If you don’t like it, wait a while. Overnight, a week, a month, a year.
On the craft of writing, Zadie Smith stresses the importance of putting aside one’s work and allowing the passage of time to work its amnesic magic. “when you finish your novel … put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal – but even three months will do … You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in twelve different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.”
I often think a work I just completed is off. I can usually tell you why I’m not feeling it. And I’ve learned something magical. I stop myself from thinking anything about it. Instead, I put it away and go about my business, get a good night’s sleep and then look at it in the morning. It’s incredible how about 90% of the time, the painting looks fine in the morning. And if it doesn’t, storing it and getting it out much later is another tactic.
I’m curious as to why this is. I think it may be the same reason that people without extensive skills and experience are more creative at solving a problem in the area they are less expert. Because we bring our expectations into our work – whether we want to or not – we are bound to be somewhat disappointed with an outcome that doesn’t fit what we thought it should be. By stepping away from it, clearing our minds, and getting rest, our brain resets, and we can look at it with fresh eyes without the obstacle of all those thinking mechanisms that were at work when we were in the midst of the creation.
I’ve also had something like this happen when I initially disliked (or, a better term, didn’t understand) something. There is a woman I paint with who has an abstract style where she usually puts a large pastel shape right at the front of her Plein air work. I did not like it at first. But I could not look away. I kept studying her paintings and thinking about them. As I saw this process play out and its result, I started to “get it,” although I can’t describe her point of view. It is totally different from how I see or will ever see things. And I am fascinated by her work and now see its beauty.
Now I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with next. I would love to see a show of her work.
“Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new. The only way to remain creative over time – to note undone by our expertise – is to experiment with ignorance to stare at things we don’t fully understand.”
I leave you with this creativity tip: Absorb new things, including your work. Avoid critiquing too soon. Take time between the “finishing” of something and when you evaluate it. When you’ve left that gap in time and return to analyze your work – you may see tweaks that need to be done more clearly. But if you critique too soon, you may fix things that should not be touched – because they are the very things that send that work soaring into new thoughts, innovations, and vision.
“Only an intelligence that does not want to seize everything, decide on everything, accept as possible only what it can know by extrapolating from what it already knows, can be shot through with grace.” – Jon Sobrino, SJ
Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash
