Creative work is rarely kind enough to grant the oh-so satisfying feeling of unquestionable completion.
There is no right, there is no wrong. There’s just you and your ideas.
Compare that to an assembly task, one with a defined outcome. When assembling a kitchen table, if you end up with three legs, you screwed up. Oh well. At least there’s a known mistake to fix.
But what about assembling art? To be sure, what you create will be outcome-driven on some level. The essayist wants to clearly articulate a point, the painter wants to evoke a specific emotion.
The problem is intuition and feedback are all you have to measure the final outcome, and it’s difficult to accept them as absolute.
Why?
Tell me if you’re familiar with this scenario:
Ah, the creative cringe.
At a recent Help Scout retreat I actually witnessed it on someone’s face during a presentation. The feeling kicks in after you’ve been reminded of old output you had hoped was long forgotten. Oh lord, was I drunk when I made this? What was I thinking?
People who work on their craft naturally improve over time, so what’s the big deal with cringing at the past?
The problem is The Cringe™ sits in your gut, and it can slowly erode the confidence you have in what your gut tells you (if you let it). Moments of “certainty” soon become cause for doubt — you were formerly convinced that what ended up on the canvas was exactly what you wanted, but experience proved you wrong. You could have done better, if only you knew then what you know now.
You also received feedback from people at the time, and they told you it was good. Great, even. Now you hate it. Can you really trust what people say about your work?
Friend, you’ve got it all wrong.
The truth is you should only be worried when you don’t feel the cringe. That’s the calling card of overconfidence and a lack of improvement.
Take no issue with being proud of your old work. But if you look back and never have the slight urge to meddle, that’s a bad sign. Art is the most malleable work there is, and seeing constant tweaks to be made later on is the result of enhanced perception gained by experience.
There’s also no concern with wanting to burn your entire archive to the ground. You shouldn’t do it, but it’s okay to feel that way. “Load up the catapults,” you’ll say, “and let’s hurl this shit into a lake.” Your talents have grown, your taste has been refined, and you are your own worst critic. Of course the old looks worse than the new. It should.
If you think you’ll be able to outrun the creative cringe, think again—the only way to avoid it is to plateau. If you aren’t cringing, you aren’t improving.
Creating is something you can never do as well as it can be done. Make things anyway.
Hat tip to Hemingway On Writing for inspiring this post. I don’t have an editor for my personal writing, so if you see a mistake, email me. We’ll cringe together!
The post If You Aren’t Cringing, You Aren’t Improving appeared first on Sparring Mind.
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If You Aren’t Cringing, You Aren’t Improving
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