I’ve been working with creative and performing artists as, first, a therapist, and then for the last thirty-five years as a creativity coach. I’ve learned from my clients just how hard they find completing their creative work. Many creatives have trouble getting started; many have trouble working regularly; but almost all have special problems near the end, when the finish line is in sight. In this series, I want to spell out twelve reasons why completing creative work is so darn hard.
I’m framing this series from the point of view of a painter’s challenges, but the points apply to someone working in any creative field, from writing novels to game designing, from filmmaking to app development. I’m sure you’ll be able to easily translate the points I’m making to the medium in which you work. If you’d like additional resources, let me recommend three of my recent books: Redesign Your Mind, The Power of Daily Practice, and The Great Book of Journaling. Together they can provide you with a clear picture of how to get your creative work done through right thinking, good daily habits, and the self-awareness that journaling provides.
Here is challenge number 3.
The fear that this is your best idea.
Let’s say that you’ve been working for months on a large, complicated narrative painting. You’ve figured out how to take a mythological subject and put it into modern dress and you’re both proud of and excited by your idea.
Naturally enough, your brain has organized itself around this idea, is focused on this painting, and isn’t allowing neurons to fly off and think about other paintings and other ideas. This natural phenomenon of being focused has a shadow side, however: it can make you believe not only that you don’t currently have another good idea but that you won’t have another good idea … ever.
Your brain can fool you into thinking that this excellent idea is the last excellent idea you’ll ever have. You can get weighed down by the feeling that since no other idea will ever come to you, you had better nurse this one—so as to have something to work on and so as to put off what you feel will be a terrible moment of reckoning when, with this painting done, you face the void and discover that you have nothing available to say and nothing left to say.
The antidote is simply to say “No!” to this half-conscious thought that this is your last good idea ever. Even if no next idea is currently present, that is no reason to presume that an excellent idea won’t percolate up when the time is right, after this painting is completed. Remind yourself of the following: that it is wonderful that you are enjoying your current idea but that it will likewise be wonderful to encounter your next idea, which is bound to become available once your brain has completed its thinking on this painting.
More to come!
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