Allen Ginsberg popularized the aphorism: “First Thought, Best Thought.” For me, “first thought, worst thought” is more typical. Sometimes I can barely even parse the phrases I’ve scribbled down on notecards!
I don’t mean to say that Ginsburg is wrong, just that we don’t all think and create in the same way. More importantly, different projects require different techniques. Sometimes our first thought fits right into the flow of our work, and at other times, the first iteration offers only the merest hints of what a new idea could become.
I’ve learned that giving an obviously flawed “first thought” too much weight can actually discourage me from working on it at all. I can become intimidated by the sense that my first attempt is close to the idea’s full potential, and that additional effort can only yield incremental improvements or ornamental refinements.
Developing those initially unpromising fragments requires time, craft, patience and an ability to set ourselves free from any sense of reverence that might hinder our ability to explore what it is we are really trying to say.
I recently heard Jay Allison, series host of the revived This I Believe speak at Wordstock. The radio series features 500-word essays in which people “from all walks of life share the personal philosophies and core values that guide their daily lives.” On the submission page of their web site, below the space for entering an essay, there is an additional text area titled “Reflections”, with the following instructions:
“Please tell us what it was like to write your essay.
Was it an easy or a challenging experience?
Please limit your response to no more than 500 words.”
Allison explained that the thoughts submitters share in this “Reflections” box are often both clearer and more powerfully written than their submitted essay, and frequently form the basis for the show’s collaborative editorial process. In other words, the essayists can become so caught up in their first thought that they can’t say what they really want to say until they are given a new blank space to fill.
At times, creating can be like trying to knit a warm pair of socks, and ending up with a big tangle of yarn. We have to choose: Am I going to stick my cold toes into the middle of this mess, tell myself it is a pair of socks and imagine the warmth? Or am I going to consider that first attempt a gorgeous abstraction, hang it on the wall as art, and make a real pair of socks?
Questions
- In day-to-day life, do you tend to be more spontaneous or more deliberative?
- When working or thinking creatively, are you the same way?
- Do you feel like you are uncovering or discovering something that already exists, or are you consciously constructing something?
- Has the first attempt at working on a new idea ever become a stumbling block for you? How did you get around it? Was it difficult to do so?
- If you find yourself with multiple “first” drafts of an idea, do they tend to be similar or different? How do you negotiate the differences between them to work on the project? Do tensions emerge that slow you down, or do the differences accelerate the process?
Exercise
- Start working on a brand new idea, and capture as much of it as you can in twenty minutes or less. This could mean twenty minutes of free-writing or drawing or talking/singing/ranting into an audio recorder. However you want to do it, as long as it is a format you can review later. The goal is to create an artifact of your idea, and then put it away.
- Repeat the same process at least four more times, with at least twenty-four hours between each repetition. Don’t look at your previous attempt, don’t borrow or cut and paste. As much as possible, start from scratch, capture the idea quickly and put it away until the end of the exercise. (You don’t have to ’store’ the idea in the same form. If you made a recording yesterday, you could write phrases on notecards today.)
- After you’ve done this five times (or more) let all the different artifacts you’ve created sit for a few days.
- Pull them all out and review them. How did your expression of the idea change over time? Were there core elements that kept recurring? Did the underlying ideas become clearer — or murkier?
