When Trying Too Hard Gets in the Way

As a child, I loved the Beverly Cleary Books about 4 year old Ramona Quimby and her older sister Beezus. I enjoyed Ramona’s eccentric behaviour, her wild ideas and  her imaginary pet lizard Ralph. However, the character I really related to was 9 year old Beezus, Ramona’s sensible older sister.

While Ramona had a huge imagination and few inhibitions, Beezus was quite the opposite. She wanted things to be done well, she liked to follow the rules, and she frequently got upset that Ramona didn’t behave in the way that her older sister considered proper.

The story that has stayed with me in the almost four decades since I first read Beezus and Ramona was the chapter entitled Beezus and her Imagination, in which the two girls paint together in Beezus’s afternoon art class.

The assignment was to paint an imaginary animal, and Beezus immediately struggled. As she tried to force herself to come up with something suitable, she found the painting harder and harder, eventually exclaiming “I just don’t have imagination,”

The art teacher’s response of “I think your trouble is that you work too hard. You don't have to be so neat,” was initially reassuring, but did nothing to help Beezus paint the winged horse she had her heart set on. She was so focussed on her belief that her lack of imagination was the problem that she couldn’t allow herself to let go and have fun.

In the end, Beezus was able to paint a dragon with lollipops down its back and to have fun doing it. She let go of the idea that because she wasn’t like Ramona, she didn’t have any imagination, and she let go of having to be perfect.

I felt exactly like Beezus when I picked up a paintbrush to create. I wanted there to be rules to follow and a clear set of instructions that would lead me to getting the image I had in my head onto the page. And I was always disappointed.

I decided in my early teens that I was not good at drawing and that was that. I moved on to colouring books and painting by numbers and I didn’t pick up a pencil to try to draw anything again until I was in my late thirties! 

My limiting belief caused me to miss out on many years of enjoyment. If I had kept on drawing I would have inevitably got better, but I didn’t see it like that. I worked so hard that I stopped having fun, I wasn’t enjoying the process and I wasn’t able to create the things I wanted to, so I completely stopped.

I have heard similar stories from aspiring writers. They have read widely and well, consuming literary fiction and the classics, and when they try to tell their own story it all feels so inadequate. They agonise over the right choice of words, the sentence structure or the type of narrative voice until they are so convinced of their own lack of ability that they give up. They held their writing so tightly that they choked the life out of it.

So how can you learn to let go and be free with your art? 

Focus on the process rather than the outcome

Stop thinking about the end product, whether it's the beautifully crafted award nominated novel you know is inside you, or the giant mural of a frog you can envisage on your child’s bedroom wall. 

The beauty of a creative project is that it takes on its own life, it becomes real, and as such doesn’t always resemble what you started out to create. Characters lift themselves off the page and start doing their own thing, paintings evolve as you work on them. And most painting techniques work better when you go with the flow and don’t grip your brush for grim death anyway!

Instead of trying to get everything perfect, concentrate on the process of creating. Write regularly even if the words aren’t the best. Make it a point to pick up your pencils every day, even if it is just to practise different strokes on some scrap paper. Take the practical steps of your craft frequently and see how this takes your work in a new direction.

Now obviously this isn’t acceptable if you are a copywriter working on a client’s brief  or you’ve been commissioned to make an owl brooch and instead send out a statue of a dragon. For your own creative projects though, it is often the best way to lighten up and enjoy what you are doing. It helps prevent blocks and allows your work to flow and it helps you to find your own style.

Detach from your expectations

Similar to the above, practise letting go of your preconceived ideas about what you are creating. If you believe that the only sort of book worth writing is a Booker nominated instant classic, you will end up killing any other ideas that may fit you better at the time. 

It’s a good idea to have some sense of what you want to be doing, but a rigid insistence on sticking to a specific plan doesn’t help either the creative flow or the development of your own style.

In wood carving, you can plan a design, but if you encounter a knot in the wood you will have to make adjustments to work around it. You can’t just force your way through. The end result will be guided by the wood and not just your initial ideas.

For a while I was quite fixated on writing a specific type of romance. I had begun to find the whole process difficult and it wasn’t until I tried a different genre that I was able to get into the zone and get the words out again. I was so intent on writing love stories that I couldn’t write anything. As soon as I dropped the expectation of the perfect hero and the beautiful romance, I was able to find it again in a slightly different form.

Stop following “the rules”

If you are trying to write anything, from a novel to a blog post, stop feeding your writing into one of those online style and grammar sites. Who cares if you have a high Gunning Fog index or that you have used too many adverbs?  So what if some of your sentences are too long or that you have a dangling modifier!

When you have finished a first draft and read it through, you can worry about these things. If you even think they still  matter. Getting bogged down in this aspect of language early on will stop you getting your story out at all. It will do little but provide you with “evidence” that you are a bad writer, which you almost certainly aren’t.

Visualise how you will feel rather than what you will achieve

Visualisation is an important part of successfully completing any project. Knowing what you want to do and picturing yourself achieving it is a huge part of changing your mindset and seeing something through to the end. 

However, if you are struggling with creating anything at all, then start visualising your goal in a new way. How do you feel when you are in the zone and expressing yourself easily? If you don’t know then consider how you think you will feel. What will you see, hear and feel when everything is flowing perfectly? Involve all your senses and fully immerse yourself in your visualisation. The more clearly you can visualise this, the easier it will be to tell when you are cutting off these feelings by Trying Too Hard.

If you feel that the harder you work at creating something, the harder it becomes, you aren’t alone. When people are really good at something, they make it look effortless. That does not mean that it feels effortless while they are doing it! 

Writing, drawing, carving, sculpting or any other artistic endeavour are skills that are learned and perfected through practice. It is natural to struggle from time to time. Forcing yourself to work harder is never the way to get better at something. 

Look for the signs that you are cutting off your creative flow by trying too hard and let yourself relax. If you keep on working on the same thing consistently you will get better. Your words will start to flow again, your brush will feel smoother and your mind will be lighter. And that’s when your imagination and talent will begin to shine.

Love,

Cat.