When I was younger, libraries and bookstores made me melancholy. Every time I entered a bright roomful of books, a sinister little voice told me, “Here are at least ten million ideas that smarter, sexier people beat you to. What’s the point?”
You too may have experienced this melancholy. And after years of writing and persisting despite my doubts, I have good news for you: there is still room on those thousands of bookshelves for your ideas. Why? Because there is only one of you in all time and eternity. One person who has your thoughts, your experiences, your perspective. That’s the good news.
The bad news — which is actually more good news in disguise — is that your ideas and your thoughts don’t deserve attention just for existing. If you want your ideas and your creations to be meaningful and memorable to others, they must be rich and full of life. Clear and distinct. And this doesn’t happen after a few days, months, or even years. It requires you to work hard to see what’s going on inside you and feed your mind new thoughts and information to make those ideas richer.
The path to creating something that others will love and value is the same path to understanding who you are and what you value. You already have the raw materials: yourself. Now you just need to begin.
You are a bottomless fountain
“We are all walking repositories of buried treasure,” says author Elizabeth Gilbert, 1 and I agree with her. Some of your thoughts and memories are “top of mind.” Others are buried deeper. All are fodder for your personal growth and anything you decide to create.
An analogy I like even better than buried treasure is that of a pearl in an oyster. Pearls have very humble beginnings: a grain of sand or an unwelcome parasite makes its way into the oyster, and the oyster secretes nacre to protect itself. As a result, something tiny and mildly irritating grows into something polished and beautiful. Some of the best human creations in existence came about because someone was frustrated. Don’t underestimate the power of responding to an annoying, unanswered question.
But perhaps the most powerful and accurate analogy of all is moving water – a river, or a fountain – because our minds are truly in flux with endless potential. Here is how author and writing teacher Brenda Ueland describes it:
“No human being, as long as he is living can be exhausted of his [and her] ever changing, ever moving river of ideas. We are so apt to think of ourselves as a stomach with arms and legs and a skein of nerves in the skull, which sometimes, when we have plenty of sleep and some hot coffee, seems to give off a few ideas.
“But to write happily and with self-trust you must discover what there is in you, this bottomless fountain of imagination and knowledge.” 2
There’s a keyword in Ueland’s final sentence: self-trust. This is why bookstores and libraries made me melancholy for so long. I didn’t trust that my ideas and talent were good enough. I didn’t have much experience. Creative work is overwhelming in the beginning when all we have is a messy blueprint. But as you stick with the work, the anxiety will ebb, and the ideas will flow.
The hardest part is not giving up at the beginning. If you can soldier through that, miracles will follow.
“Keep the channel open” and get to work
Ideas rarely come fully formed like the goddess Athena popping out of Zeus’s head. They’re more like tiny embryos that become babies and eventually full-grown organisms.
Embryos by themselves aren’t special or impressive. If we feel like imposters at the beginning of our creative journeys, it’s because we are, in a way: there are no results behind us yet. This is why it’s so important that you never quit or give up on a creative effort you care about. It doesn’t matter how shoddy you think it is; the pearl won’t appear until after you’ve spent time rubbing the sand and grit. And most people give up. They’re focused more on external rewards or validation than they are on the personal growth that comes from the ideas and the work itself. They have no self-trust.
The choreographer Agnes de Mil, lacking self-trust and feeling overwhelmed, went to a fellow choreographer for advice. This colleague happened to be Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance, and this was her advice to de Mil:
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” 3
Don’t get distracted by what you think of what you’re doing or what others think of it, Graham is saying. For goodness sake, you don’t even have to believe in yourself! Just focus on the process of noticing ideas and responding to them. See where they go. Keep the channel open.
Ideas don’t come unless you create the conditions for them. Ideas are like shy animals in the woods that approach slowly at first and return more frequently after you’ve left out food or salt. Ideas have to be fed so they can grow and lead you to more ideas, until you have enough ideas to put together something of substance and value.
This is not easy work. Your inner critic has a field trip when you’re starting out, and it never truly goes away. Outer critics – whether well-meaning family or Internet trolls – add to the angst. But the biggest enemy of ideas and creative growth is not the criticism of others or even our own. The biggest enemy is distraction.
Daily constant distractions squash and scare away our ideas and creative exploration just like loud noises scare away shy woodland animals. The biggest culprits are digital: social media, news, clickbait, and the endless bottomless “feed” of noise and froth. A lifetime buried in this stuff is the surest way to stop you from developing an original perspective or system of thought. The louder and more negative the distractions are, the harder it is for us to separate our reactions from who we are and who we want to be.
The antidote is solitude. This doesn’t mean climbing a mountain or even going for a walk (although the outdoors have plenty of benefits). It’s in those quiet “in-between” moments of looking out a window or doing the dishes without music to numb the boredom that our ideas rise to the surface, and we start making connections between them. As we start noticing and writing down our ideas, more will come, leading to a virtuous cycle in which we’ve gathered and collected a beautiful tapestry. But unlike butterflies pinned to a board, these ideas continue to move and extend in all directions indefinitely, and we’ll realize, as Ueland did, that we are truly “bottomless fountains.”
Ueland concludes:
“[E]verybody in the world has the same conviction of inner importance, fire, of the god within. The tragedy is that either they stifle their fire by not believing in it and using it; or they try to prove to the world and themselves that they have it, not inwardly and greatly, but externally and egotistically, by some second-rate thing like money or power or more publicity.
“Therefore all should work. First because it is impossible that you have no creative gift. Second: the only way to make it live and increase it is to use it. Third: you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift.”
This is a wonderful challenge. Ueland is right; how do you know you won’t do something amazing if you don’t start putting in the work? The Catch-22 is you must not expect to be amazing. You must keep the channel open, as Graham advised de Mil, and follow your ideas and your impulses wherever they lead. There will be a lot of sifting through dirt to find gold. There will be a lot of sand and grit before you get to a pearl. The process itself is its own reward. It’s honest, hard work that makes you alive and interesting to yourself and to others.
Sometimes I still feel that foreboding melancholy when I enter a bookstore. Who am I to write a book or even a two-page essay when there are millions of others doing the same thing? Then I remember that there’s no one else who’s had the same configuration of ideas, thoughts, and life experiences I’ve had. The same is true for you.
You are responsible for the care and feeding of your ideas. Nurture them so they grow into something worth creating and sharing. Keep the channel open, no matter how unsure you feel. And get to work.
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