The creative act can be conceived of in one of two ways. One is the ideal version, and one is what usually happens.
In the ideal version, you have a clear idea of what you’re going to create, that idea implies a fairly straightforward plan of action, and you follow the plan of action. What you produce is fairly close to what you imagined.
In the real version, you have a hunch about what you’re going to do, and you follow it with a vague plan of action in mind. This plan turns out to have gaping holes in it—the art you’re working on has demands that you didn’t foresee. You abandon the plan. You are lost. You begin stumbling around in the wilderness. Eventually, you find a way out, and you emerge with the thing you made. It turns out to be a malformed chunk stolen from the recesses of your mind. You polish the chunk into an object that’s as good as it can be. Then you gaze at it, puzzled, and hold it up to the world. Is this, you wonder, a thing?
Maybe 95% of the time, the art you make is insufficient, in some way, when looked at in comparison with the original vision. This discourages a lot of people, some before they begin creative projects. One thing I hear a lot from my coaching clients is “but it won’t turn out the way I planned.”
What those people need to hear is that your project will also, 95% of the time, be good in ways you hadn’t imagined. Your vision is incomplete both in that it misses your project’s unpredictable flaws and that it misses your project’s unpredictable virtues.
My favorite recent example of this is the Jazz Burger.
It’s an off-menu item at a Hollywood Thai restaurant, Jitlada. How you get it is, you ask if they’re making burgers, and if they feel like it, they say yes. It’s one of my favorite food items in the world, with an origin story that reveals its status as a somewhat failed creative project. What happened is that Jazz, the chef, tried to come up with an American-style lunch for her daughter, who was embarrassed by her usual lunches—being that they were Southern Thai curries, they yielded sights and smells that were repellent to her classmates.
The Jazz Burger absolutely does not live up to its mission of being an American lunch. It’s recognizably a burger, but it’s also wrapped in lettuce rather than a bun, flavored with fish sauce and raw shallot, and is crazy spicy. It’s almost too spicy in the same way that being in love is almost too intense. The first time I ate it, in a Thai Town parking lot, I howled in pain and ecstasy in my car. Not a typical American burger.
However, it’s kind of better, and it had effects on me that I don’t think Chef Jazz could’ve anticipated. With its Thai inflections, it reminded me of my first days in Bangkok, which is to say that it evoked the first time I was really confronted with the sun-soaked, neon-laced breadth of the world, and my tininess in the face of it. But, meanwhile, the Jazz Burger also reflected the California burger aesthetic: tender, juicy, sauce-covered. Thus, to my palate, it brought together past and future, Bangkok and LA, familiar and strange. What an amazing burger. What a weird thing, which only made its way to me because Chef Jazz had the confidence, years prior, to serve the hybrid monstrosity that her genius produced.
The message is this. Foist your unexpectedly tasty mistakes on people who don’t know what they’re waiting for. Make your fucked up burgers.
I want the burger.
Delightfully tasty writing.