From the time we enter school, we learn one lesson more powerfully than any other: mistakes are bad. This is often reinforced in our workplace and other parts of our daily life. If this is the message we’ve internalized, we may find it difficult to begin, or stick with, creative work. The very heart of creativity, after all, is exploration, experimentation, and risk taking. Which means making mistakes!
In my own writing journey, especially over the past year, I’ve had to learn to get comfortable with the incredibly uncomfortable mess of creative work. In our school and work life, incompetence is so frowned upon, it can be downright painful to write a rough draft. This is why countless writers give up while writing rough drafts and abandon the creative process. It’s emotionally overwhelming to feel like you are bad at something.
But the truth is, in order to be a good writer, you have to be willing to write badly. You have to be brave enough to make tons of mistakes and keep making them, day after day.
How do you find the strength, courage, and persistence to stick with your work even when it hurts?
I have discovered that one of the crucial keys to sticking with a creative project over the most emotionally rugged terrain is self trust.
You develop self trust over time as you gain awareness of your own sabotaging emotions and beliefs while you write. Trusting your own mind to know what to do, to problem solve, to unravel even the most unruly of knots as you create is essential to every step of the creative process.
When you first begin a project, you’re often at your most vulnerable. Your idea is like a baby bird, deeply fragile. You have no idea if it will live or thrive. You’re excited but also terrified. When you start writing and the magic you felt in your head isn’t transferring to the page, when you’re messing up left and right, your first reaction might be frustration, panic, or even self loathing. This is the critical moment. Become aware of what your inner voice is saying. I knew I wasn’t good enough. They told me I couldn’t do it, and they were right. Even if I keep trying, I’ll never be as great as I want to be. Now is the time to protect your project by trusting yourself! This is my rough draft, and it should be messy. The more drafts I write, the better it will get. I trust my mind to get this idea where it needs to be.
The practice of self trust will also rescue you as you grapple with the “murky middle” of the creative process, reassuring yourself that you have what it takes to see the project through to completion. Even if it’s messy, even if you still don’t know where you’re going, telling yourself I’ll figure it out; I trust myself to get there will keep you persisting through the storms where others might jump ship.
When at last you reach the brink, that most tender and terrifying edge where you cast your work into the world, it’s here that trusting yourself, and what you’ve created, will give your work wings.
And one day your readers will say, thank you for being brave.
–Summer Hammond
Photo Credit: Summer Hammond 2017