The importance of failure for creativity

[Brian G Turner]

This is such a great piece about the importance of failure in creativity in general, but also very applicable to the writing process.

At the heart of the argument: day dreaming about creating a grand work gets nowhere - only by doing, redoing, refining, questioning, restarting, and continuing, does the creative process lead to success.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34775411

There are some great pieces to quote - I'll paste a couple here:

A quick story. In their book Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland tell of a ceramics teacher who announced on the opening day of class that he was dividing the students into two groups. Half were told that they would be graded on quantity. On the final day of term, the teacher said he'd come to class with some scales and weigh the pots they had made. They would get an "A" for 50lb of pots, a "B" for 40lb, and so on. The other half would be graded on quality. They just had to bring along their one, pristine, perfectly designed pot.

The results were emphatic - the works of highest quality, the most beautiful and creative designs, were all produced by the group graded for quantity. As Bayles and Orland put it: "It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the 'quality' group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

This turns out to be a profound metaphor. The British inventor James Dyson didn't create the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner in a flash of inspiration. The product, now used by millions, didn't emerge fully formed in his mind. Instead, he did what the group graded for quantity did. He tried and failed, triggering new insights, before trying and failing again - and slowly the design improved.

In fact, Dyson worked his way through 5,126 failed prototypes before coming up with a design that ultimately transformed household cleaning. As he put it: "People think of creativity as a mystical process. This model conceives of innovation as something that happens to geniuses. But this could not be more wrong. Creativity is something we can all improve at, by realising that it has specific characteristics. Above all, it is about daring to learn from our mistakes".

Or take Pixar, an animation company that has become synonymous with creativity following its blockbuster successes with Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. It might be supposed that these wonderful plots were put together by resident geniuses with sublime imaginations. But the reality is very different. The initial ideas for new storylines are just the starting point, like Dyson's initial prototype. It is what happens next that really matters.

The storyline is systematically pulled apart. As the animation gets into operation, each frame, each strand of the narrative, is subject to testing, debate and adaptation. All told, it takes around 12,000 storyboard drawings to make one 90-minute feature, and because of the iterative process, story teams often create more than 125,000 storyboards by the time the film is actually delivered.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I think I take a less extreme - 'practice makes perfect' sort of approach rather than a more stark 'expect to fail before you succeed' from this. Although ultimately the second part is what you should expect.

True failure, in my mind, is someone who will never polish the turd they have envisaged.

To give an example, the man who was in direct competition with Spangler of the Hoover company: Spangler's upright hoover relied on suction to remove the dust, his competitor used the opposite and blew the dust about instead...

So I'd say a bit of daydreaming and thinking things through is required also (but yes, mostly knuckling down and learning from your mistakes )

 

[Droflet]

Before coming to this wonderful place, I wrote, with zero support, for ten years. It took three failed novels before I twigged. Yeah, no one like failure but it is the only way to learn. As for daydreaming. I put onto the tv something truly stupid or totally boring and let my mind wander. I used to take notes, now, after fifteen years, I no longer need to. Really interesting article Brian.

 

[Boneman]

Can't find it now, but there was a twitter post of some famous person's quote that went something like: failure is acceptable, because it shows you're trying.

 

[Juliana]

And this is why it's so important to be prepared to edit, and rewrite, because your first draft will never be that perfect jewel you envisioned. You need to be prepared to realize it just won't be that great and be willing to keep on working.

Hilariously fabulous montage in Iron Man I of Tony creating his first suit, anyone?

 

[Tim Murray]

This is such a great piece about the importance of failure in creativity in general, but also very applicable to the writing process.

At the heart of the argument: day dreaming about creating a grand work gets nowhere - only by doing, redoing, refining, questioning, restarting, and continuing, does the creative process lead to success.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34775411

There are some great pieces to quote - I'll paste a couple here:

I agree with Droflet. I "thought" I was ready, until Chroners entered my reality. Day dreaming is where a lot of wonderful stories and books have evolved from. What brought them into reality is the hard work that followed. So, [IMO] it takes both to produce works of written art.

 

[Overread]

The older I've become the more I dislike the idea of failure and success in theory. They breed the concept that the world is a tick-box of yes/no of failing and passing. This works when you're on a good swing and its all "passing" but its terrible when you're on the down side and its all failing.

Instead I think that it has to be from two core areas;
1) Effort

2) Critique

Even these have their pitfalls; critique especially can be very defeating if you're too exacting; whilst at the same time it can also be hard to get the right kind and one has to spend time not just honing a skill, but also working out what is and isn't right - who do and who not to listen to and often within what contexts those people are good or bad for advice in.

Effort as well can be a pitfall if its effort without reward. We have all done and all know people who put huge amounts of effort into something to then not be rewarded at the end with the reward they/we feel is just. So alongside measuring critique we have to measure effort too and ensure that there are stages of reward. Finishing word-counts - page-counts - chapter-counts. These can all seem really simple but in themselves they are goals, they are targets, they are success that you can have upon putting in the required effort.
And of course effort will come with mistakes. Many mistakes; but continued effort with the critique alongside should improve upon those mistakes - it should build up and aim to overcome them and if you're taking reward not from the work itself but from the effort put in it shouldn't diminish the reward factor whilst writing. You're still, as a writer, getting that regular reward even if its tinged with some flaws - which you can then correct for more effort and more reward.

If you can remove the idea of failing and succeeding and instead focus upon the work itself I think that it might be easier, for some, to focus on the work rather than upon the reward or lack there of.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

It is good to make mistakes if we learn from them. If we are too wedded to them we may never get beyond repeating them again and again. Of course one reader's idea of a mistake may be another reader's idea of the best part of the book. But I think anytime we recognize a mistake in our own writing (whether the recognition came spontaneously or because someone pointed it out and we recognized the truth in what they said) then it proves that we have learned something, and that is the opposite of failure, though sometimes it may feel like it.

However, writing is different from other arts in one important way: we can practice it in our heads. Not just visualize it, but practice putting the words together. We may experiment with ideas, refine them, discard them, come up with new ones, rewrite scenes, sentences, and phrases, edit, edit, edit, without coming near to our computers, without employing pencil (or pen) and paper. So in that sense the quantity of our work that we can show to other people may not represent the quantity of work we have actually done. Daydreaming is also useful if it allows us to work out solutions to the problems we encounter in our writing. As writers, we may be constantly editing our own thoughts as we think them. Or planning out conversations. Or reworking those conversations after the fact. (Good practice for writing dialogue). Daydreaming is only a waste of time if we are always daydreaming about what it would be like to be a writer, rather than dreaming the story and the words we will use to tell it.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Is it the Chinese who have no word for failure? Just change.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Failure 失败
Change 昌

Of course Google isn't reliable

 

[Tim Murray]

It is good to make mistakes if we learn from them. If we are too wedded to them we may never get beyond repeating them again and again. Of course one reader's idea of a mistake may be another reader's idea of the best part of the book. But I think anytime we recognize a mistake in our own writing (whether the recognition came spontaneously or because someone pointed it out and we recognized the truth in what they said) then it proves that we have learned something, and that is the opposite of failure, though sometimes it may feel like it.

However, writing is different from other arts in one important way: we can practice it in our heads. Not just visualize it, but practice putting the words together. We may experiment with ideas, refine them, discard them, come up with new ones, rewrite scenes, sentences, and phrases, edit, edit, edit, without coming near to our computers, without employing pencil (or pen) and paper. So in that sense the quantity of our work that we can show to other people may not represent the quantity of work we have actually done. Daydreaming is also useful if it allows us to work out solutions to the problems we encounter in our writing. As writers, we may be constantly editing our own thoughts as we think them. Or planning out conversations. Or reworking those conversations after the fact. (Good practice for writing dialogue). Daydreaming is only a waste of time if we are always daydreaming about what it would be like to be a writer, rather than dreaming the story and the words we will use to tell it.

Greetings fellow Californian! What part of the state do you reside in? I'm north of Sacramento.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I'm south-west (sort of) of Sacramento.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

All I can say is that the ceramics teacher was damned lucky I wasn't in his class. I would have got fifty pounds of clay, shaped it into a roughly pot like thing, fired it, and taken the rest of the class off!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[The Bluestocking]

Failure 失败
Change 昌

Of course Google isn't reliable

The Chinese character/word for failure that Ray pulled up is more or less correct. It also means "defeat".

The word for change that Ray pulled up is incorrect. The exact Chinese character for change depends on context and usage:

http://cdict.net/q/change

 

[Tim Murray]

I'm south-west (sort of) of Sacramento.

Near my neck of the woods, sort of.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think it is important for writers not to view writing as an “art”, or perhaps not to view art as something that descends upon you as a result of divine grace. We have this false image of the artist as someone who thinks a bit, maybe a lot, and then produces near-perfection. It’s very easy to be “a writer” or in the process of writing a book, but the real work often isn’t in the writing itself but the editing and revision (which is one reason why I would be wary of most self-published books). Whenever I’ve spoken at writing events, it always seems to me that the difference between people who take it seriously and people who are just mucking about is how much they are willing to listen to criticism and improve what they’ve done, rather than to stumble on making the same mistakes.

Often, writing isn’t a process of inspiration. It’s more like carpentry. Your table might have the most finely-carved legs in the world, but until there’s a board going across the top of it, it’s not a working table. Sometimes, to proceed in the story, you just have to improvise, to accept that you’ll tidy up elements or even completely replace them later on, and keep going. I’ve met several people whose attempts to write ended when they came to the first break in the story – end of a chapter or scene – and then started to revise what they’d written. Because it was imperfect, they revised it and revised it and never got any further. This is like a snake eating its own tail.

I can only think of one person – Mozart – who was said not to correct anything, and Mozart was a genius. Beethoven certainly made a lot of corrections. For that matter, I once saw the first page of the draft version of 1984. There were so many crossings-out that it looked as if a bag of inky spiders had been dropped on the page and allowed to wander about.