Does that even make sense?

The thing that has been on my mind today is the actual process of making. Not the idea bit, or the exciting imagining bit, but the bit where you have to somehow take the thing that is floating around in your head and make it exist in front of you.

You can sort of see it, far away, but you cannot properly see it until you start doing it. And that is part of the fun, I think. Letting it shift and change. Finding out what it actually wants to be. But also, there is this point where it becomes quite hard to picture anything unless you put everything out in front of you: the materials, the colours, the textures, the supplies, all of it.

And then suddenly it is a lot.

When everything has to come out

To work out where the project is going, I almost have to get everything out. I need to see it. I need to move things around. I need to hold things next to each other and go, no, not that, maybe this.

But then the mess starts to build. It swaddles you a bit. It swamps you. What was supposed to be a lovely creative moment becomes this busy, noisy little world of stuff around you.

And the second the creative high drops, even slightly, the need to organise everything becomes very severe. Like, no, actually, I cannot possibly continue until I have sorted all of this out.

Then the tidying takes over

Which is fair enough, because the mess is genuinely annoying. But then suddenly you are spending all your time cleaning up the exact chaos you needed in order to make anything in the first place.

So the whole thing becomes this loop: you need the mess to see the idea, the mess becomes overwhelming, the overwhelm makes you want to tidy, and then the tidying eats into the making.

Trying to find the balance

I have been finding it really hard to work out the balance between being creative and being organised. Because I do need things to be tidy enough that I can think, but I also need things to be loose enough that the idea has room to become something.

It feels like such a strange contradiction. You need the disorder to make the thing, but the disorder can also be the thing that stops you from making it.

Does that even make sense?

Maybe this is just part of making

I suppose maybe that is just part of it. Maybe the chaos and the piles and the sudden urge to sort every tiny thing are all part of the same process. Still annoying, obviously. But maybe not a sign that you are doing it wrong.