Being Messy with Creativity
When we think about creative work, we often think about the end result – the beautiful painting, the well crafted story or the catchy tune. But there is a lot of messiness that occurs during the process to make any successful creative work, well - work. Creativity requires trial and error and a lot of it. Eventually, with a little faith, clarity comes out of the mess. But you need to be comfortable in the mess before you can find your way.
My daughter loves to paint. First, I get a clean palette with six wells, and fill each well up with colors – a blue, a red, a yellow, a purple, a white and a brown. First, she starts by dipping her paint brush into each of the wells, putting the blue in the red, the yellow in the purple, the brown in the red. The messiness of it always makes me cringe. Then the paint goes onto paper in strokes and until it's filled with strokes of different tones and hues. Watching her paint, I realize that I approach a creative project in much the same way. My work notebook is filled with messy diagrams, notes, random thoughts, and eventually a strategy presentation emerges from the mess. When I write, it starts with fragments of sentences, broad character sketches in my mind, and anecdotes. After I toil and experiment, have others read my work, revise and revise again, eventually I find my way to a story.
Since messiness if essential to the creative process, I thought I’d share some of the lessons I employ in my own work to try to make sense of all the mess:
1. Creativity requires constant doing.
Sometimes creative ideas just sit stuck in our heads. While creative ideas need time to percolate and bubble, ultimately, it’s best to get it out and work on it. In a Ted talk, Tom Wujec talks about a marshmallow challenge that he uses in team building exercises. It starts with 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Teams of four need to build a structure using the items. There's only one stipulation - the marshmallow needs to be on top. Most structures fall down because teams wait until the last moment to put the heavy marshmallow on top. Surprisingly, the group that he says consistently does well are sixth graders because they spend more time prototyping and experimenting rather than planning and pontificating. It is messy to just keep doing, and it can result in failing many times. But doing means getting better and better until you finally succeed.
2. Be messy with someone else.
Getting feedback from others on creative work is important for any creative process. Every writer knows that if they intend to share their work to an audience, it has to resonate in some way to readers. I’ve belonged to several different writer’s groups over the last few decades and I have taken many classes where critique is part of the curriculum. Getting feedback from others is a great way to see if your messiness makes sense in the end. I just sat down with my dear friend to show her my latest writing project – a children’s book. Not only was it fun batting around ideas, in the end, I got some great feedback that will make the book even stronger and more appealing to moms like her.
3. Be even more messy.
The musician and producer Brian Eno employed a technique called the Oblique Strategies during studio sessions with musicians such as David Bowie and David Byrne. It's a deck of cards he wrote with prompts intended to get musicians to think about a musical challenge differently. He’d pull out a card with a prompt like: “remember those quiet evenings,” “imagine the music as a moving chain or a caterpillar,” or “plot a graph of the piece.” The prompts are meant to challenge musicians to think about the music in a different way. In a sense – its goal is to add messiness to an already messy creative process. When you are creating, look for ways to make your work even messier because this can lead you to better results. If it worked for Bowie, it can work for you.
4. Give yourself space to be messy.
I just ran a marketing training workshop and we had teams of people working on a marketing challenge. We had space to spread out and each team had easel pads, post-its and markers to jot down their thoughts. By the end of the day, we had amassed a pretty size-able mess on the walls of the room. The walls and even the windows were scattered with thoughts of all kinds. Whether you are a writer, artist or musician - even a marketer, you need to find a dedicated space for you to create that no-one else can use. Even if it is only a corner of the room, find a space that you can mess up with your paint brushes, notebooks and instruments. If you work in an office, claim a room for your project team. Creativity requires space, so find your space and claim it.
5. Find a way to organize your messy thoughts.
I have a notebook that I use for writing to hold all my messy thoughts. I make notes and go back to them from time to time. I outline and then I jump into writing. It seems to work for me. When working on my first full-length play, I discovered that I had a hard time keeping plot points straight in my head while doing revisions. I went in search of a new system. I read that some writers use index cards to outline the major plot points of a story. I tried it out but found that I was getting lost in all the cards. Then I found a beatsheet that I outlines each beat on a word document. I had discovered a new tool to organizing my messy thoughts. In short, experiment with different organizing tools and find the one that works best for you.
Creativity is a messy activity. You may even say that it’s a messy sport. If you want to be a mediocre player, you can play the game timidly. If you want to be a great player, you have to get messy. You might get bruised or even injured. But with each play, each goal and each game, you will get better and better.