I’m a sucker for any show focused on the creative process. Portrait Artist of the Year, Landscape Artist of the Year, The Great British Sewing Bee, Blown Away, The Big Flower Fight, The Great Pottery Throwdown—basically any show that lets me witness creators creating.
Part of my love for these shows is the ability to witness process, to watch the artists in the process of making. It’s different, I think, for writers. We can talk about and read about process, we can witness the development of work over various drafts, and we can, if writing collaboratively or writing a piece that is to be performed, witness some of the becoming, the creating that happens in that moment, but so much of the work of writing still happens unwitnessed in the moment of creation.
Also, artists on these kinds of shows are usually starting from scratch, but they have their materials to work with. For writers, our first drafts are often the creation of those raw materials. As Chuck Sambuchino wrote in this piece for Writer’s Digest, “Think of your first draft as the clay, not the sculpture.”
Most of these shows are competition-focused, so the artists are working with constraints. There’s a time limit, and they’re set a specific challenge like painting a particular view or celebrity sitter, or crafting an haute couture garment out of old parachutes, or throwing as many identical clay water goblets as they can in 15 minutes while blindfolded.
Those constraints can lead to struggle, to failures—sometimes spectacular ones. But viewers also witness the beauty and transformation that can come from these challenges, from the external pressures that encourage the artists to adapt, to embrace what is possible in the given time, and to be more rather than less creative because of the challenge’s constraints.
It’s another one of those paradoxes at the heart of the creative process: limitations or constraints can encourage more creativity and freedom.
I talk about this when teaching closed poetic forms. The necessity imposed by a specific rhyme scheme or meter can lead to head-pounding frustration but also unexpected, surprising word choices (for the reader and the poet) that might never have been discovered without the adherence to a specific form. As discussed in a chapter on form in Introduction to Poetry, “What is called closed form poetry is an organization of language that adds more than common rigidity to language and then tries to create the maximum possible freedom—or openness—within that space. Closed form is an obstacle course for the poet to run language through as gracefully as possible.”
And when talking about closed forms or specific narrative structures, I always also emphasize the power of breaking the form, in subverting what a reader expects, and how writers can both work within and shatter those forms.
One show that’s brought me much delight recently is Dan Levy’s The Big Brunch, a heart-warming take on a cooking competition where chefs share their stories and culinary dreams. I’ve been particularly fascinated by the critique or feedback aspect of the show—how it’s offered and how it’s received and worked with.
Like most of these shows, The Big Brunch is a competition, so there’s a prize and one winner, and there are judges offering feedback on each challenge. But on it, and on the best of these shows, what’s really being celebrated is artists becoming more themselves.
When I think back on the most toxic situations where I’ve received feedback, it’s often felt like the reader had a vision of what the piece should be, and I’ve failed to achieve that. The work (and by extension me) has failed to become what the critique-er thinks it should have been. In those kinds of scenarios I’ve found a) I nearly abandon the draft or b) the revision process became about trying to please the reviewer and achieve their vision, not my own.
What I try and do when providing feedback to writers is root it in belief—the possibility of the work’s becoming. I ask the writers I work with to tell me about the origin of their projects and also their intention so that I am always providing feedback with that in mind.
In my work as a writing coach and teacher, I’m a witness to the work and to the process of the writers I work with. I’m seeing what is there and also sensing the possibilities for the next draft that the work itself seems to be suggesting—possibilities that sometimes writers themselves find hard to see or believe in at certain parts of the process, like when stuck in the messy middle or when we’ve been looking at a piece close-up or from only one angle for far too long. What guides my approach to feedback is not what I think the work should be, but rather how can I support the writer in the work becoming more itself, more of what it wants to be.
Keith Brymer Jones, the main judge of The Great Pottery Throwdown, is well-known for crying during judging or when speaking about the process to contestants. He explains it so beautifully in this interview with The Guardian: “I get emotional…because it’s a craft I love. It is my life. When I see a potter communicating their creativity via something they’ve made, I can’t help but cry. You’re watching imagination come to life.”
That’s really what I love about these shows: the chance to witness the work coming to life and to commune with others doing this creative work in whatever form, work that too often goes unseen or is unvalued. To witness, to celebrate and to be inspired by the messy, beautiful, transformative journey of creation.
Photo credits:
Photo of Woman Painting on Wall by Brett Sayles from Pexels
Photo of Crop Potter with Clay in Hands Photo by Monstera from Pexels
