The Art of Function: Making Your Idea Real

I’ll begin with the truth: I’ve had an exhilarating and crushing last few weeks on the creative front.

In my other life, I am an aspiring novelist. Or rather, I’m caught somewhere between a person who writes secret stories and an author. And it hasn’t escaped me how creativity, its gifts and trappings, follow me from creative writing into creative copywriting and brand archetype work I do for entrepreneurs. And how it follows anyone who wants to make something.

Grappling with the difficulty of creativity has led me to ask certain questions like:

At what point has something been created? Like, for real?

Where does resistance come from and how can we overcome it?

How can we transform past regrets into future action, breaking the cycle of never-quite-real ideas?

Have you ever had one of those moments, during a quiet moment, on a Tuesday afternoon, for example, when you suddenly see the events in your life so starkly and clearly that your brain freezes in its deeply-rutted tracks?

This happened to me a couple of months ago.

With a cup of tea suspended halfway to my mouth one chilly afternoon, I realized that four things have happened in my life, in the following order.

1. In 2017 (what an embarrassing year to type, it feels like a thousand years ago), I wrote the first draft of a novel. An honest-to-god, 70,000-word, entertaining, deep, and nuanced novel.Then life happened, I started my business, and I never got around to refining it. I banished it to a folder titled after the book itself: “Obstacles On The Road To Perfection”. And no, the irony that the title of the book became a literal obstacle on my road to perfection does not escape me.
2. A few years ago, I started work as a ghostwriter, which means I help write people’s nonfiction books at whatever stage they’re at, without taking credit. So there are published books on shelves that I wrote, but don’t bear my name.
3. This year, I started a new novel. Reviewing Obstacles felt like a non-starter, and I loved this new idea I had. Oh, the words flowed. I’m in a small writing group, which has allowed me to share the unfiltered chapters as they come out. My dear friend, who is a member of this group (he was there when I wrote Obstacles a hundred years ago) presented a challenge: if I refined and shared my whole Obstacles manuscript with the group, he would do the same for a book he had drafted and also put into a drawer.
4. This brings us to the fourth event, which made all these events fall into place in a rather sickening fashion.Eight weeks ago, I found myself reviewing Obstacles on the Road to Perfection. I had warned my group in advance that it was probably pretty rough. Some of the characters had to change, for sure. There were massive gaps in the plot. I was convinced I hadn’t even finished it – hadn’t thought of an ending.

What caused this regret, you might ask? It was that the editing process was effortless. A missing period here, a misspelled “too” there. That’s all that was required to finish it.

In other words, I had been 99% of the way to finishing the damn thing, and now I have to face the fact that I had stoppedright before it was done. If I had taken the next difficult step, I could have published a book when I was 27.

Imagine the strength of my own resistance in that moment. 1% of me, just my baby finger, holding back a raging 99% of a completed novel. It turns out the last mile (or meter) is truly the hardest.

But I did, I stopped. And that is immensely painful to come to grips with.

I write thematically, in alignment with archetypes, and this month is Universal. It has direct archetypal tension with the Creator archetype, so you could say that I’m writing about the exact opposite of what I set out to do. But I don’t think it is.

Creator is inspiration. It’s imagination. It’s having a vision. It’s the ability to start, to flow, to be inside the chaos of creation and allow yourself to spill your ideations all over the place in a jumble. In Creator, we get to be excited and set ourselves on fire with all the ideas. In this space, we have the ability to start businesses, fuelled by possibility. We make flow charts and projections. We write and draw feverishly. We dream. We schedule out how it’s all going to work. We have the ability to pour out a whole novel in this space.

But that’s not the problem with this story, is it? I wrote the novel. It’s not the problem we have as business owners, either. We have businesses, don’t we? 

Ideas are powerful aphrodisiacs. We can fall in love with them and get carried away into the night – but what if they never become real? What if our deepest, best ideas only exist in files and documents, in our minds and hearts, in a perpetual planning stage where we prod and poke at them occasionally, wondering why they still aren’t working?

I think this is what happens. Perfectionism and resistance only show up when we reach a particular fork in the road. One road is marked with a sign that says “The Real World” and it’s the only way forward.

The other road is simply an endless flat jogging loop with a sign that says, “Or Maybe It Needs More Work”. We see it every time we go around for another pass.

And that’s the problem.

And this is where Universal comes in.

I want to briefly review where I’ve arrived with the three questions I posed in the beginning of this article. I hope they bring you awareness, strength, and inspiration. Here they are:

At what point has something been created? Like, for real?

This is a tough question, and my answer for it, although it pains me to share, is also tough. I’ve done so many backbends and posed “create for creation’s sake” arguments to myself to avoid this answer. But I keep coming back to it. Here it is.

It’s real when you can have an engaging dialogue about it with other people. When other people see it, and use it, and reflect back to you their experiences with it.

I can already hear the creators protesting from the depths of their souls, and I hear you. Honestly, if you love to write and are satisfied with never sharing it with anyone (I am this way about journalling), or you’re a musician and you find the deepest satisfaction playing for yourself alone under the moonlight (that is the way I feel about music!), or you’re an artist and all your best work is stored in a closet, I truly accept and honour that. Keep it for yourself. It means it is sacred, personal, and enough as it is.

For others, and I am (fortunately or unfortunately) among you, there is a deep and undeniable part of me that wants others to engage with my writing. To talk about it. To share it. To recommend it. To revel in it. To know this part of me. This part of me that cares a lot.

Universal is about functionality and other people, and that’s what we’re talking about. Connection, engagement, and expansion are on the other side of perfectionism, if you want it.

For people to engage with your creation, it means recognizing the creation is bigger than you. It’s for you, and it’s also for an audience who really wants to love it. You absolutely require a dialogue with others in order to make your creation the best it can be, whether that is a novel, or a business idea, or an experience, or music, or whatever.

Holding back or waiting until it’s perfect means doing yourself, your creation, and your audience an injustice.

So where does resistance come from and how can we overcome it?

Resistance comes from caring.

I think it’s that simple. The care and protectiveness we feel over not only just our creation, but ourselves, is immense. And it becomes more powerful the better the creation. The more potent and real and beautiful it is.

When I ghostwrite, I care a lot about my clients. I want their voices to be heard through my writing. But it’s not my voice. This is how I’ve been able to “publish” books without my name on them. The stakes aren’t as high. 

Seeing resistance this way has softened me towards it – I no longer wish to pummel it into the ground, but instead calmly press on, knowing how much I care.

This is the same for you. It means that the thing you are resisting finishing and sharing is great. In fact, your level of resistance and hesitation and procrastination is not about how ready the thing is. It’s about how much you care about it. And caring is a good thing. Without care, we miscreate, throwing things into the world that we care less about to feel like we’re doing something. So somehow, we must find a way to move forward honouring our deep caring and our desire to connect and share.

There is always risk with creation, and there is no escaping that risk, unless you want to jog endlessly around the “Or Maybe It Needs More Work” circuit and tell yourself you’re moving forward. The consequences of that, as I’ve learned so recently, are hard.

What you can do, and the value of this is immeasurable, is to find people who may get it, who are cheerleaders, who are true to their words, and test it out on them. Don’t immediately send your novel to Uncle Randy who doesn’t read fiction. Don’t share your new invention with your roommate who has no idea what you do for a living.

Some people won’t get it, and rather than saying “that’s ok”, because it doesn’t feel ok, instead I’ll say: keep doing it anyways. This is a muscle you can strengthen, one that allows you be more yourself without worrying about standing out.

And remember, sharing is not just telling people about it. 

Take it from someone who has learned this lesson the hard way. Truly sharing my novel means sending it to people with a list of questions and a desire for feedback to make it better. It means sending it to agents who may reject me endlessly. It doesn’t mean telling people who love me that I’ve written a novel. Sometimes telling people can feel like you’re taking action, when really you’re seeking affirmation as you jog around your circuit.

The same goes for business. Sharing your business idea for real means inviting people to engage with your creation or your process and asking them honest questions about it – questions that may have answers that are hard. This is the dialogue. Telling people about your idea can make you feel really good when they say they think it sounds great, but it’s not the same thing as making it real.

How can we transform past regrets into future action, breaking the cycle of never-quite-real ideas?

When I sat there two months ago, with my tea halfway to my mouth, realizing how masterfully I had shut down my opportunity to complete, share, and publish Obstacles six YEARS ago, whoof. It was a moment. A true face-palm situation.

But my first thought was powerful: Never again.

Never again will I put up with my creative fears and shenanigans when it comes to something I’ve created – something I care about, something with promise.

I will not stuff it away in a folder. I will stand in the discomfort of my excuses and see them for what they are. I will stand in the beauty and fear of how much I care, and move forward from there.

And I will practice relentless self-love, because that is the only thing that will see me through the tough practice of sharing my creations with the world and taking real action. I will give myself the nutrients, rest, love, and laughter I need to continue the journey.

I absolutely refuse to look back in another six years and see that I now have two, not one, novels that were never shared with the world. I feel the thrill of terror as I write this, because now I feel like I need to follow through, and I don’t really know what that means. Not yet.

Creation is never comfortable. However, it’s more important to be terrified and do it anyway, than not do it all.