I have been toying with a couple of different new projects over the past few months. Weeks of work have gone into each one as I uncover and explore each of the ideas to see if its a direction worthy of my limited time. I have to go a certain way down the road in order to test that worthiness. This means of course that not everything I have been working on will materialise into something solid, sellable or even readable.
It’s all a gamble.
The best description I have read for what the creative process looks like for me is by the choreographer Twyla Tharp, who wrote a book called The Creative Habit. In it she writes about scratching at small things that spark your interest like a chicken scratches at the dirt to uncover delicious little morsels of food. Not the big thunder bolt we might think of as Inspiration or a visit from the Muse, but just a chicken, scratching away at something that has caught their interest.
Of course, not all the things we scratch away at are going to become our next big creative idea. Inevitably we will hit dead ends and come up empty and we’ll probably do so quite a lot of the time. Maybe even when we are quite far along with a project and realise suddenly that for whatever reason, this is just not going to work.
For a writer that can mean abandoning work that you have poured huge amounts of time into. Words, ripped up and tossed in the metaphorical bin (although more likely languishing untouched in a folder on your desktop). Time gone, with nothing to show for it.
Or is there really nothing to show for it?
A creative practice is more than the sum of words on a page. If we rip up the words and start all over again, we aren’t going backwards. It may not be in a state for anyone else to see but that doesn’t mean it did not serve a purpose in your creative practice. We are not the same writer we were before we began. In fact, by ripping up words we may even have moved forward.
I’ve now decided which idea I am going to write. The other idea and the work I did on it is in a drawer. I have no idea if it will ever come out of the drawer again but that doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t need to ever come out of the drawer for it to have moved me forward, getting me to where I need to go.
Ripping up words (so to speak), is scary. But it serves a purpose. Annoyingly, frustratingly, irritatingly……… it’s all part of the process. We don’t have to love it though. But it can be helpful to accept that it is all part of a creative practice.
Perhaps we should shout ‘thank you for moving me forward’ as we flip it the middle finger, throw it in the bin and attempt not to think about how much time we spent on it. Because eventually we will end up with the right words, ones that won’t end up in a bin. And the ones we ripped up will have got us there.
Are you working on non-fiction book proposal? My next Book Proposal Group Program begins in late January and you can sign up for the waitlist here.
I think of half-formed work on ideas that don't pan out as "priming the pump." The good stuff will come. Just gotta keep writing.
Is it fiction or non-fiction that you are working on? X