As multi-talented people, we don’t just have a Plan B. We have enough interests, talents and ideas to have all the way to Plan H or Plan R. I’m used to keeping my options open, having lots of irons in the fire and lots of dogs in the race. I’ve got lots of feathers in my cap and strings to my bow. This multiplicity obviously makes me more creative, right?
Apparently not. Evidently, having a lot of paths open can not only paralyze you at the crossroads, but leaves you parched for creative juice in the projects you actually do.
My revelation came last week during a class on writing TV pilots by Ellen Sandler, who wrote a lot of great episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. I had signed up just to learn some general tips about how pilots are written and sold. I felt unprepared when Ellen asked us to bring our idea for an original pilot to class.
Once we got there, she hit us with a barrage of questions. Was our idea for a drama or a comedy? If a comedy, what kind of comedy? A family comedy? A marital comedy? A workplace comedy like The Office or Taxi? I realized that my idea (about a suburban wife and mom suddenly possessed by the spirit of a hard-drinking single party girl) could either be a feminist comedy, a marital comedy, a midlife comedy or some other thing I had not thought of yet. I began to sweat.
“What is your main character’s occupation?” Ellen barked.
“Well, she’s either a schoolteacher or a stay-at-home mom. Something like that, ” I offered. I figured I’d narrowed it down enough for now, seeing as I’d had the idea for the series in the car on the way to class.
“You haven’t made a CHOICE!” she bellowed like a drill sergeant.
“But I don’t know!” I whined.
” ‘I don’t know’ is just a way of saying you don’t want to make a choice. And until you make a choice, you have no show.”
I soon saw it was true. Since TV shows, especially comedies, are about situations and relationships, remaining “open” –being vague — yielded me no ideas. But if I made it a marital comedy, for example, I could see a lot of stories and jokes between my main character and her husband, who suddenly no longer understands the woman he married. Or, if I made it a midlife comedy, there would be a lot of jokes about hormones, wasted youth and unfulfilled longings. without making the choice, I had nowhere to go. You can’t hang pictures on the walls of house you haven’t bought.
I also realized that this one challenge — the avoidance of making creative choices, is one of the main culprits in my procrastination in my writing.
What if your choice is wrong? I won’t go all Stuart Smalley on you and say there are no wrong choices. There are — but unfortunately, you really don’t know until you actually try it see where it goes. Then you can change it if you want to and start all over again. Is it a lot of work? Yes. But making a choice and going with it is the only way that you can know. Sadly, there are no shortcuts. It’s a bitch. And I suspect that no one has ever written a great creative work using a flow chart, with either/or options at every crucial point of decision. You can’t manage your ideas like your sales department. You just have to promote the mailroom guy, fire everyone else, and pray you picked the right one.
Do you mourn the ideas you don’t go with? Of course you do.
The great news is, once you are on the other side of the choice, the fun begins. Now you have all the freedom in the world inside the sharply-defined world of your own creation, instead of the paralysis of suspended animation somewhere in the “I don’t know” stratosphere.
I spent the rest of the week in a frenzy of V-8-syle forehead-smacking as I saw how this principle applies to everything in life. If you don’t make a choice which guy to marry, or you marry but you never really break up with your ex, you never really get to explore that relationship because you’re always comparing. And does anyone really experience or enjoy any one dish at an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, or is it just a huge mishmash that doesn’t satisfy no matter how much you have?
I’ve had to face it. Sitting on the fence is just a huge pain in the ass. What’s the solution? Just pick something, anything, if only for the sake of being able to move forward into a more creative space and have fun. An idea, a project, a goal, the occupation of your main character. Pick one iron out of the fire and brand your idea as your own, your favorite. For now.
Activity: Identify one project where you’ve been waffling or keeping your options open about a creative choice. Now, just pick one. It doesn’t matter which. Flip a coin if you have to. Now, spend one hour (or more if you get on a roll) seeing what you come up with based on the choice you just made. Is your idea tighter or stronger now, or has it taken a whole new direction you could never have forseen?
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Are you struggling with too many talents, skills, ideas? You may have The DaVinci Dilemma™! Find tools, fun quizzes, coaching, inspiration and solutions for multi-talented people at http://www.davincidilemma.com/ .
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