You’ve done what you’ve set out to do! You’ve conquered your doubts and succeeded in dragging your dreams into reality. After all of the effort and work all you want to do is take a load off and congratulate yourself. Regardless of what you’ve created, be it a new kind of cake or a fantasy book, you deserve a break. Once that final step is taken, once you have built your idea, celebrate a little. Pat yourself on the back and enjoy the moment. Not everyone is successful in bringing their ideas to fruition and you have taken a large step towards completing your goals.
What else is there to do now? Why is the loop not finished? Because you are not done. Your idea is real now, it is concrete. Now you know what it is. You know where it excels and where your idea flounders a bit. You can’t know the measure of a thing until its actually built. You can have a good idea, you can guess. But once it’s real, once your idea has been built, you know exactly what it is, how it works and how it can be made better. Depending on what your dream actually is, how you go about improving it will differ. Your dream of becoming a professional athlete will involve a different set of circumstances for improvement than what an author is aiming for. Stop and imagine what would happen if an athlete stopped working out after they went pro. Do you think they would be an athlete very long? Imagine a wedding cake maker who focused solely on taste and not presentation. Should they bother with what a wedding cake is supposed to look like? These are both examples of refinement. An athlete who works out after signing day will perform better, and will seek to do better on the field with each new game. A cake maker who refuses to bother making food that looks as good as it tastes will limit their audience.
Since I am neither a cake maker nor an athlete my advice tends to lean towards what I do know. Writing. Writers do not get a redo once a book is published (ok, usually we don’t). We do not get to continually improve something through a software update or by adding value to our business with better and newer services. Once our words are at the printers, they are there and there’s nothing we can do about it anymore. For an author it is vital that we really focus on getting our stories right before they ever reach the store shelves.
As I have said before you cannot judge for yourself how good your own work is once you have written it. Trust me when I say this, an author knows his work better than anyone. After all the work and effort that goes into making a novel, why wouldn’t we? So when we sit down to edit our work, when we set out to improve upon it we are not the best judges of what works and doesn’t. The trouble is, we will never unsee those words we worked so hard to write. We can distance ourselves from our works a bit by setting it aside for a time but we will not truly be able to forget them. This is why I believe feed back is so huge for the writer.
I’ve talked about giving and receiving feedback before. I cannot stress its importance enough. How will you know if your idea, your story, your dream is any good unless someone can verify that? How can you tell what sections simply fall flat or what characters really work well if it is you who is judging your own work?
“Unless we learn to share our ideas with others, we will be stuck with a world of seemingly impossible problems. We can either all work together or fail alone.”
Most of us do not like feedback. It makes us feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. And it is. It shows us our work in a different light. Feedback exposes a story’s weakness in broad daylight. Edwin Catmull is not a name you are probably familiar with in everyday conversation, but you are familiar with the company he is the current president of, Pixar. Jonah Lehrer interviewed Edwin about Pixar’s creative process and it was not one you would expect. Imagine taking your newly minted story into a room full of your peers, reading it aloud and then getting feedback right then and there on the spot. Handing over your manuscript to your friends doesn’t sound to bad compared to that does it? Pixar uses feedback in every single step of their production process, from early scripts to newly rendered scenes, everything is put out on the table to be dissected, commented on and put back together again. This brutal process is what gave us Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Pixar has taken the refinement process and incorporated it into everything they do so that the next film will be even better than the last.
For an author I believe the final leg of the Creative Loop is the hardest. Your first draft will have lots of areas to focus on and fix. But what about the fifth draft? Part of the difficulty in refining our work, is simply the sheer scope of it all. These are not engines, disassembled and put back together again in an hour or two. It takes days, weeks sometimes months of editing, improving and evaluating our work. Then we do it all again and again. I am always amazed at just how much room there is for improvement in a good story. Even more so when I go back and look at my original notes, when I see that scrappy little idea in its infancy, I am humbled at just how far an idea can go when given the chance.
*Lehrer, Jonah (2012-03-19). Imagine: How Creativity Works (p. 140). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
(This post originally appeared on Oct. 1, 2015)