Try, Try Again

When Your Vision Doesn’t Come Alive as Planned

Let me address one of the most frustrating experiences that occurs during the practice of creativity. This is the experience of executing your creative vision only to have your end result fail to match up to the vision in your mind. That is, when you create something and it isn’t as good as you hoped it would be and planned for it to be. This is, in fact, the worst.

There are many reasons why the creative activity might not produce the desired result. Chief among these is that the creative activity often produces the first draft and the first draft is rarely what anyone envisions when they conceive a masterpiece. It’s the final product that most people imagine: Polished, perfect, and ready for prime time. 

It can be very discouraging when the work you produce does not live up to the expectation.

People have different reactions to discouragement. Not everyone pats themself on the back, acknowledges that the work would have to be better to meet their expectations for it, and then plows ahead with a second draft. For every person who does that there’s one who shrugs and says “enh, I guess this is as good as it gets I’ll just go forward with it like this” and another person who gives up forever. This is some kind of anecdotal math, by the way. I didn’t do any research on this. This ratio is not clinically proven.

The fact is that anytime you produce something that does not live up to the vision you originally had for it, then you have an opportunity to grow into the person who can bring that vision to life. I think most people have the capability of imagining more than they can realistically do. This is normal. But I also think, with creativity at least, it’s always possible to hone your ability through study and experience to get to the level of craftsmanship you need to create the thing.

If I had a vision of myself as a marathon runner, I believe I could develop the skills necessary to run a marathon. I would do this through study (reading up on what I need to do) and experience (running practice). Fortunately, I do not have a vision of myself as a marathon runner because I’m allergic to running. 

Now: If I envisioned myself as some kind of world-champion marathon runner, I probably could not make that vision come true. I am forty-something and I do not have a lifelong history of running and athleticism. There are people who are younger, with a younger body’s greater muscle density and endurance, who have been training for a greater proportion of their lives. And, importantly, the criteria for being a world-champion marathon runner are objective and were decided by someone else.

When I have a creative vision, the success criteria for that vision are subjective and determined by me alone. I have complete control over both what the success criteria are and whether my work has met them. With that degree of control over the judgment of the work I produce, I believe I will always be able to grow to a level of expertise that I can execute the visions I have.

Naturally, I’m not the only person who judges my creative work; just the first. But since I judge first I get to decide whether my work eventually gets to go on to see the light of day. This is not just true for writing. It’s also my prerogative to decide whether a purse I made is good enough to give to a friend or whether a blanket I made is good enough to give to a baby.

I love giving handmade gifts to babies because babies literally never point out the mistakes they found in your knitting. 

A person who revises their work; who creates a second, third, and fourth draft; a person who iterates and tries again; is a person who gives their work the opportunity to improve. A person who gets discouraged that their first attempt isn’t as good as they imagined it would be, and gives up, is a person whose work will never improve.

I will repeat this sentiment although I have said it before: Some people think their work is so good it can never be improved; and some people think their work is so bad it can never be improved; and both of these groups of people are completely wrong.

Here are the steps I take to deal with a creative work of any kind that falls short of my vision for it.

1. Walk Away

Step one: Walk away.

This might mean I walk away and go do something completely different for a while. Sometimes a while is a couple hours and sometimes a while is a few years. I have to take the time away that I need to get over the disappointment of failing to execute my vision because as long as I’m angry or frustrated or discouraged or disappointed, I can’t do anything about it. Sometimes I take this time to work on a different creative project, or sometimes I take the time to work on my taxes, or sometimes I go walk the dogs, or sometimes I take a nap.

I also might walk away and go find my friend or my dog or my spouse to listen to me complain about it. Venting is almost universally helpful as long as I make sure I’m using the process to relieve pressure and not get spun up even worse.

Getting some distance is crucial. Distance equals space and time.

2. Learn From My Fail

When I’m ready to get back to work, the first thing I will do is review the end result that got me so discouraged in the first place. Often I can’t see the good in it initially because I’m so distracted by whatever disappointed me. I need to come back and read through the draft again to find those parts that are actually good and can be saved and separate them from the parts that don’t measure up and need work.

I also need to spend some time considering how the actual result is misaligned with my vision for it. If I’m going to execute a revision or second draft that more closely aligns with the original vision, I need to understand where and how the first draft failed to do that. It’s not helpful to tell oneself “well just write it better next time.” Self, if I knew how to write it “better” I would have done that in the first place. Instead, I need to develop an action plan to get from the result I have now to the result I want. I have to figure out which things fell short and how. This is often as hard as actually writing the first draft, if not harder, and is a critical part of the creative process. This is where the learning and growth happen.

I suspect everyone starts with “I just thought it would be better than it is.” I certainly do. However, I don’t have to let that be the final word. Drill down and find specifics.

3. Iterate and Improve

Finally, I accept that what I thought would be my end result is actually a middle step in an ongoing process. Rename that “title underscore final” document as “title underscore third underscore draft” and open a new document named “title underscore final.” Maybe it really will be the final version or maybe it’ll end up being the fourth draft but you can’t know that until it’s written.

If it were easy to execute a creative vision flawlessly the first time, then everyone would do it. And I know it often feels like everyone is. Bookstores are filled with rows upon rows of what appear to be flawlessly executed creative visions. When you go on social media you are—or at least I am—bombarded by artists’ polished artwork, crafters’ perfect handicrafts, and writers’ success stories. But remember, when you see these final products out in the wild you’re not looking at someone’s first draft. You’re looking at the culmination of all their drafts, their feedback cycle process, revision, editing, and polishing.

You cannot measure a first effort against a final, perfected result and expect the first effort to compare favorably. 

I have one more piece of advice. Not all creative visions are created equal. Some are much harder to execute than others. If you’re feeling discouraged by the complexity or difficulty of your creative vision and it feels impossible that you’ll ever close the gap, then ask yourself if there’s a simpler creative vision in your idea bucket that you could work on executing instead.

Nothing improves the ability to execute a vision but practice executing visions.

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