge. There are many steps to my process and
between each one is conscious or subconscious thinking, processing,
synthesizing. While in the past I might have thought this was because I wasn’t
good enough, now I know it’s because I'm gestating. And that might be the most
important part of my process.
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