Do you have trouble sticking to things long enough to finish them? Or perhaps, your project is not turning out the way you hoped, so you abandon it?
There’s this feeling of, “This sucks. Clearly I’m no good at this. I give up.”
That is the feeling — and the trap — of what I’ve dubbed the “messy middle.”
We all know the exhilaration of starting something new. Woo hoo! Everything is possible! A clean slate!
Sometimes (less often) we even manage to reach the triumph of completion.
But it’s that vast wasteland in between the exciting beginning and the satisfying finish where we tend to lose our way. It’s the second act of the screenplay, where you know how you want it to end but are floundering trying to get there. It’s the thrilling business idea that loses its thrill when you discover that people are not automatically lining up to buy what you’re selling, and you feel like a failure.
For me, my most recent “messy middle” experience happened in oil painting class.
Now this is an activity I planned as a creative play date for myself. I figured, a once-a-week block of time in the studio would be a super-relaxing treat.
Except this time, it was not. There’s no frustration quite like working on a painting for hours and realizing it looks like a pile of mud. I looked around at the other students’s work. We were all painting the same coastal landscape. Mine was decidedly less attractive.
My first impulse was to simply give up and start another painting. What was the point of continuing, when it looked so awful? But, I reasoned, a feature of oil painting is that it lets you keep on adding and changing things. And I was at least enjoying mixing the colors and being with the class. I could call this picture a failure, but why not just keep experimenting and see what happened?
So I did… and a small miracle happened. I had fun. I tried brushes and colors I wouldn’t have if I were attempting to be perfect. I relaxed and breathed.
And the painting? It eventually turned out to be one of my best. The whole class and the instructor loved it.
For me the biggest triumph was facing the messy middle of the process, and not quitting.
When I thought about it, I realized everything in life has a messy middle. It’s after the honeymoon when you get down to the reality of being married. It’s the agony of working on your golf swing over and over when it seems like someone legally blind could hit the ball straighter than you. It’s the novel, the thesis, the symphony, the invention that at some point in the process looks like total crap. It’s the soup in the cocoon before it emerges as a butterfly.
So, how do you get through your messy middle and get to reap the reward?
Here are a few tips:
- Recognize it’s NOT YOU. It’s just the nature of the process. Everything has a messy middle stage. Too often, creative people assume it’s our own lack of talent or skill that’s causing a project to look so awful halfway through. That’s why we give up — it seems futile, and why punish ourselves with repeated reminders of how much we suck?
- Treat everything like an experiment. Trick yourself into a state of curiosity rather than judgment. “I wonder what would happen if the hero took up skateboarding?” “I wonder how orange would look here instead of blue?” “Why don’t I try making this offer and see how it goes?” BONUS: besides keeping you in action while reducing stress, this approach also yields more creative thinking.
- See yourself as a warrior. In his excellent book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield pictures Resistance as a monster that a creative person needs to do battle with every day. The Messy Middle is one of Resistance’s tactics to get you to give up. Don’t let him win! Kick him in the nuts instead.
- Reward yourself for taking action, not for the result. You get the most points for doing what you can do to keep going through the Messy Middle. How it turns out is often not 100% your control and it’s almost beside the point. Obviously, we all prefer mad success, but even when you succeed, you discover that your proudest victory is the one you win over yourself. Plus, you’ll almost certainly get something out of the process regardless of the outcome. One of my friends, who doesn’t believe in failure, likes to say, “I win, or I learn.”
If we can’t avoid the Messy Middle, why not embrace it, or at least expect it? As poet Robert Frost once said, “The best way out is always through.” (I’ll bet he travelled a few roads with messy middles.)
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Next time you feel like giving up halfway through, keep going just for the heck of it, and watch what happens. Have you ever done this? What happened? Share in the comments!
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I have a multitude of interests but crippling perfectionism. I have mostly focused on writing but pushed myself so hard and so long that it ceased to be fun. Have spent next to no time drawing and painting over the years and 2018 is the year I decided that should all change.
I would say my key approach to 2018 is viewing my drawing and painting efforts as a grand experiment. But it’s NOT easy. It’s so easy to start work on a drawing (and for me, even worse, painting) and begin to self-criticize. Even though I know perfectionism is only harmful, not helpful to the creative process, it’s a hard habit to break. But I have at least taken some baby steps with my experimenting this year, particularly in drawing.