The business of re-work
Whatever your creative act may be - whether in the arts or the office - get your repetitions up. Do more of it.
Da Vinci once stated that "art is never finished, only abandoned." When creating a masterpiece, there is always something else that could be done to improve the project. Perhaps that is why there are so few of his paintings?
When I first began writing regularly, I struggled to understand Da Vinci’s sentiments. I hated the editing process. It felt tedious and time consuming.
But I've come to a realization that has been exceptionally helpful to me, and might be to you in your creative endeavors.
Da Vinci’s perspective is that of a master, a committed and dedicated artist. Author Stephen Pressfield in his War of Art refers to this kind of mentality as becoming a “professional” in your craft. A professional shows up and does the work, day in and day out. An author who has “gone pro” writes. They write every day (or darn close to it). They don’t have writers block, because they need to write something each day.
Professionals are in the business of re-work.
Like Da Vinci, they know that focused attention moves something from good towards great. Stephen King referred to this process as "killing your darlings," being willing to remove something from your work (that you may love) to make it better.
This all sounds very noble and inspiring. It is also really hard to do.
I didn’t like editing my work because I liked what was on the page. The early drafts felt closest to my own thoughts. The sentences used grammatical structures, phrasing, and words that were innately appealing to me.
But more deeply, editing was hard because I was not sure what would be left if I cut away at something I had written. It was as if I had a limited supply of words that I risked using up.
This scarcity mindset is the opposite of the professional. Scarcity says there are only a finite number of ways to say something. But writing is not like that - there are no constraints on the production of words.
It was only as I made my own attempt to ‘go pro,’ and have a regular practice and cadence of writing that I began to see this.
It was only by showing up to do the work daily that I was freed from seeing words as precious. Frequency of doing something keeps you from becoming wed to your work. It shows you words are readily available if you show up.
What are actually rare are ideas.
Ideas that are real, unique, and genuine are fleeting. The only way to find them is to show up in the mine, ready to dig.
Once you have found an idea - then you can work it like a baker kneads dough - shaping and re-shaping the words until you have expressed the idea in its purest form.
The point of your creative work is the idea, not the mechanism.
Words are just a pathway you are opening in the brain of the reader to the idea. Editing is the work to make this mental pathway as smooth as possible.
So whatever your creative act may be - whether in the arts or the office - get your repetitions up. Do more of it. This will make any one effort less precious. It will also begin to teach you the taste required to make something better and better.