From The Creativity Journals: The Importance of Making A Mess

Generating something that matters, a thing we will offer out into the world in a gesture of soulful devotion, is a necessarily long, often arduous, (only sometimes) rewarding task...

This is the first installment of what I’ve called The Creativity Journals. I won’t always focus on writing, either loosely or at all. Today’s entry is dedicated to the craft of drafting, which is a thing that happens with all creativity, yet it’s a thing we mostly associate with the writing process. My hope in offering these shorter journal entries is that it will remind us what genuine, soulful, creativity looks like; what it demands of us, where it comes from, and what’s required in attending to the ‘care and feeding’ of our creative self. In doing this I’ll be speaking to the process of tending to the beleaguered and all-important experience of our human belonging in and to this beautiful world, by way of feeding our creative spirit so it might be plump, generative, beneficent. These writings will be about our essential and intimate relationship with Eros, The Mystery and our own longing to be of eminent use to the only thing that actually matters – the continued unfolding of Life.

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The process of drafting any creative work is long. There, it is, the plain and simple and necessary truth, printed in black and white. If you’re reading this and you call yourself a writing coach and you are shaking your head saying, ‘no, no no! It doesn’t have to be!’ all I can say is shame on you. We cannot and should not – ever – hack the creative process.

I’ve been writing for decades now. Writing for various reasons and in various forms. I write curriculum, marketing material, narrative and information/prescriptive essays, poetry, and I’ve self published a couple of books. And still, I’m just learning about the true and necessary process of drafting. Something happens in drafting, a deepening of an intimate relationship, that cannot happen in a ‘write your book in a weekend!’ workshop. I’m sure it’s possible to pull together a short prescription book (the kinds that were popular in the 90’s like, ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’) but even those took decades to write if you count the moment authors began scribbling their ideas and wisdom on napkins, the backs of business cards or the backs of their hands. You see, that counts as drafting. The minute you commit a sketch or a sentence to some kind of permanence anywhere, it becomes its own creature and you’ve entered the drafting process. I hope this is both inspiring and also sobering to you. Because once you do that, you’re no longer entirely in charge. You’re now at the mercy of another creature, with its own soul, who now has permission to wake you up at 2am to demand your time and attention. And it could go on for decades.

I bless the writers out there who have dedicated themselves to peeling back the erroneous expectations and promises that would have us see the drafting process as anything other than exactly what it is. For the actual writer, writing is like childbirth (and we know what’s become of that endeavor). It’s hard, long and quite often a woven braid of both ecstatic and grueling moments. Given that we’re birthing a thing with its own spirit and soul into the world, to carry on without us, that seems about right. It needs to be arduous.

I began my current book project, a memoir, 16 months ago. I was compiling source material for it for the last ten years (which gets to be counted as part of the drafting process retroactively). But I only turned my attention toward the project, making a file for it in Scrivener, in November of 2022. By some extraordinary miracle incomprehensible to me, I had a comprehensive first draft by the Fall Equinox of 2023 – a deadline I set for myself that felt deliberately unrealistic, just to keep me on my toes. Compared to many writers I know, I’m cruising. And still…STILL…I’m not nearly as far along as our instant gratification loving society expects me to be. Good thing I don’t turn to my society for anything much these days, except perhaps for how not to be a human.

I can’t tell you how many people have said, ‘oh you completed a comprehensive first draft! So you’re pretty much done now aren’t you?’ This speaks to the culture we’ve created that has erased the messy process of creation and birth. I’ve included a picture of simply the printed versions of my FIRST draft. Just my first draft. And just the printed copies. There were at least five more legitimate versions that never got printed. In fact, though it’s a bit off topic, I’ll re-tell the story of my phenomenal developmental editor and writing coach, Max Regan, being overtly, obviously frustrated with me (which required that I behave in all manner of unreasonable in order to get him to this place). I was whining and mewing like a spoiled teenager, “How can I justify printing this version when it’s just going to change by tonight?! But I can’t read it online…it’s just too hard…inevitably I start editing it, and then I’m not really just reading it…how am I expected to do this?!” Just retelling this moment has me rolling my eyes (an very important part of the drafting process which I’ll get to in a moment). Finally Max threw his pen down (we were on ZOOM for this meeting, and I don’t know for certain that he threw his pen down, but that’s what it felt like on my end of the ZOOM call), and screamed “Make a donation of one-hundred bucks to the Sierra Club then kill the fucking tree! Kill the fucking tree would you already, Christiane?!” I killed the fucking tree and then some, as you can see from this photo. Given that there will be (at least) four more major drafting stages for this book project, it’s fair to assume that for my next life I’ll be reincarnated as a tree in Western Canada, with the stereophonic sounds of chainsaws 24/7 all around me, watching my comrades fall until it’s my turn. May it come quickly.

Writing is no different than any other big creative project we undertake, including parenting. In fact, our own intimate journey into actual initiated adulthood – which very few of us in this society can truly claim to have done – is it’s own necessary and exquisite drafting process. One that must contain unending eye-rolling, embarrassing moments, that we hope weren’t witnessed by anyone else but that must be witnessed by as many other people as possible, or can we really say we’re evolving as a species?

In our society we’re encouraged to imagine nutrient-dense brilliance simply appears, like our shrink-wrapped skinless, boneless chicken breasts or our IRS refund check. In both instances we can see dates and other information that points to an original source. But most of us don’t really believe these things actually came from anywhere other than The Mystery herself. And many of us will say outright I don’t want to know, as long as it just keeps coming. We expect immediate gratification and perfection – we expect final drafts – the moment we put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. And our society, too, expects nothing less of us. No awkward sentences and half-baked eye-rolling ideas. God forbid mistakes, missteps, misspellings, and messes. No corny euphemisms or indulgent narrative. No big blue splotch in the middle of the canvas of yellow stripes. In a society that requires impulsivity and mercurial attention spans, we’re set up to fail miserably at sticking with a grueling thing until it’s actually ready to be birthed into the world. And yet, this is how big important projects go – those offerings that are uniquely ours to gift to the world. They take time, seasons, gestational phases. They take both the eye rolling and the brilliant moments, sentences, and strokes of the brush alike. The grueling and ecstatic experiences both. 

Our task here is to make sure we don’t write off the eye rolling sentences, paragraphs and chapters as regrettable. I’m saying this as much for myself as for anyone else. I still make my eye rolling moments regrettable, embarrassing. I’m working on celebrating them, reading them aloud even. Don’t throw away the photographs of your mullet phase, nor introduce it with eye rolls. If we censor our creative process and expression because we’re worried that it’s not refined enough, we’re censoring the only thing that is truly ours to offer this world – the thing that is necessarily ours to offer this world. And why on Earth would we do that?