It’s Yoda time on the blog this week. Read on for a simple but INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT truth about being a creative. And don’t just listen to me. There are some links at the bottom to press home the point further.
Have bad ideas to get better is the opposite of what many people imagine is the creative life.
TRUTH: Creators do not come up with perfect work straight off the bat. They might pretend they do. They might quite like you to think they’re unusual geniuses with some kind of hotline to the muses. But the truth is, they will have made – and continue to make – bad work in order to get the best. They will have taken ‘wrong ‘pathways. The chances are they will have thrown stuff in the bin after spending ages on it.
The view that good creators only make perfect things is not that surprising - because you may well have been encouraged to think that in school. There your writing/painting/creative project is judged good or not good. Right or not right. I think it’s why so many people give up on art early on and say ‘oh I can’t do that’. They didn’t do it ‘right’ first time and that was that.
But if you continue with that view you will struggle – I will go as far as to say you won’t make it – as a creator in any field.
Wrong is the fertiliser of right. It’s the path you take to eliminate things, learn things and ultimately find the best way.
Let me tell you something about myself. I’ve had many books published and I have many ideas in drawers and folders that aren’t yet right and perhaps might never ‘work’ as they stand. Through my agent I’ve done deals for many books, but there have also been plenty of ideas she has said no to, and plenty that publishers have said no to. There are also ideas I haven’t shown anyone because they didn’t gel.
It all happens regularly. I’ve failed lots and lots. But, though it doesn’t look as if I’ve got anywhere with something, it doesn’t mean it won’t come back later and evolve, or feed into a different project. Maybe it will turn out to be ‘the wrong bit of the path I went down so I could find the right bit’.
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| Ideas hiding in folders on my computer, some of them bad! |
Yes, of course bad ideas can feel disappointing for various reasons – ‘I thought that was OK’, ‘I spent a lot of time on that’. it’s hard to bounce back sometimes, when work you’ve spent time on doesn’t make it through. But it has happened to me many, many times so I know that it’s actually a normal and recurring thing for a creator working seriously in their craft. Gotta dust down and go again.
As Yoda says – The Greatest Teacher, failure is.
Now this only works if you’re prepared to learn from your setbacks. You need to be up for changing paths and continuing your journey from a different angle. If you meet someone who says ‘everyone else is wrong’,‘it’s all because gatekeepers are biased against me’, ‘I won’t change my idea. It’s great’. – then you’ve met somebody who won’t succeed because they won’t allow themselves to learn and try new angles.
It's the same for mega-successful creators. If they decide they are geniuses who can’t be gainsaid and don’t need to alter anything then it quickly becomes obvious in their bloated unedited work. They forget they are on a learning journey, like everyone else, and get bogged down in the quicksand of self-delusion.
For more on this subject (and other thoughts on being creative) I’d like to recommend US picture book creator Andy J. Pizza’s podcast – Creative Pep Talk. He emphasises this blog’s point over and over. He calls it Booby Traps mean Treasure. You’re on a journey and the booby traps you meet are proof that you’re still on it and still have a chance to succeed! Andy’s episode 349 lists 10 rules of creative practice, and he suggests it’s a good place to start listening and get a flavour of the podcast. He's super-enthusiastic and encouraging.
Through that podcast I heard about Seth Godin – who says in his TED talk ‘if you want more good ideas have bad ideas’.
He’s not wrong!
https://ideas.ted.com/heres-why-you-need-to-have-more-bad-ideas/
Moira Butterfield is an internationally-published children’s author. This year her publications include The Secret Life of Bugs (Happy Yak/Quarto) Look What I Found By the River (Nosy Crow/National Trust), Welcome To Our Playground (Nosy Crow) and Does a Bear Wash its Hair? (Bloomsbury).
Instagram/threads @moirabutterfieldauthor
Moira Butterfield's 'Have Bad Ideas!' is such a refreshing take on creativity. Sometimes, a rookie sideloader can lead to surprisingly good results too!
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