Life, Art, and the Creative Process
I didn’t publish a blog last week, breaking my year-long streak—though it wasn’t for lack of trying. I have written snippets and pieces that remain unfinished. I have felt ideas float around my head but cannot coax them into words. I have processed a wide range of thoughts and emotions, none of them cooperative enough to become a cohesive piece of writing, preferably in the vicinity of 500-700 words. And though the blemish to my weekly self-publishing routine is new, this struggle to write is a familiar pattern. Each week I have started and stopped, I’ve typed and deleted. I’ve procrastinated, prayed, and persisted, eventually pulling ideas from my head down to my fingertips and onto the blank document whose blinking line ticks away the seconds I spend staring instead of writing.
When it comes to my writing, people only see the polished and edited side. I rarely let anyone view the product before it’s finished. I think and write, delete, edit, rephrase, and eventually find myself ready to click publish— not perfect but content. The whole process feels disjointed and kind of sloppy, but that part is invisible in the finished product. In this way, writing reminds me of a tapestry displaying a beautiful tableau. When reversed, it reveals a mess of yarn crisscrossing in a haphazard appearance that doesn’t seem to connect with the carefully crafted image on the front. And like a tapestry is hung with its beauty facing outward, clicking the publish button on a blog displays my words with their polished face forward. Readers see beauty (or at least my best effort), I see internal vexation, countless drafts, and chewed fingernails, which are the collateral damage of the creative process.
Life itself is a similar messy process, but sometimes we forget. We see the polished outside of a person and forget that the image is multi-dimensional. We forget that makeup can conceal dark circles that speak of exhaustion. We forget that clothing with spandex can smooth over lumps of insecurity. We forget that the strands of trial and error, mistakes and missteps, of learning and growing, are often messy and emotionally knotted, even though their outcome can become beautiful. We forget that living is a process, and each step is working to create beauty from the strands that make up our lives. And because we forget, we tend to put unrealistic expectations on ourselves. When we don’t recognize that we view our tapestry from the backside, we don’t appreciate that these seemingly messy strands make up what is truly beautiful.
When I embrace the process of writing and leave the stress of polishing and publishing behind, I find joy in the making. And I think living is the same way. It’s done best when we remember that we’re in the middle of a process, there’s no deadline for having a polished version submitted. Paul told the church at Philippi, “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ.” (Philippians 1:6). Our deadline isn’t this week or the end of a year. It isn’t required by our 30’s or 70’s or when we become a parent or grandparent. It’s simply forward progress until I meet Christ. Based on the ups and downs in my past, I know the work God is creating in me will look pretty messy from my perspective, but that’s okay because the work is in God’s hands, and what a gift it is to let him make art out of the strands of my life. I’ll leave the tapestry to him, trusting in his perspective instead of my own, and keep plugging away at this whole words into writing thing.
