NANDINI NAYAR
 May05 Enid
Blyton II
Apr05 Enid
Blyton I
PENI GRIFFIN
Mar05 Last
Column
Feb05 What's
In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read
A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity
IV
Oct04 Creativity
III
Sep04 Creativity
II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social
Angst and All That
May04 Reading
In Public
Apr04 Elephant
In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary
Synchronicity
Feb04 The
Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors...
They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The
Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An
Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a
concept.'
Sep03 Preaching
to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic
on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...
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Creativity
by Peni Griffin
Part 3
Revise Responsibly
3) Your original inspiration is the best one and if you mess with it too much you'll spoil it.
NO.
This perception twists the fact that it is possible to overthink a problem and misapplies the experience that in many instances one's spontaneous reaction is the best. I think the overuse of multiple choice tests in schools causes many of us to overemphasize the worth of the first thought. When you are asked a question and are given four choices, the one you recognize is indeed likely to be the best - but that's a different matter entirely from solving a problem or creating a work.
Maybe this is merely a re-stating of the false dichotomy in Part 2 - but if so, it is a restatement that illuminates an angle that I have found important. This particular misperception encourages laziness and inhibits people who could do better by instilling the fear that they will ruin reasonably good work. I am thinking here particularly of two friends of mine.
B would occasionally show me a story, the visible and material manifestation of a cycle which existed in her head - the saga of an East Texas town full of colorful characters, periodically stirred up when the pollen of a magical weed blew into town. These stories were funny, inventive, sprawling, confusing, and unpublishable. Since she asked me for feedback I would go through the manuscript marking the bits that should be cut - usually for insertion into different stories; I don't recall more than one or two sentences that ever needed change, as sentences. She would resist the feedback she'd asked for but gradually concede my points as I went over them, never revised, and never published. I say never because she is dead now, of lung cancer, leaving no publishable manuscripts behind.
J worked for a telemarketer, but he was a sketch artist. He might have been an illustrator, or a painter, or a graphic storyteller. He had notebooks full of single-figure studies, mostly of people and animals in motion; but when I would encourage him to produce a finished work, he always insisted that they were too good to fool with and he didn't want to spoil them. Even when he sketched an RPG character of mine, with the express purpose of producing something with which I could illustrate my character sheet, he never got past a number of studies of her utilizing her ability to change shape. These were marvelous, in potentia - you could see the woman/dolphin figure lurking in the pencil strokes waiting to swim out at you; but if I suggested that he could do more, he got angry. I never understood this anger, and I don't think it was directed at me. Something was going on there, some fear of failure that wouldn't let him succeed.
J died of complications after quadruple bypass surgery, at the age of 28. All we've got left is a notebook full of sketches.
This burns me up. If my friends didn't want to invest the time and energy to finish their work for publication, fine. Not everyone with talent needs that goal. But to vanish from the world, leaving behind only half-finished scraps of your potential - that is just not fair to your friends and family. I will never get into B's town because if she couldn't show it all at once, she wouldn't show anything. I can't take out my old character sheet and smile at what J did with Menagerie - because he never quite did anything.
Often, your first thought is a cliche, a hint, an assumption - not a complete thought at all. An archeologist who finds artifacts on the surface knows that if treasure exists, it lies below. Your conscious mind is surface scatter. Only hard work can excavate your real ideas and true talents from under the layers of ordinary stuff that clutter all our brains. Knowing when to stop means knowing the difference between topsoil and bedrock. Stopping too soon is as bad as digging too deep and destroying the site.
This is where critical skills are helpful. During drafting, if you think about themes or arcs or even why you're working on this bit rather than that bit, you'll usually block up the flow of material from your subconscious. During revision, or during times when your progress is mired, it helps a lot to go into cool mode and ask yourself questions. During the final stage of revisions on the Paleo-indian book, my editor asked me to rewrite a sentence that had confused the reader. We tossed a few lines back and forth, getting nowhere, until I sat down, looking at the context, and asked myself what this sentence needed to accomplish. It was a joke; it was a position statement; it expressed the character's honest judgement of another character. Armed with these criteria, I was able to select three alternates with subtly different effects. I preferred one choice because it cut nine whole words and conveyed a new thematic point without disturbing the joke. The editor concurred, pointing out that this choice also illustrated the speaker's degree of maturation, a factor I hadn't even noticed. Will anyone else notice these layers?
Why should I care? I know now that this sentence is the best one for the job that I could make, and I know more about my own story than I did before. You can't ask more of yourself than your best.
You shouldn't ask less of yourself, either. Satisfaction doesn't lie down that road..
October 2004 © Peni Griffin
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