Wait—don’t put those in the compost, we need them! Mistakes, Failure, Rejection, Jealousy, and Loss are always stocked in my pantry. Find out what these icky parts of life have to do with creativity and why they’re embedded in every finished project. I promise you we will not be icing any cakes if we try to bypass the mess ups. Enough with the baking metaphor—we’re more than halfway through the Artist’s Way! We’re digging into weeks 7 and 8 of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
MOONLIGHT HIGHLIGHT
"Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead."
- Julia Cameron
”When faced with a loss, immediately take one small action to support your artist. Even if all you are doing is buying a bunch of tulips and a sketch pad, your action says, 'I acknowledge you and your pain. I promise you a future worth having.”
- Julia Cameron
ASK MOLLY
Question: How do you translate your brain onto paper when writing is supposed to be linear and your thoughts are circuitous? When responding verbally comes so natural, but thinking of something to write is so tough?
What can you do to manufacture situations for yourself where you have something to respond to when you want to write? You can work with, not against your desire to function this way. You can read a poem, a page, or take in some sort of sensory experience, just looking at an image, or smelling or touching something, and use your response to whatever object/work of writing/art you're using to prompt your thoughts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting something to bounce off to get your writing flowing! Then, rather than working against a "circuitous" way of thinking when writing, you can lean into that too--follow whatever associations come up for you, complete or not, ordered or not, and just follow whatever comes. Particularly when you are just writing and drafting, order and linear thinking aren't important. You can always work on that part in editing and revision.
TEXT EXCAVATION
FACING WRITERLY REJECTION
In the easy and popular game of compare and despair—what you don’t often see is what’s underneath all of the bylines, acceptances, titles and affiliations that writers share in their bios. Those names and titles are only the highlights reel. In this episode I spill the failures beneath my bylines—I calculate the percentage of acceptances I receive and how many “No’s” I log before I get just one “Yes.” Why would I do this?
Because I want to normalize the process of swimming through slush piles, the slog and the massive volume of attempts it takes to write, create, publish. Using and making connections in the literary world to get editors to know your name is great advice I’m sure, but for most of us that’s not going to happen overnight. I want you to know that even when you’ve done your best work and you’ve edited to its highest good—there could still be a long road to finding someone with publishing power who shares your vision.
Failures, dead ends, bad blood, deleted drafts—it’s all inevitable. These tough moments are in fact sign posts of artistic life. The key to accepting this is knowing how you will deal with them when they come along, or at least, giving them some space when they sneak up. We need a way to process our ouchy moments rather than internalizing them and getting lost in a doom spiral. We need space to share our disappointments and failures.
In addition to getting the hug you need, sharing about your artistic losses can help validate others experiences too. There is so much vulnerability and humility in putting your work out there and facing rejection, and even more in letting others know that has occurred. It takes a lot of bravery to reveal this rather than hiding your No’s and oopses in an attempt to save face among your peers or preserve a veneer of perfection.
PERFECTIONISM IS (NOT) NEXT TO GODLINESS
We tend to secretly, or not so secretly, think that perfectionism is an acceptable part of our processes. Even if we lament that we’re perfectionists, there’s a part of us that thinks there’s something admirable in there—it can be a way of attempting to say, I try hard, or quality matters to me, or I take pride in my work, but unfortunately perfectionism does not equate to effort, quality, or excellence.
Perfectionism is synonymous with stalling out. It’s not a way forward but a way to get stuck in place, circling over the same steps again and again or purposefully holding yourself in a space where you live with only the imagination of your potential, but never test your wares (which are forever incomplete.)
Perfectionism is the belief that final drafts are created in one step, that the first draft should be the quality of a completed draft. This unrealistic expectation sets us up for disappointment. Not only do creations need to be constructed in layers, the idea of completion, final, the end, is a bit of a fruitless chase. Once we have developed a piece of art of writing through layers of creation and revision, we can reach a point at which the piece is good enough, perhaps even excellent, and ready to be shared with the world—deciding when this point has come is not an entirely objective decision—eventually you call it done. But, if perfectionism has you locked in a phase where you never fully finish the first draft through to the end, the round you can call finished is unlikely to arrive.
WHAT TO DO WITH JEALOUSY
If we can see through it, jealousy is a tool to understand what we value and aspire to. The tricky part is that jealousy doesn’t want us to know it has this useful meaning. It just wants us to feel like we’re too this or not enough that to get what we want, or that someone else already has it (so we can’t possibly).
Jealousy wants us to shrink, feel critical, put out, and disempowered by other people’s possibilities, their realities as we interpret them. If we can detach these negative and frustrating outcomes that jealousy has clinging to its message—we can begin to notice what matters to us and locate ways to further invest in ourselves and see our desires through to fruition. We can find ways to cultivate the same or parallel situations for ourselves. When in doubt, remember that jealousy’s message that you’ve been left out of the party is just a vicious rumor. There’s plenty of room for you to join.
This episode of the podcast we’re talking jealousy, perfectionism, deconstruction without encouragement, unsupportive institutions, processing artistic loss, and how to hang in there through it all.
RESOURCES & NEXT STEPS
Journal Prompt from Julia Cameron: “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I would try _____”
Jealousy Maps, adapted from Julia Cameron’s exercise in the book:
Materials: Grab blank paper & colorful writing utensils
Draw a very large blob that takes up most of the paper. This is your jealousy island.
Populate your island. First, mark 5 locations and name them for people/experiences/situations that makes you feel jealous
Write or draw a description of what it is at that location that you want, interpreting the attribute that’s really important to you from the person/place/thing you feel in competition with.
Draw a flight path or a trail to each of the locations on the map. Along each line, write down an action antidote that could lead you to the goals that are hidden in what makes you feel jealous.
What one action will you take for your creativity today?