1. The imagination works differently in different people, and there’s a way to find specific ways of working that suit your personality.
This seems like such an obvious thing to say, but how many times do we hear people talk honestly and openly about how ideas and stories unfold or show up in their minds or on the page? Hardly ever! So here are a few broad ways that people come to their ideas: some people are more visual, so the story may unfold cinematically in their minds while daydreaming, like on long walks or commutes. Some people are more deep listeners or conversational in their storytelling style, so they tap into characters’ voices first and find one that takes them into a story. Others ask themselves “what if” questions and come up with scenarios that unfold prompted by the questioning process where one question leads to an answer which leads to another question, another answer. And others jump straight to a problem they want to explore and solve it on paper or on canvas or wherever…or a strong emotion that a situation provokes. It took me forever to realize that some of my best story ideas tapped into a kind of anger or frustration I experienced that underpinned the emotional logic of a story. These feelings propel me to see the story through to the end, or to the solution of a problem. They’re often based on experiences I had, even if they evolve into something totally different.
Sometimes you need to observe yourself when you have an idea you’re excited about, or finish a piece you started, and notice what behavior or feeling or value led you to it. This is the kind of creative education we don’t easily find in arts classes or formal education or workshops. Creatives have gotten into the habit of thinking that what works for them must work for others in their fields, so we get these reductive articles that regurgitate the same advice over and over again about embracing failure, shitty first drafts, etc. But it’s this attention to our inner lives and what happens inside of us when we imagine and ideate and play that really helps us get to know what works and what doesn’t.
2. There is a whole inner game to making art, and it’s totally normal to feel stuck.
The creative process is dynamic, nonlinear, and crazy mysterious. It’s the part of your mind that’s always galloping off like a lunatic. And sometimes it stops to chew on grass and there’s no amount of nudging and prodding you can do to get the wild creature to move when it’s not ready yet.
We can learn to navigate this process so we stop blaming ourselves for every block or difficulty we encounter and instead see them as just part of the process, as opportunities to try something different. Learning the inner game of making art means paying attention to what motivates you, what makes you tick as an artist, what “fills your well” and feeds your imagination, and what makes you slow down and pay attention. So much of what our culture tells us about being productive or getting things done involves a kind of willfulness and discipline, but for artists, discipline is necessary but not so necessary as genuine enthusiasm, pleasure, joy, and faith in yourself.
It’s good to know that there is a way to learn what habits and psychology and strategies that “successful” artists use, consciously and unconsciously. And that is so liberating to me, because when I was stuck, I would just blame myself for not “getting” it. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I didn’t have any creative role models, didn’t have like-minded writer friends, and had learned so many harmful concepts from formal education and my upbringing or culture. I knew how to work hard like a student or an employee, but I didn’t know how to work hard like an artist. I took the popular advice to just “sit down and do it,” but I would show up to the page with all my insecurities, my rigid ideas of how I was supposed to be using this time, my fears, my misguided beliefs about what I couldn’t and should write about.
But Shaili, what if I make whatever comes out at the time, people don’t LIKE it? What if it’s just not GOOD and I’ll hate myself and want to die?! …Okay, maybe your inner critic isn’t as dramatic as mine is. But you get the idea.
3. All those things people point out about your art/writing style that you get “wrong” might actually be your strength, your original, authentic voice coming through.
Feedback on your work is definitely important, but not all feedback is equal. If you put your work out there, you will get a lot of feedback on it, and a lot of that feedback might be totally useless to you, because it’s coming from people who don’t read, want to see, or seek out the kind of work you aspire to make. So how much does it matter if people who don’t like weird sci-fi novels think your weird sci-fi novel is not great?
On the other hand, feedback givers might not like the work because it seems to be doing this one style “badly.” But like Neil Gaiman says in his MasterClass, your mistakes and deviations from the genre or work you’re imitating are really what marks your work in terms of style. On the other hand, sometimes people just straight up don’t like things that aren’t familiar to them in some way: it’s not what they’re used to, so their reception is lukewarm. In any case, it’s just not useful to worry so much about being odd or different in your work—this difference is the artist’s currency!
This one really gets to me personally—I spent so much time feeling like my writing wasn’t good enough whenever I got negative feedback. I just thought I needed to work harder, and I ended up ignoring all the fun details and weird bits of writing that I thought were too abstract, mystical, whatever, just because the three people to whom I showed my work didn’t react with enthusiasm over that aspect of my work. I just assumed it was bad. But how could I even know that?
A few years ago, when I took my first improv class, I remember the teacher encouraging us to use mistakes, that they could lead to some interesting twists and turns in a scene. Nothing was really a mistake if it could be incorporated into the play.
So if something reads or looks like a mistake, it’s good to remember that mistakes are useful. A lot like mutations, actually. It’s hard to believe, but TWO mutations in the modern human’s DNA are responsible for our ability to use language complexly. So, mistakes aren’t the worst thing.
But then how will we know if the work is good or not?!
4. We can’t tell how good or bad our work is while we’re making it, or even for some time afterward.
As Julia Cameron wrote in The Artist’s Way, we have to be willing to write badly in order to write well. There is NO WAY to guarantee that what comes out will be good. You can’t control this by finding the right time and place to write, the right kind of inspiration, the right cup of coffee, the right writing utensils or laptop, the right kind of music, the right book on making art, etc. You might do all this and still have a crap writing day. Guess what? THAT’S NORMAL. Every writer or artist has a bad art day because our minds are tricky and fast and they get upset when a moth gets trapped against a lightbulb and reminds us how trapped we felt in our first job, when someone told us on the first day that the haircut that we thought made us look like ___ actually made us look a little sloppy and we think who do we think we are for thinking we could pull it off ?! Anyway, what is the point of anything when climate change will destroy us all, my God, now all I want is a donut. Orrrr like maybe you run over a small animal with your car and you think about whether a prayer for it will mean anything and anyway it kills you a little on the inside—I don’t know, man, shit happens. But you significantly up your chances of making good art if you keep doing it.
For my fellow overachiever, good student types: I sympathize, I really do. I struggle HARD with this one. All of our lives, it has been relatively easy to figure out what to do based on what the given expectations were, what images we see in the media or online, and what paths are available to us. But in creative work, it’s a lot of bushwhacking in a jungle, as Lani Taylor puts it in her excellent writing process blog, Not for Robots. And it can be hard to shift into this mode, this place where there are no real rules.
That means, we need to find a new way of grounding ourselves in what we do and why we do it, or we’ll get stuck in the old paradigm of right and wrong ways of doing things. If you’re not at all concerned about the work being good, then that opens up space for other reasons why you might create this work, the reasons why art appealed to you in the first place. Some possibilities are: 1) because it’s fun, 2) because it’s a subject or story worth exploring, 3) you’re clarifying something to or for yourself, 4) it might be helpful for others to hear/see/read/experience this work, 5) making art makes you feel better or come to grips with something that’s been troubling you, 6) you’re discovering something as you make things up…the point is, this is what we need to remind ourselves when we sit down to do this kind of work. Bad art, like failure, is not the end of the story, but it is a part of it.