The Points of the Creative Artists’ Code: Twenty-one - Never throw your work away
June 6, 2008
It’s tempting to toss ideas that don’t seem to have any merit away. But they did have merit at one point in time. Our failures are the best place to learn and they have additional value, this short article is about recognizing that value.
Never, never, never throw away a good idea because it didn’t work out. Instead refine it, look into it, find out why it didn’t work. Now do it again. Sometimes you don’t have enough data on the subject to make it work. Get more. Sometimes you need to recreate it, again and again. In the end the persistence will pay off. Sometimes you need to write the rubbish before you can write the good stuff.
If you talk to any Creative Artist I have worked with you will find that I abjure them most soundly when they talk about losing material, or tossing stuff away, or if they relay to me some moroff’s* idea of tossing out their early work, or their bad work, or anything like that. Why?
Because when you make it, that work is going to be important and have the potential to do so much more. It will, in short, eventually achieve its value, and that value may not necessarily be what you think it would be, or should be, but that is not what is important.
What is important is that the work finds its value with those who have to know you through your successes and that the early works and the bad works provide insight into how you developed and what you developed.
The lessons to be learned from this material are immense, not perhaps to you, who has already learned those lessons, but to others. You see, as I have often said, for a Creative Artist it is not about them, it is about the work and it is about others (”It’s not about me, it’s about you”).
In every failed work are lessons to be learned. There really are. But you have to learn to look at your own work objectively and become what I refer to as “Your own best critic.” It’s a careful choice of words worthy of some consideration.
Also, in every failed work is an idea worth expressing, that has simply not been well-expressed, and which you must therefore seek to liberate in another way. If you do this, if you search in your failures then you will make discoveries that develop your craft and skill to levels that are not going to be realized if you are content simply to toss the work aside, or trash it. You have to do this to know the truth of what is being said.
Remember point zero. If it should be liberating to you to throw away the work of previous times, so that you may start anew and afresh, then you should do it. Just throw it into the neighbor’s backyard where it doesn’t get lost and hopefully will be valued.
Remember too, that all too often the value of an artist’s work is often discovered after they died. At that point, the work they created becomes valuable and finds its place, and it goes on to improve economies, national pride and other aspects of civilization that are all too often, in a materialist consumer-based society, overlooked. In a way, it’s the ultimate acknowledgment and the ultimate rip-off all in one package as the profits end up going to others who didn’t create the works, but only capitalized on them after death.
Personally, I think it’s great that works finally find their place, and I know that artists can be ahead of their time and thus be unappreciated, unknown and ill-used in the society they service and contribute to while it chooses “to remain ignorant.” I do not however, agree that it is morally correct that such artists end up dead and go unrewarded, and un-supported in life. I think we can do it better.
[*moroff, a term coined by NDK which describes those whose intellectual faculties are 'more off' than on.]
Email this article to a friend - or a nemesis, it doesn't bother us.
Subscribe now to receive notification of new Free Articulator articles like this one.
Comments
Got something to say?