100 Day Creative Challenge Day 92:  Get Messy

Why, when we know that there’s no such thing as perfect, do most of us spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying to be everything to everyone? Is it that we really admire perfection? No – the truth is that we are actually drawn to people who are real and down-to-earth. We love authenticity and we know that life is messy and imperfect. Brené Brown

When I’m in the middle of a project it looks messy. Notes, books with sticky notes like porcupine spines and notebook filled with a pen scratched first draft are piled on my desk. The inside of my head is filled with characters’ lives and settings and ideas that intrude into my day and night hours until the book is published.

In a perfect world, my desk would be totally clean, ideas flow like soft serve ice-cream and the first draft will be so perfect the editor tells me she’s not charging me because it didn’t need work and she loved the story so much, she wants to pay me.

This is me at my cleaned up desk. It lasted five minutes!

Writing is a messy process. Any creative endeavour is messy. Messy is what makes it interesting.

This is what it normally looks like!

It takes courage and determination and experimentation, and lots and lots of hard work to persevere through the mess to get to the end product. But it’s so worth it!

I’ve been writing full-time for ten years and I’ve learnt so much about myself through the process of taking notes to manuscript. Writing is a metaphor for life. I’m the author. I can change the characters, the setting, the plot. I can edit and polish and rewrite as much as I like, but my job is actually publish my book. In life, I am the author of my story. Others influence it, play a part, and God puts a story in my heart. Somehow, the ups and downs, the stresses and strains, love and loss, joy and sorrow,the mess is transformed into a life.

Getting messy is nothing to worry about. Creating is messy and imperfect work. We are messy and imperfect. That’s life.

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft. Harlan Coben