The difficulty of writing, the ease of rewriting, and a trick for getting started
The star writer John Swaltzwelder from The Simpsons is notoriously interview shy. In a rare interview with the New Yorker he shared one of the secrets to his writing process:
“Writing is very difficult but rewriting is comparatively easy, and rather fun.”
Elaborating on this process he continues, “I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible…the next day there’s a script, a lousy script but a script. The hard part is done…All I have to do from that point is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight.”
Tasks and projects can feel very hard, they can loom enormously in our imagination, intimidating us with their cost or their difficulty. The distance from where we are to where we wish to be can stop us from getting started at all if we let it. It can be enough to put us off trying altogether.
Perfectionists can suffer from this all the more. Perfectionistic people (especially those who have already had their confidence bruised) can give up on ever starting out of fear of not being able to produce something perfect or awe-inspiring straight away.
The learning curve can be steep.
Learning to enjoy the process of failing and learning
My wife discovered a love of pottery a couple of years ago. She is a go-getting person who is ready to give things a try. Pottery has offered lots of “invitations to grow” (read: deep frustrations) as she has worked through the specific skills and challenges of mastering shaping and forming clay. Different textures, temperatures, and drying times all provide lessons to be learned. As do the in-kiln explosions, freak glaze bubblings and the errors made by others that have sabotaged what would have been victories.
Rather than being daunted she has set them in her sights as challenges to be overcome. Like Swaltzwelder’s trick for writing, she has risen to the challenge of finding the technique that makes it easy.
We have kept in our home a couple of the first pieces that she made. In the early days we celebrated anything that came through the door. These wobbly, thick, shapeless, odd-sized creations are a fun joke now as well as a measure of progress.
Have you come to enjoy the process of failing and learning? Or, is it unbearable to risk rejection and failure?
Becoming the ‘kind-of-person-who’
A little tip I try to seed wherever I can is to switch from ‘success measure’ to the ‘kind-of-person-who’ measure.
In Anna’s (my wife) example, this is the switch from making perfectly formed pottery to becoming the kind of person who can persevere with the challenge of (for example) drying mug handles evenly. For the writer, to go from writing an excellent memoir to becoming the kind of person who writes for 20 minutes each day whether they feel like it or not. For the athlete, from running a marathon to the kind of person who runs 5 days a week.
What ‘kind of person who’ do you need to become in order to achieve your creative dreams?
A close friend is a marvellous singer who performs solo shows interweaving humour, song and story. He sets a list of goals for each show he performs and has learned to set goals carefully. They include: becoming the kind of person who executes his lines well, the kind of person who reaches for the right emotional source to access the right emotion at the right moment.
Focussing only on the things that he can do enables him to stand before audiences and bring all of himself to the stage. Free of the tyranny of ‘giving everyone the night of their lives’ his goal is to give all he can of himself and leave the audience to experience that as they will.
If this has brought to mind anything that you would like to talk through or have help with please get in touch. Either choose a time or send an email via the contact form.
Sources of ideas and stories are acknowledged when used significantly unchanged. Underlying mental health concepts are from the Living Wisdom approach to Pastoral Counselling.