BY TESS GADD
‘What?’ my lecturer asked me in her I-only-baby-my-children-and-not-my-students voice. She looked up from her laptop, glasses holding on to the edge of her nose for dear life.
‘I want to make this change, but I’m scared it won’t work out. What do you think? Would I get worse marks if I did it? Should I do it? What do you think?’
She looked at me with her typical deadpan stare and said, ‘Tess, you are the god of an A4 piece of paper. Do whatever the hell you want.’ Then she went back to looking at her laptop.
At first, that suggestion sounded dismissive. And it was. Maybe she didn’t realise how significant those words were or how much of an effect they would have on me, but it was such a visual statement that I suddenly saw myself and my work in a different light.
In that one sentence, my lecturer summarised three truths about creativity.
The first is that you have all the power in this teeny-tiny piece of the world, namely, your page. You can do ANYTHING. Write ANYTHING. Others might have opinions, but you have all the power over this page. As a teenager, this made a significant impact on me.
The second is that the consequences are low. It’s just a bunch of LEDs on a screen. If someone likes your work – excellent! If they don’t, well, chances are they will have forgotten about it in a few hours anyway. The reward of writing something good is high, and the cost of writing something bad is low.
The third truth (a hard lesson for most creatives) is that ‘you are not your work’. You are the god of your work – not the work itself.
The same lecturer used to make us come up with 30 ideas and reject 27 of them. Then we would flesh out three, and she would reject two more. We all got so comfortable with our ideas and work getting rejected that it was like water off a duck’s back, and we all became a lot more creative because of it.
This approach to creativity also allows you to become a better reviewer of your work. Should this paragraph be here or there? Or should I just remove it? Is this character adding to the story or taking away from it? Even though it is grammatically incorrect, does this sentence add to the character’s description? All these types of questions are easier to answer when you are the god looking down at the page and not the human looking up.
So, get out there and become the god of your own A4 piece of paper.
About the Author
Tess Gadd is a product designer who usually writes about user experience and interface design. More recently, she has also begun to write short fiction. Her work has appeared in UX Collective, Designing Humans Blog, Framer Blog, Balsamiq Wireframing Academy, 365Tomorrows and 101words. She lives in Cape Town with her cat and her partner. Read more of her writing at https://medium.com/@tessgadd.
Tess was a finalist in the June 2024 My Writing Journey Competition.
