Throwing Stones

The invaluable Austin Kleon had a quirky blog post week before last featuring variations on the old gag of painting the bull’s-eye around the arrow after you’ve shot it.

It’s a perfectly cromulent metaphor for the creative process, in that it’s often the fear of failure that prevents us from starting. Either we know exactly what we want the finished product to look like and are afraid we can’t achieve that, or we have no clue what the finished product should look like, and so we don’t start.

Either way, the fear is bogus. Start anyway.

However, sometimes you really don’t have any ideas, and that’s when you play without worrying about hitting that bull’s-eye. Kleon is right: draw the target around the arrow.

Here’s a sonnet I wrote when a mere youth:

Throwing Stones

Throwing stones without aim: so where
they land is good, or there is all right, too.
Es macht nichts, it doesn’t matter. Air
falls, doesn’t hinder rubble, lets it through.
Turn upon determined point. Now throw.
Air feathers, pulls, prevents, does not assist
the arc, affixes where the stone must go,
makes the fact, the truth of hit or missed.
Or toss the stone into a wet, blank stream.
Currents stop their placid rush along
their course and splash against deflected dream.
The obstacle has set up right and wrong.
Our goals become, then, not a target which
we hit, but tend to miss: and that’s the bitch.

This is not what most of the enthusiasm gurus try to teach us, is it? WITHOUT A GOAL, A DREAM IS JUST SMOKE and other platitudes. Of course we all operate in a world of deadlines and goals, and that’s fine. Their point is that if you think winning a Tony before you’re 30 is the only thing you care about, then probably you need to set that goal and then buzzsaw your way to Broadway.

Our literary history, though, is replete with stories of goal-driven individuals who find themselves in a life without meaning because either they fail at their goal or — worse — they achieve it. It’s better for your heart and your soul if you don’t get sucked up into that game, particularly in your creative life.

Just throw the stone.