5 Tips to Getting Messy With Creativity

5 Tips to Getting Messy with Creativity

When we think about creative work, we often think about the end result: the beautiful painting, the well-crafted story, the catchy tune. But there is a lot of messiness in the process of any creative work. Creativity requires trial and error, a lot of it. Eventually, with a little faith, clarity comes out of the mess. But you need to be comfortable in the mess before you can find your way.

My daughter loves to paint. When she was younger, I’d get her a clean palette with six wells and fill each one with color: a blue, a red, a yellow, a purple, a white, a brown. She’d starts her art project by dipping her brush into each well, putting the blue in the red, the yellow in the purple, the brown in the red. The messiness of it always made me cringe. Then the paint went onto paper in strokes, until it's filled with strokes of different tones and hues.

I approach a creative project much the same way as a young artist. My work notebook is filled with messy diagrams, notes, random thoughts. None of it makes sense. But eventually something cohesive starts to emerge: a training presentation, a thoughtful talk, a blog post. When I write, the piece starts with fragments of sentences, broad character sketches in my mind, and anecdotes. After I toil and experiment, have others read my work, revise and revise again, I eventually find my way to a story.

Since messiness is essential to the creative process, I thought I'd share some of the lessons I use in my own work to make sense of all the mess.

1. Creativity requires constant doing. Sometimes creative ideas just sit stuck in our heads. While they need time to percolate and bubble, ultimately, it's best to get them out and work on them. In a TED talk, Tom Wujec talks about a marshmallow challenge he uses in team-building exercises. Everyone is given twenty sticks of spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of tape, and a marshmallow. Teams of four need to build a structure using the items, with one stipulation: the marshmallow needs to be on top. Most structures fall because teams wait until the last moment to add the heavy marshmallow. Surprisingly, the group that consistently does well is sixth graders, because they spend more time prototyping and experimenting than planning and pontificating. It's messy to keep "doing," and it can mean failing many times. But doing means getting better and better until you finally succeed.

2. Be messy with someone else. Getting feedback from others on creative work is important in any creative process. Every writer knows that if they intend to share their work with an audience, it must resonate with readers. I've belonged to several different writers' groups over the last few decades, and I've taken many classes where critique is part of the curriculum. Getting feedback from others is a great way to see if your work makes sense and accomplishes its goal, whether that's touching someone emotionally or moving them to action. I'm currently working on a novel about my family, and I gave the manuscript to my sister to read. Her feedback will make the book stronger and more appealing to readers like her.

3. Look to unlikely inspiration. The musician and producer Brian Eno used a technique called Oblique Strategies during studio sessions with musicians like David Bowie and David Byrne: a deck of cards he wrote with prompts meant to get musicians thinking about a musical challenge differently. He'd pull a card with a prompt like "remember those quiet evenings," "imagine the music as a moving chain or a caterpillar," or "plot a graph of the piece." In a sense, the goal is to add messiness to an already messy creative process. Incorporating unlikely inspiration into your creative process may be messy, but it may lead to better results. If it worked for Bowie, it could work for you.

4. Give yourself space to be creative. A few years ago, I ran a marketing training workshop. Four teams worked on four different marketing challenges in a large space, each with access to easel pads, Post-its, and markers to jot down their thoughts. For each lesson, I gave an exercise that brought it to life. By the end of the day, we'd amassed a sizable mess on the tables, and the walls were filled with large Post-it papers. Whether you're a writer, artist, musician, or even a marketer, you need a dedicated space to create. Even if it's a small corner of a room, find a space you can claim for your creative pursuits. Fill it with your paintbrushes, notebooks, and instruments. If you work in an office, claim a room for your project team. Creativity requires space, so find yours and claim it.

5. Find a way to organize your messy thoughts. I have a notebook I use for writing, for talks and another for workshops. They hold all my messy thoughts. I make notes and go back to them from time to time, outline, then jump into writing a piece, creating a talk or developing a workshop. It seems to work for me. When I worked on my first full-length play, I found it hard to keep plot points straight in my head while revising, so I went in search of a new system. I read that some writers use index cards to outline the major plot points of a story. I tried it, but found myself getting lost in all the cards. Then I discovered a tool called a beat sheet, which outlines each beat, an action that moves the story forward. I still rely on this tool to organize my messy thoughts - from writing to creating presentations. In short, experiment with different organizing tools and find the one that works best for you.

Creativity is a messy activity. You might even call it a messy sport. If you want to be a mediocre player, play the game timidly. If you want to be a great player, you must get messy. You might get bruised, even injured. But with each play, each goal, each game, you'll get better and better.