Lily pads
So let’s say you’ve followed an OOH.
Which is not an acronym but a feeling. Say it: OOH!, with an uptick. That’s how it feels.
What do you do with the OOH?
Is it an idea seed? Is it a little nudge telling you a change might be needed in your life?
Most of mine are idea seeds, and my next task is to feel them out. I see this process as crossing a pond using lily pads.
Picture it: Monet’s pond, the water a deep, velvety peacock green. Fat, glossy lily pads are strewn across the surface, seemingly solid. But let’s say only some of them can hold you up. You need to get across this pond. So you tentatively touch your toe to a promising lily pad. Does it feel right, or does it wobble? Does it pull you or repel you or leave you indifferent? Find a solid lily pad. Put your weight on it. This is now your path. Find another one.
By the way—in this metaphor, you are a frog, so you don’t need to fear falling in.
In more practical terms, you have one OOH, and you need to find the next OOH. Beefing up a story idea is a process that involves both mind and body. The right path will feel right. You say if this… then that? And if you feel another OOH, followed by YES, THEN, you’ll know you’re on your way.
The worst thing to do here, in my experience, is the sort of brainstorming they taught us back in school. If you pull out your whiteboard and make a list of one hundred different lily pads or whether you should reinvent the bridge and consider wood costs between two sawmills and then debate yourself all day, you’re losing precious sunshine. This process is intuitive and instinctive. Your first answer is often your best answer—that’s why your subconscious hurled it at you. Perhaps consider a few other choices, but it is rare in the creative process that your hundredth answer is the golden one. Worst, a list like that makes you doubt yourself. With so many choices, how could you ever select the right one, the perfect one that would begin the perfect path that would lead to the perfect piece of art?
That kind of doubt is a dreamkiller.
There is no perfect path. There is no perfect art.
You simply begin by making one choice, and it informs the next choice, and you follow that path to the end.
So just pick a solid lily pad that makes you go OOH and then look for the next lily pad.
Children do this naturally, but somewhere along the line, they taught us to make decision trees, to work in a group and let the loudest person win. They taught us not to listen to our OOH and our gut. Screw that. Your gut knows what’s right. Its OOH might be quite small and tentative at first, but the you more you listen, the more you trust it, the more firm it will become. Your subconscious is your greatest ally in the creative realm. It thinks when you’re not thinking, connecting the dots while your brain is occupied elsewhere. You might not know why you know what you know, but you can trust it.
This is the part where you discover that your Muse, that fickle and dancing thing, is already inside you—it just might be quiet after a lifetime of being silenced.
Listen. Step on a lily pad. Step on the next lily pad. That path is your journey.
