Don’t Mind the Gap
If I were to ask you what the determining factor will be in your success or failure as a creator there’s a good chance you’d say the quality of your ideas.
Without a good idea, you have nothing.
Yet there’s something else even more important still; an awareness without which you are destined to fail, even if inspiration is coursing through you.
And it’s all to do with the gap.
By ‘the gap’ I mean the space between idea and execution; between concept and realization. And it is a truth understood by makers in all media that what you end up making with your hands rarely, if ever, captures the glorious luster of the idea as it was in your head.
Kate Tempest, the musician, and poet, put it like this in a recent conversation she had with Phoebe Waller Bridge, creator of Fleabag …
‘The difference between a writer and someone who dreams of being a writer is that the writer has finished. You’ve gone through the agony of taking an idea that is perfect — it’s soaring, it comes from this other place — then you’ve had to summon it down and process it through your shit brain. It’s coming out of your shit hands and you’ve ruined it completely.’
What defines the ultimate success of a writer, or indeed any artist, is not how well they’re able to realize their ideas, but how well they’re able to cope with the endless cycle of frustration and disappointment.
For many, their first encounter with the gap is too much. The yawning gulf between what they imagined they’d make and the pitiful simulacrum before them is overwhelming and they retreat, forever, to a less painful place.
But there are others who just keep ongoing.
The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai remains an inspirational and influential figure two centuries after his death. He wove together Eastern printmaking techniques together with a Western perspective to create a new form of image-making.
