You finally got around to painting, or writing a short story. You’re pleased that you’ve done it but there’s no way you’re going to show it to anyone. It’s crap. It isn’t exactly how you wanted it to turn out but you don’t know how to fix it. You know the perspective isn’t right in your picture or the dialogue is clunky and doesn’t ring true in your writing.
So you berate yourself. You tell yourself that you’ll never be good enough, you don’t have enough natural talent which means that you can never produce work that will live up to the people you admire.
You think it’s all a waste of time and you consider giving up.
You have to produce crap art to get better
Being disappointed with your efforts is a common feeling among people throughout their creative journey. Rest assured, you are not alone.
Here’s the thing. You have to produce crap art to get better. Your intellect and critic knows that it is not up to the standard you would like but you have to keep practising and learning. It will gradually improve. Those people, whose work you admire, once produced crap art too. They probably still do. But the stuff you see looks good because they kept producing, they kept learning and they kept experimenting.
Some of their experiments worked out, others led them to a cul de sac. But whatever the outcome, these experiments allowed them to hone their voice and their style. The constant production and learning allowed them to eventually produce work that they liked, that matched the intention of what was in their minds, work that they are proud of.
You can have this too, but you have to stick with the journey. You have to be prepared to be crap, to be embarrassed about what you produce. And then you need to put that that piece of work to one side and start on the next.
Crap art helps you to beat procrastination
The great thing about being willing to produce crap art is that it frees you up to just get on and do something, anything. It’s a great procrastination beater.
One of the main rules in Anne Lamott’s book about writing, Bird by Bird, is that you have to produce a shitty first draft (her words, not mine). Ernest Hemingway said the same – the first draft of anything is shit. I have found this rule to be a great procrastination beater in my own writing. It frees you to get words down on the page and just keep going. I wrote the first draft of a novel last year and allowing it to be crap meant that I could keep writing until I had all 69,000 words of a finished manuscript. And as a bonus, when I finally read back over it, some of it was indeed crap but some of it wasn’t that bad and some of it was even quite good.
Remember the ‘F’ word
If you are feeling fearful, overwhelmed or are walking around your next project but not getting on with it, be the trickster. Give yourself the permission to produce the crappest thing that you can and you’ll find it much easiest to get started and actually have fun. Yes, the F word – fun!
Creating art doesn’t have to be a painful austerity that only the chosen ones are saddled with. Set the expectation bar low, get started and have fun while you do it. Then you can enjoy the act of creation and be proud that you got on and just did it.
Now I’d love to hear from you
Please share how you cope when you are disappointed or embarrassed by your work. Give us some tips on how you stay positive and get started on your next piece.
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Love it – The F word – fearful! Think I’ve been fearing something most of my life……when all along I’ve been in fear of fear!
Your article reminds me to “do it anyway”. I’m back on a new creative path and just loving putting all my fears out there on my “author” website. Who am I to call myself an author?
Who am I not to??
Hi Luci. Thanks for your comment. F for fear is a good one. Well done for doing it anyway. You are an author!
So very true! Allowing oneself to ‘fail’ often feels wrong in our achievement-driven society, I spent the first half of this year trying out new painring ideas and I worried that people would view this as self-indulgent and a waste of effort and resources. I threw at least 20 paintings to one side, but all of them were an important step in the process and I am finally making paintings that convey the sensations I struggled to achieve previously. Hooray for crap art!
Thanks Helen. There’s a new F word -fail. Yes we have to be prepared to fail in our creative objectives to learn and get better. Having seen your recent work I would say that it was 20 canvases well spent. I like the way you question whether it was self indulgent to do that. I can feel a future blog coming on about that topic!
What a great post, Cali – thanks for sharing!
Giving myself permission to go with the flow and just get the first draft down is so liberating and knocks procrastination on the head right at the start.
I find this really helpful when I’m creating a new video or blogpost – letting it all come out stream-of-consciousness style, without any editing by The Controller (my conscious mind) that will judge and nit-pick the life out of anything before it’s even been born. Left to its own devices, The Controller sucks the energy out of most things in the belief that it’s helping me ‘get it right’.
Once I learned to be with the discomfort of letting the writing flow, perfect in all its imperfection, knowing that this is just the first ‘shitty draft’ and that it is full of juicy little nuggets that just need polishing and honing on the second edit, the whole process became much more fun.
That and learning not to compare myself to others, thinking they have everything sorted, whereas in reality they all started somewhere.
I especially like your passage: “Those people, whose work you admire, once produced crap art too. They probably still do.” Oh yes, they do.
Here’s to tons more crap art!
Hi Linda. I love the concept of your Contoller. Good to give these things names because then we can minimise the impact.
Cali x
It’s a paradox. The more crap you produce, the sweeter the flower will smell in the end. The crap work is the fertilizer. You’ve got to produce the fertilizer so the flower can grow beautiful and smell sweet. I draw all the illustrations for my blogs or take the pictures. My sense of perspective is not consistent or great in my drawings. But I don’t care. They convey the message in a creative way. The process of finding how to express the message and the actual drawing of it are two modes of creativity that feed my soul in a way it has been wanting to be fed for some time.
I love the flower and crap metaphor. And well done with feeding your creative soul by doing the drawings for your blog. I have always admired that you do that.
Hello…I found this very refreshing. I have been writing ‘crap’ on and off for quite a few years now but have never felt brave enough to ‘test the waters’…until now. I have sent off two creative stories to respective competitions and am waiting a feed back. Decided to ‘woman up’ and take rejection full on and take that as a necessary learning curve. Thought this might give me the spark to plough on so as not to be beaten!
My genre is mainly mystery/ghost stories…is there anyone out there who has the same interest in that section of writing?
I love your expression “woman up”. Rejection is part of a writing life. Every rejection gets you closer to being published. Keep the crap coming because that’s where you will find nuggets of gold