Hoarding or Cultivating?

The studio of William Merritt Chase (Smithsonian)

In your creative work, where do you keep track of your fledgling ideas or the seeds of projects? Do you keep journals, or files, or boxes of notes, drafts, sketches, plans, or research? Do you work on one project at a time, or do you have a few on the boil? And what about those ideas or projects that you haven’t gotten around to working on properly yet? How many of those do you have?

Is your ability to finish projects equal to starting them?

In 2020, I attended The House of Beautiful Business’ annual gathering, The Great Wave. One session I attended – Negative Space facilitated by editor Megan Hustad – was about hoarding unfinished creative projects, and when to keep and when to cull them. We were asked to consider those projects that we were going to get around to ‘doing something with’ one day, some day…

The question for me was an intriguing one, because I do keep a hold of ideas (and their attendant notes) sometimes for years before I finish them. This doesn’t bother me as I review the folders where I keep this stuff and do regularly cull ideas that seem to have gone stale. I also have a track record of finishing projects, albeit sometimes eventually, even if progress is incremental and slow.

But I can see the sense in Marie Kondo-ing your ideas folders. Excessive hoarding is unhealthy; whatever is hoarded becomes a burden. Old ideas that you may have outgrown can clutter up the surfaces of your mind, inducing a vague and useless guilt when you could, instead, be spending emotional energy on fresh ideas that inspire you to actually make work.

So, I tasked myself with thinking about when I have kept my ideas and when I have culled them. What is the difference between the stuff I retain (and then finish) and the stuff I feel able to throw away?

The stuff I jettison is a mixture. There are things in which I am no longer interested. There are things that I have started working on and abandoned part way through; upon reflection I may realise that these projects were not going to turn out to be things that I felt were good enough to show to the public but, and this is the clincher, in attempting them I have taught myself something or led myself to a deeper set of imaginings or insights. In other words, the work I have undertaken has already served its purpose. Having taught me something, it can go.

Sometimes I come across weird rambling notes-to-self where I can no longer understand what I originally meant. The funny thing is, I can often remember how I felt when I wrote the note – stimulated, moved, euphoric, righteously angry – but not what the now-cryptic note was about. Obviously, these get binned but, in remembering my excitement, I can bless my little brainstorms for linking my hungry imagination to the next idea and the next.

The stuff that gets kept? For me, it’s the stuff that somehow represents a promise to myself: themes that recur throughout my life; issues that I feel passionate about; issues that, in my opinion, may not be talked about enough, or not in the way I want to talk about them.

Then there are the projects that get interrupted. “Life is what happens when you make other plans,” quipped John Lennon. There are a few projects that I planned and wanted to do, but they got interrupted by life. I wanted to write the thing about libraries, but my mother got cancer and then she died. Suddenly I really needed to write about mum and grief. But I still want to write the thing about libraries. And I will. One day.

The death of loved ones, illness, homelessness, joblessness, workplace bullying… these are some of the things that (temporarily) shoved their way into my life over the years, grabbed all my attention, and made it hard to finish certain projects. Some projects I abandoned, but some I did return to and finish. After my stint of poverty, couch surfing and job searching during a particularly difficult six months, I returned to finish the book on innovation I had begun before things went pear-shaped. I had had to give up so many of my plans during that crisis and I couldn’t bear the thought of my life being completely subsumed by a bit of bad luck. I finished that book, and loved doing it, because it was a part of reclaiming who I was.

While writing this blog I found a couple of curt notes I had made to myself during the Negative Space session; I am not sure whether these were things that occurred to me while listening and thinking or whether they were things someone else brought up during the session.

The first note was “hoarding versus curating.” There is a difference between mindlessly hoarding stuff and curating a collection. Curating is deliberate; it requires thought, discernment, analysis, creativity, and decisiveness. If you know why you are curating a set of ideas and projects, then that is one thing; if you just have a random pile of stuff you haven’t bothered to get rid of then… maybe a cull could be a good idea.

The second note is “hoarding versus incubating.” If a project is slow to come to fruition but, during its incremental progress, it continues to build and form (even ‘just’ in your mind) then that project may still have some life in it. I think these are the projects I sense are a promise I made to myself. But if the project doesn’t move or smoulder or throb or germinate while it’s waiting to be finished, but just sits forgotten as a few notes in your journal or a rough draft, then perhaps your need for that project is over?

When I mentor people in developing or sustaining their creative practice my objective is to help them develop confidence in their creative identity. I truly have no sense as to when people should or shouldn’t cull projects; that’s up to each individual and according to their needs. What I look out for is how the holding on or letting go of unfinished work affects that sense of creative confidence: does it convey a sense of potential or failure? That’s where the real truth lies. 

Thank you for reading this blog. It has been refined and included in an eZine with some other articles about creative life, so if you liked it then you’ll love Experiri, on sale here.