A Vision That Appears Only When You Move Forward. The Dwarf After the Rainbow

#CoachingSeries I The combat against creative block

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We think the well of ideas has dried up. We call it “creative block.” While that can happen, more often the problem is entirely different. We convince ourselves we need a clear vision of the work before we start. This means we put a heavy load on the starting point and thus, never truly begin if we don’t have a plot in mind, a story line, a melody .... It is hard to allow a dump of messy ideas, help us over the bridge and reach the spot where the vision appears: the elf, the dwarf, the mountain witch. The ogre: a vision that comes naturally, but only when you set the work in motion.

I spent a whole year trying to write the perfect first chapter for a novel. I wanted teenagers, poetry, and northern Mexico. That's all I knew. I retreated to the silence of a faraway location where I couldn't be bothered, hoping to think upon these three certainties and come up with the right first chapter. I spent the better part of that year thinking in circles, pacing back and forth as I wrote that first page maybe fifty times. It had to be great; say everything and nothing simultaneously. The rewrites kept bringing back stranger phrases and more encrypted images of what eventually became nada

Isn’t it ironic? As Alanis Morissette so eloquently put it in metaphors, I had the time, the space and the craft, yet nothing arose from it.

Since it wasn't working, I decided to set aside my golden, precious pages, and start anywhere. “A la chingada”, was my thinking. I wrote what I thought could become the second and third chapters, away from the illusion of a pristine and perfect first chapter, and the novel sprung naturally. At the end of the second year, I wrote the first chapter and it only took me a couple of hours. It had nothing to do with what I'd agonized over during that lacerating first year.

That wicked year also taught me that a rose is a rose is a rose. And kill your darlings. What you select as a starting point isn't a grand commitment to the work, but just a starting point. You can rethink it as many times as you need as you move forward. And what you consider a beautiful, exquisite, necessary paragraph that must survive, can actually be your doom and you need to let it go, since you will start building a scaffold outside what that paragraph says just to keep it there, chipping away your time and energy in focusing in a few quirky moves.

My two cents: The pressure to be perfect from the start damages the creative process. Embracing imperfection and iteration leads to better spaces for creation. My philosophy is: start anywhere, with whatever you have. Don’t commit. You are just fucking around at this time.

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There has to be a little road for the wheels to make traction for a vision to surface. This vision is a consequence of setting things in motion, and not the other way round. It does not matter how that little road looks like. The power is in the traction of crossing the starting point.

Why is it so hard to start off in a shapeless dump, even when you know you can go back and change it? It took me years to understand this need to get it right from the beginning: Our default thinking in Western cultures is to make sense. "How can this come from that?" Logic tries its hand pretty early. “A great novel follows a great first chapter." "A leopard cannot change its spots”, says logic. This thinking is the opposite of what happens when you create. A Leopard can definitely change its spots in creation. Linear thinking is survival mode; it helps us navigate the conventional world. But creation is unconventional thinking; it's essentially nonsensical, dreamlike, play-like thinking. Creative thinking, says Julia Cameron at some point in The Artist's Way, struggles to survive it in a system of alerts and alarms that keep telling you to get back in your lane, wear the uniform, blow off the candle, etc. How can this strange light come from nowhere? “It makes no sense”, says logic. “You have to build a window, or a source, so the light can come in”. But that is not how creativity works. A strange light can come from nowhere. You can change the Leopard spots.

Beware of the default system of does and don’ts, especially when you want to pave a little road for the dwarf to come. Do as you please and don’t take any sensible advice.

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Can you share a “dump of ideas” in the comments? A little road, so to speak, to later make traction with toy cars.