Have you ever had someone else articulate something that you weren’t able to — and the second they did, your eyes opened up wide, you hopped up and down in your chair, and you started yelling, “Oooh! Oh, that’s ME!”?
This past week, I finally opened up my copy of David duChemin’s Start Ugly, and WOW did I have a lot of those moments. It was similar to the first time I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield — completely, marvelously mind-blowing.
In Start Ugly, duChemin talks about how “Creativity isn’t linear, but it is iterative.” So when we create something — a novel, a podcast, a painting, a vase — we’re not moving in a straight line from Point A to Point B (even though, as duChemin points out, it often looks misleadingly linear in hindsight).
Rather, when we create, we’re taking three steps forward, two steps backward, eight steps sideways, and maybe even visiting Mars or the ethereal plane along the way. We’re taking an iterative journey — one that often includes repetition, doubling back, and revisiting things we’d thought we were done with.
Just like life, duChemin notes, the creative process isn’t linear: “We’ve all been at the junction wondering which way to go, worried that a wrong choice will lead to more and more wrong choices that take us further from the thing we’re meant to be making.”
And there it was, in casual black-and-white lettering on the page: the thing I had been struggling with for weeks and weeks, in both Girl In Space and another project that I’ve been terrified to begin.
And this was why. The paralyzing notion that, if I committed to an idea, or a step, or a decision in the story, that it could send me in the wrong direction and RUIN EVERYTHING, or at least result in some really serious wasted time and effort.
But as it turns out, writing isn’t linear — it’s iterative, which means that we’ll always be going back and refining. That writing a sentence doesn’t set it in stone, unchangeable forever. That we’re all just feeling our way forward, and not every sentence we write has to be some kind of masterpiece that defines us forever. That we have some freedom to be imperfect.
Each choice we make isn’t as big of a deal as we might think it is. As duChemin later notes, “We see each decision as if it’s life-alteringly important. It’s not; life isn’t like that.” It’s iterative.
And realizing that — remembering that — has given me the courage to move forward (and perhaps inevitably backward, and sideways, and forward again) once again.
Words & warmth,
Sarah
P.S. I’m not getting paid or sponsored to say this, but Start Ugly by David duChemin is fantastic. I highly suggest you read it, no matter where you are in your journey or what kind of art you’re making (or even whether you consider what you make to be art). Snag your copy.