The Grasshopper #95: The Greatest Sustained Creative Project In Our Lifetime

The Webb Telescope has huge lessons for creators

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I love scientists. I think they are the advanced long term creators. To do something scientifically you have to get it right, literally over and over again until your intellectual peers approve.

It is a different form of creativity.

The project took ten years, ten billion dollars, and endless hours to build and there were 344 failure points during the launch and deployment, each of which would have meant the telescope had failed. You may ask how a science, design, and engineering project like this qualifies as a creative project.

There is a movement in STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and math, to add an additional letter A to the acronym for art. STEAM is the nomenclature. I’d argue that Webb is the ultimate expression of that concept for several reasons.

The first is the magnitude of the vision required to conceive, sell, and fund this crazy endeavor, one that seems designed to fail. What creators can learn from this is persistence against all odds. It may seem like a stretch but a creative act like writing a novel or a symphony, for an individual, requires this level of persistence.

Those are monumental tasks for one person.

Then we see the results of Webb’s success, extraordinarily beautiful images that encompass thirteen billion years of the development of our universe. The telescope was built to make those images and, scientific value aside, they are works of art on a grand scale.

Each view holds enough to inspire legions of new STEAM students to take on impossible things, to boldly go where no…nope, I won’t do that, though that is exactly what those scientists and engineers did.

I strongly suggest watching the Netflix documentary Universe, Cosmic Time Machine, on the building and launch of the telescope. It is truly inspiring.

And let it be the inspiration for that novel you’ve wanted to write. If humans can build something like that, you can write a book. And you probably won’t face 344 points of failure in the process.

In case you don’t think this is art, check out these photo galleries. Truly extraordinary.

---

An unusual start to a newsletter on writing and creativity, except that we find our inspiration from unexpected places and experiences. To me writing a novel involves the creation of an entire world, even if that world exists solely in the mind of one character.

And we don’t need hundreds of PhDs and billions of dollars. But we do need the will and vision and persistence to see it through. Even if the end result never sees a publisher, you have that universe you created inside you, with the knowledge you can create something bigger than yourself.

That’s kind of a big deal.

In my mind there are two kinds of artists. There are those who create a few things and constantly return to them as proof that they are creators. The would-be poet who always reads the same poems for years at poetry readings or the musician who has one song they always play at open mics. That’s one type.

The other is the artist who builds a body of work, who grows and expands, often in unexpected directions, seldom repeating themselves or when they do, finding something new to express each time.

Be the second artist or writer. Stasis is not growth. Risking failure repeatedly is growth. The one thing we can learn from the Webb images is that the universe is not a static thing, it is constantly changing and expanding. We can see thirteen billion years of that body of work.

---

Daily Practice Changes Your Writing

And your understanding of what constitutes good writing

One of the things I like about writing every day for years is the way our perception of what good writing is changes, if we aspire to change. That’s a big if in these days of self-proclaimed ‘content creators’, a phrase I am increasingly finding annoying at best.

But I’m not writing this morning about those who crank stuff out by formula as a side hustle. Growth does not come from rewriting the same things over and over again, not when you don’t really have something new to say each time.

Certain kinds of writing, notably genres like romance and mystery and self-help, are by nature formulaic. And their fans expect adherence to the formula. Until someone comes along and breaks the mold while still solving the mystery or getting he, she, or they together in the end.

So, how do we achieve originality when we write daily? First, you will not always get there. That’s alright. No one performs at a peak every time. We practice and sometimes we fall down, other times the writing falls flat. When that happens, if you publish regularly, you have to make a decision whether to put even the second rate stuff out there or get rid of it.

I can only speak for myself, but knowing when the spark isn’t there is a personal thing, though many writers cannot bring themselves to admit that some of their work sucks. But they know.

This happens at every level, from word selection to sentence structure and when a scene seems out of place or just not right. My personal daily battle, a tiny one, is placement of commas, something small that can change the flow of the writing. I usually write an entire piece in one go, then go back and fix things and commas are almost always the thing that gets adjusted the most.

Yes, there are rules about this stuff and you should be aware of them. Read Strunk and White but don’t be owned by it. And if you are new and reading advice about how to structure your writing for short attention span readers, ignore a lot of that advice too. 

You will hear these things: write short sentences. If possible keep each paragraph one sentence. Leave a lot of white space. Don’t use big blocks of text. If it’s non-fiction, use a lot of subheads so attention deficit readers can skim them. 

In other words, dumb it down. Don’t. You’re underestimating the readers and you’re shortchanging yourself because those snippets of writing may not be your voice or may be insufficient to get the complexity of a scene or concept across. We are not writing technical manuals where extreme simplicity is a virtue.

At the same time, keep it direct and on point.

Wait a minute. How…? It’s a balancing act. The goal, as in any sport, is flow, the pacing that keeps a reader moving along without having to stop and reread or think, what just happened? That’s the art of narrative. Pauses, timing, rhythm, music. You can’t plan these things, you have to feel them, like a song.

That is stuff that only comes from two things, reading and practice. Reporters talk about writing in beats, each beat paced to build that track, slow and sonorous or fast paced and moving along. Next time you read something you think is good, take a break and go back and try and see what the writer did. That takes practice too, but that kind of conscious breaking down of the work is a great way to learn.

When I was learning piano, which I never mastered, drawn by the allure of playing a guitar in a rock band, my teacher taught me that when you’re learning a piece, play through it until you make a mistake. Then mark that spot and go back and play it over and over again until it is the easiest part of the music.

Editing yourself works kind of like that. Look for those places where a reader might stumble and find a way to fix them. Tweak things. It takes practice, but so does everything.

---

~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen. 

If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!

Believe me, it makes my day. M