On Discovery, Freedom, and Being a Creative Control Freak

When I was thirteen years old, my mother enrolled me in an after-school art class where we were each assigned a painting to recreate. Mine was Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by the 17^th century Dutchman Johannes Vermeer. It was love at first sight.

There was something mysterious and familiar in her lowered gaze, her ghostly reflection in the glass. Being thirteen, I was not only full of wonder but also foolish faith that I could recreate the same exact mystery, or close to it, on my own blank canvas.

In pencil I drew a grid and outlined where each item in the painting should go. I ruler-lined the window, made sure proportions were correct. So it was baffling to me how I could have failed so utterly, in the end, when I placed my painting against Vermeer’s. 

Mostly I blamed my limited talents; partly I blamed the oil paints.  I preferred drawing with pencil or maybe a hard, thin charcoal.  I had done some good things with scratchboard, my vice-like grip on the Exacto knife preventing any errant mistakes.

Looking back, I think my success in scratchboard was due to the fact that I was a bit of a control freak. You wouldn’t think so from looking at my writing desk today, a mess of dried-out pens and paperclips. Yet I recognise the controlling tendency in myself whenever I sit down to write the first draft of a novel, the impulse to stay ten steps ahead of my characters at all times.

As a college student, I didn’t know how to rein in that tendency. I remember discussing one of my stories with my workshop professor; it was a tightly plotted mystery with a twist ending that had gone over well with my classmates. During that meeting, my professor gave me the sort of advice that, upon closer inspection, could extend across all aspects of life:

Loosen up.

She could see the effort I had put into designing the plot, dropping hints and red herrings.  She could detect a steely control in the writing, and my role in it as the grand and all-knowing architect.  When I look back at my writing notebook from that time, I see five-point plans for short stories whose plot points I detailed before ever setting down a line.  Nothing wrong with that, my professor said. But try another way. Try letting the story discover itself.

To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with planning out a story or a novel. But in my case, those painstaking plans were a way of avoiding mistake or failure. Thinking back on this, I’m reminded of what the critic Joan Acocella called a moment of courage:

'[Young writers] imitate their elders, and not admiringly, but grudgingly, in the spirit of “I can do it, too.” In fact, they can’t do it, because they don’t really believe in it, but neither can they do what they’re meant to do, because the moment of courage has not yet come.'

I bore no grudges, but that can-do-too spirit is familiar enough. Nowadays, before embarking on a novel, I do my share of thinking and mapping and spreadsheeting. But I also understand that much of this preparation is, in part, a way of tricking myself into believing that the work will get done. Once inside the writing, I allow those guardrails to dissolve. I allow myself the freedom to take wrong turns.

Sometimes you have to take the wrong turn to recognise which is the right one. Taking no turn at all, out of fear, is the only bad outcome. And the detours themselves can lead to unexpected delights.