Make It Mighty Ugly: Exercises & Advice for Getting Creative Even When It Ain't Pretty

255 Pages·2014·9.03 MB·English

by  Kim Piper Werker

Copyright © 2014 by Kim Piper Werker
Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Kate Bingaman-Burt All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Published by Sasquatch Books
Trade paperback editor: Gary Luke
Trade paperback project editor: Michelle Hope Anderson
Art director: Anna Goldstein
Illustrations: Kate Bingaman-Burt
Design: Joyce Hwang
Copy editor: Rebecca Brinson Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57061915-1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57061-914-4
Sasquatch Books
1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710
Seattle, WA 98101
[phone]
www.sasquatchbooks.com
[email protected]
v3.1

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
PART ONE: NAME THE DEMONS
Section One: Heroes
Section Two: Villains
Section Three: Mighty Ugly
PART TWO: MAKE STUFF
Section One: You’re Creative, Let’s Make Something
Section Two: Mistakes and Squirming! They’re so Great!
PART THREE: KEEP ON MAKING STUFF
Section One: Establish a Regular Practice
Section Two: Show and Tell
Section Three: The Continuing Battle
Section Four: Sustenance
Final Thoughts
Acknowledgments
Meet the Interviewees
For Further Exploration
About the Author

You could fill a very big boat with books like this one, about creativity and
overcoming creative challenges. If that boat were to start taking on water, you
might be able to find among those books enough titles worthy of sharing space
on your lifeboat and still have enough room to save some of your travel
companions from a watery death. Those books are smart and wonderful. The rest,
though. Well. It’s possible part of the reason I’m writing this book at all is
because the rest of those books seem to share a couple of troubling qualities that
defeat the purpose of encouraging creativity and new habits. Those useless
qualities are cheerleading and hand-waving. Nothing makes me want books to
drown more than cheerleading and hand-waving.
When you’re running a race and you get to the point where you feel like dying
would be a relief, people shouting, “You can do it! You rock!” can be a very
effective motivator. But when you’re reading a book, there’s just got to be more.
Why? Why do I rock? How do you know I can do it? When the author then rolls in
the egomaniacal hand-waving of, “Just do what I did and you’ll be as blissfully
happy all the time and filthy rich, like I am!” or the even less helpful, “Just do
the work!” it’s time to just gently set the book back on the shelf and walk away.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate enthusiastic encouragement, I really do.
What I don’t believe, though, is that a book that’s 90 percent cheerleading and
10 percent vague advice is actually useful. And I don’t want to live my life like
other people, anyway; I want to live my life like me. I bet you want to live your
life like you, too.
So here’s how things are going to go with this book.
1. We’re going to assume I believe you can do it—whatever it is—and we’re
going to leave it at that. If you start envisioning me waving pom-poms as you
read, send me an e-mail and tell me I’ve done it wrong.
2. There’s work you need to do (I do the same work, so don’t think I’m just
pointing at you from afar here). The work does not consist of, “Follow these steps
that I took so you can achieve tremendous success and make several dozen
masterpieces every week! Listen to these vague platitudes about how you should
develop a routine like mine and eat a special kind of diet like mine and get a pet
like mine!” No. I’m going to tell you about my experience, not because I think
there’s anything in the details that can or should be copied or emulated, but
because I want you to know that you’re not alone in wanting some help; that
you’re not alone in struggling, in feeling confused or lost, in being blocked, in
feeling you’re not creative (but secretly wishing you were).
This knowing you’re not alone part? Don’t underestimate the power of that.
( If you get nothing from this book other than the knowledge that
SPOILER ALERT:
you’re not alone in your creative struggles, I’m going to call it a win, because
there’s so much you can do with that knowledge. I don’t need to be a part of it;
do with it what you will, and I hope what you do makes you happy and helps you
work through the struggles to the good stuff.)
I’m going to tell you about my own experience because it’s the story I have to
tell. I created Mighty Ugly in an effort to help myself and other people both fight
and embrace creative demons; I have demons, you have demons, we all have
them. I’ve spent quite a lot of time getting to know mine, and that I win more
battles against them than I lose these days is possibly my crowning achievement.
But more than that, my acceptance that my demons will never, ever fully die—
that’s the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. That there is no end in
the grand creative adventure; it’s an adventure we get to enjoy forever and ever.
So that’s it. Don’t trust me because I’m a celebrity (I’m not). Don’t trust me
because I’ve gotten rich (I haven’t; I’m probably watching Buffy and knitting in
my pajamas and eating nachos while you read this). Don’t trust me because I
have credentials and awards that appease your concern that I’m full of crap (I
don’t; Google won’t unearth much of anything beyond lots of blogging and a few
books I’ve written and some photos of my dog and crafts). Trust me because I’m
being honest with you about the ups and downs, and because I think we should
have coffee someday and talk about it all. Or, you know what? Be a skeptic. Don’t
trust me at all unless you feel like it.
EMBRACING THE DARK SIDE
This book is not about killing your creative demons. Creative demons—the dark
side of creativity—are important. Like the bacteria in your gut that help you
digest your food, your demons keep your creative engines purring. Without
them, you’d be stuck making stuff from a place of benign blandness—everything
would be rainbows and unicorns and paint-by-number and sunflowers after a
summer rain. Your demons, mean and challenging as they may be, are what make
your experiences unique and your creations meaningful.
We will fight our demons, yes, but we’ll do it knowing that they never die
beyond a state of mostly dead. That’s OK. Part of getting past the demons to the
creativity and the making of stuff is accepting that the demons exist and
learning to cope with them. People who have no demons are robots. Cool as
robots are, people are cooler.
Right. Since I already said I’m not a fan of you-can-do-itism, these pages
contain, in equal(ish) measure, tales of my own battles in hopes you might relate
to them in ways that will help you with your own; exercises that are designed
more to give you something concrete to try than to be used as a cure-all; wise
words and anecdotes from people who are not me, because my stories can get old
real fast and theirs are different and wonderful; and tips and notes about other
places to seek out information and inspiration for your continuing adventures.
As I said, this book is but one amongst dozens, if not hundreds, on this topic,
many of which are filled with ace ideas that transcend vague cheering (there’s a
bibliography at the end of the book for you to mine when you’re so inclined).
And the internet! Filled with brilliance.
Here’s another thing: This book is YOURS. Mark it up, fold down the pages,
cut things out. It is not precious. It is, in fact, meant to be USED.1
FAILURE AS FOUNDATION
J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, delivered the commencement
address at Harvard in 2008. It’s a moving, inspiring speech about the
experiences that led her to create one of the most iconic stories of our time. In
addition to explaining why imagination is such an important human trait for the
empathy it enables, she talked about how failing miserably in her twenties
allowed her to achieve such greatness later on:
“I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was
still alive … and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock
bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Which is not to imply that we must hit rock bottom before we’re ready to
succeed. Nor should we believe that our success should be defined by someone
else’s achievement. But I do mean to imply that knowing we can survive the