When the story you uncover doesn’t fit with what you expect

by DRM

Grafitti Stairway

Here’s how I work: I’ve got a long project under­way that takes focus and energy. To keep my mind lim­ber and my imag­i­na­tion at play, I explore dis­trac­tions in short bursts. I’ll write a story, mull an idea, research a set of images or some idle question.

These are amuse­ments. All the while, I’ve got this intense pull to the world that I’m explor­ing in the long project. The char­ac­ters are frozen where I left off, the sto­ries and back­sto­ries swirling around, the images and feel­ings tug­ging at me. The entire work is so alive that it makes my head sore.

Some­times the bal­ance gets thrown off and I get side­tracked by one of my amusements.

This is a del­i­cate sit­u­a­tion, as you might imag­ine. Maybe my imag­i­na­tion is push­ing for space, wants to get away from the big world of the long project and run around unen­cum­bered. Imag­i­na­tion is a del­i­cate thing and needs to be nursed along. Or, maybe I’m los­ing focus and my imag­i­na­tion is giv­ing up fight­ing to keep me in place. Or, maybe, and mad­den­ingly, the place where I’m side­tracked some­how is going to lead me to a new dis­cov­ery that I need to be able to tell the story that I’m try­ing to tell.

I’ll stop here for a sec­ond so we can all catch our breath.

Right now I’m side­tracked by the ques­tion of cre­ativ­ity and iden­tity. The urge to make things, to use signs and sym­bols and tools to build some­thing out of noth­ing, to pass knowl­edge along from one per­son to another, to offer solu­tions and util­ity and edi­fi­ca­tion, to cap­ture beauty and still the pass­ing of time, is a pro­found human impulse. It is how we have trans­ferred the essence of human­ity across thou­sands of years.

But cre­ativ­ity can be self­ish, waste­ful, destruc­tive and lazy. It can be an excuse to avoid, dis­tract, tear down.

There is a moral imper­a­tive to cre­ativ­ity that is cen­tered around hon­esty and sub­mis­sion. Be hon­est to your­self and sub­mit to what you see.

Now I real­ize what’s hung me up. As I’ve been watch­ing the story I am telling emerge, I’ve been reluc­tant to sub­mit to what I see, because it doesn’t fit with what I expected.

Like a great piece of graffiti.