Member-only story
Why Holding onto Failed Artwork May be Holding You Back
How letting go can fuel your artistic creativity
One way you can think about creativity is that it’s not about what you make, but what you choose to get rid of that matters.
For writers, it’s the words, sentences and paragraphs that might be clogging up the flow of a larger piece that sometimes ought to be trimmed. Occasionally, entire manuscripts have to be completely disowned before new ideas can truly and succinctly show through.
The wise advice is to “kill your darlings.” The meaning of this rather cut-throat guidance is for creatives to ruthlessly eliminate any unnecessary storylines, characters or sentences, no matter how precious they might be to their maker. After all, who isn’t sometimes prone to admiring their work a little too strongly — too personally — such that pulling the plug on hours of toil can be a wrench? But it is often crucial for the sake of purifying the writing to deliver a stronger punch in the end.
Sometimes we need help getting rid of the non-essential. I think of the tale of Raymond Carver, the American short story writer whose poignant tales work so brilliantly because of their minimalism, conciseness, spare beginnings and wide-open endings. According to reports, much of this leanness was down to Carver’s imperious editor Gordon Lish. Manuscripts of Carver’s early drafts are scarred with crossings out and abridgements, crisping up the writing for the story to tell itself better.
So if you’re struggling to brandish the cleaver and chop away, just remember: they’re only words.
There’s plenty more where they came from.
The Artists’ Advantage
For painters, it’s the brushstrokes that seemed so perfect yesterday but today look unconvincing that must be scraped, smeared away or overpainted. If experimentation is key to your art process — the liberal spattering of paint from a heavily loaded brush — then you’ll know that success lies much less in the actual sloshing and much more in the final decision to keep or discard this or that drip or smudge.
Perhaps the strict methods of the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans are sagacious here. He once told an interviewer that…
