The Blessing & the Curse of being a Creative Visionary
Do you have a perfectionist streak? A hyper-critical eye with which you judge everything you create? Clearly there is nothing wrong with reviewing and / or editing your creations. But if that tendency regularly prevents you from completing or sharing your work, you’re not alone.
Creative people are visionaries. That might sound like an old-fashioned expression but it is absolutely true. You have an idea for a story and the over-arching shape and lot-lines form in your mind before you’ve even opened your computer or put pen to paper. You’re an entrepreneur and a new product idea appears in your mind, fully formed, while you’re in the shower. You are training to be a chef and even though you are still learning your techniques and skills in the heat of the kitchen, somewhere in your mind’s eye you can picture the restaurant you’re going to own one day.
Unfortunately the visionary’s extraordinary imagination can be a double-edged sword. Along with what can sometimes be an incredibly detailed idea, many creative people envisage their creation in its purest, absolutely perfect form. At least some of the time, what they experience is real inspiration - a flash, within which lies the perfect essence of their creation. They see very clearly the ideal to which they aspire.
And therein lies the problem…
Often the creative process, by its very nature, involves numerous steps, often incremental and sometimes even backwards. What you are working to bring into being might never actually reach the ideal you’ve envisaged, at least, not for some time. How on earth do you persevere? How do you keep on working, all the while battling the feeling that what you are creating simply isn’t good enough?
Some thoughts of what to do:
First and foremost one needs to understand that one’s vision might be an ‘ideal’. It is something to aspire to, to work towards, to hold up as a thing of beauty. It might not be attainable in its perfect form. At the least it might take quite a long time before your creation reaches a level of attainment with which you are happy.
Be willing to share your creations, preferably with people who you know will be kind in their criticism. Seek feedback even if it is uncomfortable at times. There will also undoubtedly be encouragement.
Be willing too to let go of initial drafts and ‘working models’ if they simply don’t hold together. What you learn and gain from the creative process you’re going through will feed into subsequent editions of your work.
Most of all, do what you can to build your emotional resilience. If you have been blessed with the experience of having a ‘creative vision’ bringing that vision to fruition is likely to take quite some time. You are unlikely to be able to maintain objective distance all the time. You may receive challenging feedback. This is going to be painful when what you have built has something of your heart within it. If you are will though to experience the dissonance of the mis-match between what you’ve envisaged and what you build during the creative process, then slowly but surely you will also build your craft. And with that skill you will eventually find yourself approaching the ideal you have pictured oh so clearly.
