Screwing-Up … Creatively

For an artist, the mistake or an accident is not the opposite of useful work. It’s often the work’s most honest collaborator.  It’s the one voice in the room that didn’t get the memo about what you intended, and therefore tells you something you couldn’t have told yourself.

The trouble with intention is that it can only reach as far as what you already know. When you set out to make exactly the thing in your head, the best possible outcome is that you succeed … and success, in that narrow sense, is merely the absence of surprise. You get what you pictured, no more. The mistake is the trapdoor out of that closed loop. It introduces material from outside your imagination: a wrong note, a dropped take, a misalignment of metal chirps that suddenly sounds like a bird, one different from what you had imagined, and better. I’ve found that the discipline of art is largely the discipline of being available when accidents happen.

The whole premise of my essay Designing a Movie for Sound rests on it: that the most alive moments are rarely the ones calculated inside one’s own discipline, but the ones that emerge when a collaborator does something unscripted and everyone in the room is awake enough to keep and incorporate it into their own thinking. A finished soundtrack is, in a meaningful way, a record of mistakes that were promoted to decisions.

So the tactics are really tactics of attention and nerve. The first is to slow down at the snag rather than correcting it reflexively. The instinct is to unscrew the cap and try again; the artist’s move is to wiggle it a moment longer and listen. The second is to make mistakes cheap, so you can afford to welcome them … rough passes, scratch takes, sketches you’re not precious about. Useful surprise only visits a process loose enough to have room for it. The third is to separate the two halves of judgment: generate without filtering, then filter without generating. Most promising accidents die because the same anxious faculty that made them immediately strangles them. Let the wrong thing exist long enough to be heard.

There is a deeper version of this that runs through everything we build. The recordings that matter are the ones where you didn’t fast-forward through the junk … where the noise at the head of the take, the part you’d normally skip, turned out to contain the thing you actually needed. The mistake and the masterstroke are frequently the same event, seen from one frame of attention or another. The artist’s only real job at that moment is to be the kind of listener who doesn’t skip because they think they know exactly what they’re looking for.

A career, in the end, is not a sequence of intentions realized. It is a long training for staying available to the thing you didn’t mean to do, that was better than what you intended to do.

A craftsman knows how to avoid accidents. An artist knows how to use them.