By Kari Patterson
Hell hath no fury like a woman with writer’s block. Or so my husband says.
He has a right to say it, as he has endured my endless rants as I attempt to draft book chapters in the midst of life. Creativity is such a beast, yes? So untamable and infuriatingly elusive, yet intoxicating and life-giving once the muse mercifully makes her visit and you find words pouring out onto the page.
This process of writing, it can be absolute madness, especially when it “matters.” When the stakes are high, a contract is on the table, a deadline is looming, expectations soar and we find ourselves desperately hunting down that elusive creativity with such intensity we’re crazed. The more desperate we are for inspiration, the less likely we are to find it. The muse is shy.
There is, however, a gentle way to coax her out of hiding. It is a simple: the Rough Draft mindset.
This year’s Faith & Culture Writers Conference is Rough Draft: From Blank to Beautiful. I love this. It reminds me of the freedom-filled approach to writing and life that relaxes the pencil-grip and lets creativity come alive.
In her brilliant book, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain, Henriette Anne Klauser explains our trouble with writing stems from the fact that we are taught to write and edit simultaneously, rather than letting ourselves loose with words without worry for conventions, then going back later to edit and rework. She tells a fabulous story about a little boy who wants to write a story about a mouse and a motorcycle. The problem is, he doesn’t know how to spell motorcycle, so he writes a story about a mouse and a bike, but somehow when he’s done it wasn’t quite the same story he had in his heart.
Haven’t we all been there? We had something sacred inside that we so wanted to share, but we knew our limitations and feared failure, so we smash the story into something more manageable and lose the sacredness of it altogether. The boy was afraid of seeing his teacher’s red marks slashed across his paper, so he produced a lesser work, and wasn’t true to what was in his heart.
How much better would have been a rough draft about a mouse and a motorcycle!
Klauser also explained that the brilliant Russian pianist Franzk Liszt produced not only Tarantella, Don Juan Fantasy, and Liebestraum, but also more than 700 works, most of which were “uneven in quality, superficially composed or down-right dull.” The point? Even the greatest writers and composers spend the majority of their time writing less-than-stellar material. Can we allow ourselves to try something and do it imperfectly?
This is the Rough Draft mindset. It is the only way to go from blank to beautiful.
Here’s the thing: What’s true of writing is also true of life. An expectation comes such as, let’s say, Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. The time when your kids’ dreams should all come true. Then company comes and the cameras are clicking and that blasted Facebook feed is just chock-full of everyone else’s perfect life and the pressure to “compose” the perfect holiday can choke the joy and inspiration straight out. We do well to remember, every day is only a rough draft.
The most sacred holiday moments are those when you just live. Not when you’re striving to craft the perfect moment. Not when everything’s orchestrated and choreographed. When my son and I were curled up on the couch last Friday night, just sitting in silence staring at the tree-lights, savoring the last few hours of him 7-years-old, I thought to myself, This is the highlight of my year.
The only way to discover the deep well of inspiration is to live. Not live looking for a tweet or a title or a clever catchy phrase, live looking for life. For beauty. And not only for the sake of writing it, but the sake of living it.
The ever-present danger we writers face is to skip straight to the telling without the living.
So this Christmas, let’s embrace the Rough Draft Mindset It is the way to overcome writer’s block and the way to overcome life block. Let’s relax our way into our imperfect holiday, because Christ is our perfection, once and for all. Let’s write and give and and live and love, scribbling beautiful fragments from the depths of our souls.
Merry Christmas.
———————————
Kari is one of those people who has been to every single Faith & Culture Writers Conference since the first one in 2011. She loved it and got involved. She’s been our communication coordinator, an emcee, and now she’s on our advisory board. This year she’s co-leading a workshop at our pre-conference mini-retreat. Kari is a writer and speaker who loves seeing sacred in the mundane, and writes about it at karipatterson.com
