the mess

I had a unique experience not too long ago: I came up with a song. 

I’m inclined to say God gave me a song, though I’m not exactly sure how that sort of thing works. I don’t really know where the song came from, I was just sitting there reading one morning and watching the sunrise then a bunch of words and a tune came into my mind.

I know, that’s hardly a unique experience as far as creative inspiration goes. Creative ideas come to people seemingly out of nowhere all the time. Perhaps every time it happens it is an act of God, or maybe that’s only the case sometimes and then the other times it’s just our creative minds working the way they should when inspiration hits. Either way, I wrote a song.

I’ve written lyrics before, even tunes, but never a whole song with chords. I decided it ought to be shared with someone other than my wife, so I texted our worship pastor, a guy who is a highly skilled and accomplished musician, and asked if he’d be willing to lend me a hand with it. He graciously said yes. That’s where the real story begins.

This is where I’m much less inclined to say the original song was entirely the product of divine handiwork. As I soon discovered, the song was a mess—an honest to goodness, downright mess.

Our worship pastor, being the kind soul he is, didn’t lay it out to me in those exact words, but the truth of the matter soon became clear enough.

There were plenty of good things about it, but it needed serious help. It had too many verses, the words in the chorus changed every time, including each of the five times it repeated at the end, and some of the lines were a bit…contrived.

He explained to me the difference between the singer/songwriter type songs and the popular ones that people tend to sing. Not that one was bad and the other good, but that I needed to understand what I was trying to make and the audience it was intended for. Then he explained what he perceived to be the main problem: I had made attempt after unsure attempt at finding the right words, rather than just choosing the best ones with confidence and settling on them. I hadn’t realized that’s what I was doing, but he was dead on.

So, we set to work reshaping it: a process I’d never participated in as far as music is concerned. Thanks in a large part to his guidance and in some part to my own creative input, we came out with something that still carried the same heart and soul of the original piece, but was much more succinct and powerful.

I won’t say a diamond came out of a rugged stone, but there was something quite amazing about the process and the resulting transformation—one we both were satisfied with.

My whole point in sharing this isn’t to tell you I wrote a song and that I’m happy with it (fun as that is to say), but that I don’t want you to miss that first crucial step of the creative process: make a mess.

You heard me right. The first thing you make will, most of the time, be very flawed. Maybe even ugly. Hopefully, you’ll love it all the same (it’s yours after all) and very possibly, you’ll be blind to its imperfections. But, if you share it with some people who know what they’re looking at and are honest with you, you’ll see the lack.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you don’t start with a mess to begin with, you won’t have anything to improve upon. If you don’t get advice from someone with experience, you won’t know how to make it better.

Clay comes out as a cold lump and a lot of sculpting has to happen before it looks like much of anything. The painting begins as splotches on a canvas and some painters take months of adding layer after layer of paint to get it just the way they want it. The first draft of a story is typically a terrible, unreadable thing.

This is all well and good. Don’t be afraid of the mess. It doesn’t mean you aren’t creative or skilled; this is the way everything must begin. But don’t leave it a mess.

As you practice at a craft, each new attempt you make will get better, but there will usually still be a need for polish, no matter how long you’ve been in the biz. Embrace it. Love the mess and enjoy the part where you (and perhaps someone else) get to work on forming it into something wonderful.

And remember, most people will only see the final product and have no idea what it looked like when it started or that it took fifty-two failed attempts to get there, unless you share that part. Whether or not God is the source of inspiration or the one working through refining process, I always find it miraculous to see a mess become a masterpiece, especially when I’m part of it. I wish the same for you.