It is better to write a bad short story than to have a good idea for a short story that you never write.
Most of our posts tell a story, give a quote, or start with a hook to interest readers, but this time we’re doing something different. This time the one-sentence first paragraph contains the fundamental and powerful truth we want to talk about. Actually, to refine the point, we’re focused on the relationship between creativity and doing.
In fact, look at some of our recent titles for New Forums—Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking (2012) and Teaching Applied Creative Thinking (2013). Both titles stress Bloom’s higher-order skill of application—i.e., doing something. Even the subtitle of our recent Options (2014)—Constructing Your House of Fiction—emphasizes the need for action; fiction, like knowledge, is built through the application of many concepts.
The three of us have recently been reading Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation, a book Rusty is using as his main text this semester in his CRE 201 Creativity and Innovation course. Innovation, a common term in business, is distinguished from creativity because the former demands some stage of product. In fact, as Kelley affirms, “All good working definitions of innovation pair ideas with action” (6). Rusty will guide his students through the various stages of innovation, but in the end he will demand they develop a product.
One of our favorite stories from over forty years of teaching creative writing involves a student we will always refer to as Gentle Ben. Ben was a master of story concepts. Each week he would stop by the office or catch us before or after class to tell us about this great idea he had for his next story. Unfortunately, in the context of the course, Ben’s next story would have been his first. As great as he was coming up with concepts, he was as bad setting them down on paper.
If we could get his permission, we would put Ben’s picture on a poster with the caption “It is better to write a bad short story than to have a good idea for a short story you never write.”
Even a bad short story is a product you can do something with. Getting the concept out of your head and getting it on paper gives the writer a perspective. The getting it down process is much like penciling in a guess on a crossword puzzle. You can’t tell what words you will be able to see as viable crosses until you pencil in a possible answer. Once you have your story idea at least partially living on paper, you are able to critique it. Just as import often, somebody else can critique it. All those years ago we could tell Ben we liked his ideas, but we could never truly judge the idea as story until it was in print.
In The Ten Faces of Innovation, Kelley discusses the idea of prototyping, of making even a crude model for your innovative product. Kelley even provides the example of a colleague who prototyped a new surgical tool with a whiteboard marker, a film canister, a clothes pin and some tape, and executives of a surgical company were told to “squint”—“to ignore the surface detail and just look at the overall shape of then idea” (47). However, you can only squint when you have something to squint at—squinting at an idea is difficult at best.
So, whether your innovative idea is a creative business product or creative writing, prototype it. Right now Hal and Charlie are part of a writing group trying tom produce a 400-page collabo-novel, but how did that product begin? Each of the five writers created one scene involving one character trying to obtain a goal in one place, Clement County, Kentucky. The novel quickly got past five chapter ones because we had something to build on. Interestingly none of them original chapter ones is still chapter one—we had to write two prequels to our openings that now serve as Chapter I and Chapter II.
But we couldn’t have done it without our crude prototypes of Chapter I. Wicked Design may turn out to be a bad book, but it wouldn’t have become a book at all without a foundation of words in the form of five chapters.
Go forth and do.
Author
Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.
