Your Creative Process Evolves When You Do
By: Stephanie Georgopulos
Tags: Process, Writing, Creativity Tips, Creativity

Writing

Your Creative Process Evolves When You Do

Growth is a creative process — but don’t discount the wisdom of your younger self

Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

When I first began writing online over a decade ago, I wasn’t just building the foundations for my eventual career — I was awakening to the notion that I had a voice. And it was an intoxicating discovery: I had no shortage of things to say, and I lacked the neuroticism and experience that would otherwise have me hesitate to say them. That would come later. In the meantime, I became prolific: giving form to hundreds of thoughts, ideas, and questions that’d been piling up in my brain for a lifetime. I told stories I’d never spoken aloud; I experimented with structure and voice; I wrote from the gut, the heart. Occasionally, I even wrote from the head.

I don’t know how much of that work holds up, 12 years on (by my Virgo standards, I estimate about 2%). At my most prolific, I was publishing two or three stories a day. Now, I chip away at the same essay for months on end before I even know what it’s about. My perspectives seem to evolve at a quicker clip than my ability (or desire) to pin them down, to memorialize them before they slip through my fingers and become something else. And while part of me is content to be less guns-blazing sure about what I think to be true — humility and uncertainty have been some of my best teachers — I do miss the courage I had in those early days, to just spit it out and let it be. Perhaps writing prolifically was its own form of humility — a willingness to not get it perfectly right most times, and an openness to try again tomorrow, either way.

For a long time, I took my diminishing output as a sign that I’d lost something fundamental to my identity as a writer: a skill, a mindset, maybe a passion. Whatever it was that allowed me to churn out words without second-, third-, and fourth-guessing them — it was gone.

The problem — as is often the case — was my perspective: I was viewing the productivity of my younger self as an indictment of my current self, when I could’ve been honoring her, keeping alive the best parts of her experience.

But as I write this, I’m starting to understand it differently (which is often the case, as I tend not to know what I think until I write). I haven’t lost anything. Those early publishing experiences are just one romantic layer in my long-ass relationship to writing, which began well before I took my act online and continues to exist, even as I publish far less than I used to. And I’m in whatever phase I’m in now because of the phases I experienced before it: The bliss of writing for an audience for the first time. Refining my gut instincts into something others could swallow, digest. Concocting ways to write ad copy about the Super Bowl without using the words “Super Bowl.” (God, it feels good to just write the damn words: Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Super Bowl.) Learning to interview, to research, to weave together the words and thoughts of others into their own unique tapestry. The skills and experiences I have today accumulated over time — and so did my uncertainty about how, exactly, to use them.

This quieter phase I’ve been in for the past three or so years isn’t wrong or less than its predecessors; it’s an evolution of what began years ago. To create the exact same way I did when I first started would suggest that little has changed for me in the decade-plus intervening years: my circumstances, my understanding, my priorities, my self. There’s no area of my life that hasn’t been altered in that time, and writing is no exception — so why do I feel like it should be? I’m mostly proud of my willingness and desire to evolve in other areas of my life, yet I’m prone to comparing my current creative output to a version of myself I otherwise have no desire to emulate (no offense to me).

By expecting myself to maintain the same relationship I once had with writing — even after all the throat clearing, novelty, and ego-gratification of the thing have long since faded — am I measuring myself against a standard by which I’ll always fall short? It seems so. I often wonder if I have a fear of success, or a fear of failure, or if there’s even a meaningful distinction between the two. (I don’t think there is — at least, not today.) I’m not sure what I gain from engaging in this self-comparison, though — aside from feeling so defeated before I begin that I never quite do.

I believe in the power and influence of the unconscious mind — that there are reasons we’re attracted to or repelled by certain experiences and feelings, even if we’re not aware of what they are, even if they don’t square with our sense of self or with logic in general. We’re a repressed species. I’ve unearthed enough of my own unconscious tics, behaviors, and motivations to no longer trust that all I am is what I think I am. So when I’m feeling or behaving in ways that feel counterproductive to what I know I consciously want, I start to consider what I may unconsciously want.

What is the unconscious goal of setting myself up to fail? In feeling so defeated that I never get started? An explanation is washing up on the shores of my consciousness, now: Maybe I’ve been trying to protect myself. Not from failure, or from success, but from pain. Because, as much as I’ve told myself the story of how amazing it felt to write All The Things back in the day, the high-highs came as a package deal with low-lows. I may not dwell on the lows, or incorporate them into my current narrative, but some part of me is rolling her eyes at the rose-colored glasses I’m wearing. She remembers.

Yes, I was writing a lot. I was also processing a lot of trauma — publicly — for the first time, spouting half-baked opinions on things I didn’t fully understand, and occasionally getting dunked on by more prominent writers — usually for the crime of being too earnest (this was back when people had the energy to communicate entirely in snark). And that’s to speak nothing of the mess that was my personal life. Or my finances. Or my mental health. My regular health, too. So while my impulse now is to romanticize that period as my creative “heyday,” to wish for its return, my heart remembers what my mind has chosen to forget.

There are things I miss about that time, and you could not pay me to relive it.

And yet, putting all of this into words reminds me why I’m drawn to writing in the first place: I have a better idea of what the problem is than I did when I started. The problem — as is often the case — was my perspective: I was viewing the productivity of my younger self as an indictment of my current self, when I could’ve been honoring her, keeping alive the best parts of her experience. Integrating them into my (less dynamic, less volatile) current existence. Perhaps that’s what this current phase is about, for me: learning to see my former selves not as competitors, but as creative collaborators.

What if, instead of distancing myself from… myself, I got curious about what I could learn — or relearn — from an earlier model? What if I learned to combine her joy and courage with the patience and thoughtfulness that now makes her unrecognizable to me? What if I learned to weave together my own competing narratives into something new and invigorating? What if I taught my steady hand to cradle my beginner’s mind?

Maybe it’s not prolificness I yearn for at all, but the spirit behind it: the playfulness, the experimentation, the wide-eyedness of it. The willingness to not get things perfectly right, and the openness to try again tomorrow. It’s certainly a lesson my former self is qualified to teach — and I’m happy to learn it more than once.