What do we do with things we don't need any more? Ideas, images, thoughts, approaches, names, abandoning the ones which don't seem to work is an essential part of the creative process, if we don't leave something behind its pretty impossible to move forwards at all.
We go through a similar process in other areas of our lives. Some people move on quicker than others, leaving redundant relationships, jobs or homes without so much as a backward glance as soon as they lose their sparkle, become too difficult or get boring, or simply because something better turns up which distracts their attention. Others resist change desperately, or simply hoard everything, accommodating the new alongside all the accumulated junk of years. There's security in accumulation but it's easy to drown completely in all the excess information.
In a creative context these tendencies emerge in several distinct ways. In "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines the ability to produce vast numbers of ideas at great speed whilst simultaneously abandoning the ones which don't work as one of the common indicators of great creative personalities. It's this ability to judge and discard which defines truly innovative process.
You might assume then that an inability to quickly let go and discard leads to mediocrity or at best a creative product which is less streamlined, over- complicated, undefined. But what happens when we discard too quickly, and respond on a purely emotional level to creative failure by destroying the work itself? So many times artists or designers or writers will paint over the image which doesn't work, screw up the badly written pages or delete the offending file, not because it has no value but because it represents their insecurity or fear of failure. We don't want to look at it, or read the abandoned prose, so we cut it out and pretend it never happened.
I'm not saying this is wrong. There are times when we just know that it's time to move on, and that we don't need to preserve what has gone before (often because it exists in our memory if not on paper/ canvas/hard-drive). What I am saying is that there are times when it makes sense to wait a while, and hold fire on the delete button. Sometimes when the roar of self-criticism dies down we find there are elements of a failed work which we want to keep, a couple of great sentences, a bit of interesting construction or the germ of a really important idea. Occasionally a second opinion will give us a different perspective but often it's just through the passing of time that we see things a little more clearly.
There's a reason why we call it a creative process, and that's because its constantly moving, constantly evolving and often cyclical. Some things come round again, some disappear. Just make sure when you erase a piece of work from history that you'll always be pleased that its gone.
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