Small Steps

Every time I see the phrase "small steps," I'm reminded of the scene in Contact where the young Ellie Arroway is trying to pick up a signal on her ham radio, but she's turning the dial too fast.  "Small steps, Ellie.  Small steps," her father tells her.

Good advice for hailing a trucker three states away, and great advice for being creative.  So many times when we look at a creative and her output, we see the big things: the novels, screenplays, symphonies.  What we fail to realize are the hundreds of small, creative steps she took along the way to get there.  We pay so much attention to the red-and-white-stripe-wearing crowd that we completely fail to notice Waldo.

To get our own creative lives to the point where we're making the novels and operas, we need to focus on the small steps.  Deciding what to draw on 500 cupcakes is hard; deciding on pale mauve for the icing color is easy.  If we make enough of these small creative decisions, one at a time, it won't be long before we discover we've not only picked our icing color, but decorated a whole fleet of cupcakes (except for the two we just couldn't help eating while we were working).

What if you don't feel like a particularly creative person?  Small steps are still the answer.  If you can pick one small thing and do something creative with it each and every day, it won't be long before you feel confident and comfortable enough to do two things in a creative way each day.  And after a week or two of that, maybe three.  Before long, creativity will be an ingrained habit, one you don't even think about.

And what's more -- small steps are fun!  If I write a novel, it may be months or years before I have a solid, finished result, something I can take pride in and share with others.  If I do the right sort of small steps, however, I can have a finished product almost immediately, something I can take pride and comfort in, something I can show off at cocktail parties (if you're not old enough to attend cocktail parties, show it off at whatever sort of parties young people go to these days). 

In fact, I'm going to show you just how much fun small steps can be.  Starting today, in the sidebar of this blog, you'll find a spot for the "Daily Haiku."  Haiku are great for small steps, because they're seventeen syllables long -- five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.  You can make them more complicated if you want to (if you do it in the ancient Japanese tradition it almost becomes a form of mental acrobatics), but at its heart, that's all it is.  Seventeen syllables, probably no more than eleven or twelve words.  You can't get much smaller than that.

I'll post a new haiku each day here on The Creative, and I invite you to come check them out.  Some will be poignant, some will be deeply meaningful, but most will probably be just plain silly.  I'll also add a haiku archive so you can go back and catch up on any haiku-y goodness you missed.

If you don't want to write haiku, that's fine, but look around today and find some small creative step you can take in your life to get you closer to your hopes and dreams, or just closer to having pretty, ready-to-eat cupcakes.  Start taking small steps often enough, and before long, you'll have created just what you wanted to.  So go on, find a small step, and get creating!