Every Creative Journey Begins with the First Step...here's how to take the first step

The short story The Dolt by Donald Barthelme goes meta, and leads the reader on a literary version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with twists and turns of story elements, miscues, and dead ends. Once you figure out the game, you enjoy the ride. At the end, Barthelme closes with his oft-cited quote:

"Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin."

—The Dolt, from Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, Penguin Classics, 1982

After a story like a tour of danger lurking in the prison yard of creativity, that ending is like getting shivved on your way to lunch. The pain is exquisite, and the surprise is in not having expected it when you knew it was coming.

I write fiction and creative nonfiction, and I produce books, essays, and short humor. That combination of creating from scratch and producing polished works involves wildly different skill sets. When you’re just starting out, you may not realize everything you must master to succeed.

The elusive part is that the skill set is all on a spectrum known as “writing.” The initial brainstorming to first drafts, revisions, edits, polish, and publishing are of the same world but demand different things of the writer. Beyond producing the work, there is the marketing, which demands yet another skill set.

If you ever watched project runway, you’ve seen a marvelous example of that spectrum of skills needed by a fashion designer. They brainstorm a look to satisfy the challenge, and often sketch the clothing. They may further design greater detail and plan how to cut and assemble. Already they’ve moved from artistic vision to calculating craftsman.

Once they assemble the piece into a basic form, they fit it to a model and begin their “edits,” changing the piece to get the drape and shape they saw in their artistic vision. The calculating craftsman has given way to the expert tailor to finalize the production.

Finally, they work with the model on makeup, accessories and shoes. They discuss presentation. It’s the last chance to polish, and relies on the designer’s ability to realize the original artistic vision.

The attraction of the show is to see in compressed time how the vision becomes reality, and to do so in a competitive, stressful environment that also requires each designer to manage their emotions so that their artistry is not crushed. It’s absolutely wild, and it’s what any writer or artist does.

Writers have one of the more dragged-out timelines, especially novelists. Most novels take months for a first draft (I’m ignoring the fast cycle writers who push out a novel in a month) and make take an equal number of months for the next draft. This may be repeated over and over, depending on the writer’s artistic vision.

Then there is a feedback cycle with early readers, more revisions, deeper edits. If they are self-publishing, there is the calculating craft of book interior design, cover design, and writing the marketing copy. That also takes months.

The good news is that it’s all achievable. Writers have figured it out thousands of times, and you can too.

Same thing with whatever creative project may interest you. The way forward is to look at each hurdle on the path and learn how to clear it. It helps if you love to learn new things and can figure out how to make the hard work fun. Whatever your challenge, I promise you there’s a YouTube video, or a book, or a course on how to master it.

It’s a lot of hard work though. Don’t let anyone kid you about that.

It’s also worth it. To satisfy a creative urge and make something good enough to share with the world is a special type of satisfaction.

If you’ve never tried it, just know that the main challenge is getting yourself to begin. To begin, to begin, to begin.