How Harnessing Your Chaos Can Help You Find Your Creative Voice with Rachel Jepsen
Our guest this week, Rachel Jepsen, nonfiction writer and executive editor for Every, is the perfect person to speak on finding your voice and what that looks like. I know many members of the Good Space community have some type of involvement in, and passion for, creativity in some way. For me, that's through my writing and through The Good Space. Rachel shares with us why she feels that "chaos isn’t only necessary to create anything, harnessing chaos is possible and our ultimate creative state." By the end of this post, I hope you’ll feel inspired and encourage to step further into your creative voice.
Who is Rachel Jepsen?
Rachel Jepsen is a nonfiction editor, writer, and dog owner living in the Midwest. She’s the executive editor at Every, a digital subscription publication focused on entrepreneurship, productivity, internet culture, technology, leadership, and more. She writes The Long Conversation—a newsletter on writing and editing with over 5,500 subscribers. An interesting fact is The Long Conversation started as a podcast.
Chaos = Good
I first came across Rachel’s work when I read an article that just rocked my world was Chaotic Good on The Long Conversation, talking about shame-free writing, and she talks about how chaos is necessary to create something. And as someone who's a perfectionist, it's so hard for me to let things go or to not start until things feel perfect, or I feel inspired.
Rachel wrote that article using inspiration from her relationships “with my writers. I really do consider myself an editor first, so much of the understanding I have of what a lot of the challenges are, for folks trying to do this professionally and consistently comes from the conversations that I have with the people that I work with, and listening to their challenges and helping them as I can to address them.” Rachel assures that my perfectionism is not uncommon, but is one of the concerns brought up the most, the need for everything to be perfect.
That perfectionism is actually the cause of most of the times it feels difficult to just start, but it is also “a pattern of behavior that can be addressed by trying new behaviors, rather than it being a sort of quality within you. So I think rather than thinking about it that way, if we try different methods of getting started, giving us a specific task to do, instead of just get started and work it out later on. Those things aren't as helpful as giving people a really specific place to start. So while I want to help people embrace the idea of starting in a chaotic place, I think that can really help us discover what it is that we want to say and how we want to say it.”
Rachel stresses the importance of not only having a place to start and specific tasks to start with but also letting chaos bring creativity at the same time. She calls this “chaos theory, that's where creativity comes, out of a place of chaos, you have to also give people prompts, start here, start with this random word, something like this. I always talk about prompts being the thing that puts gas in your creative tank, but then you're still the driver. So I like to sort of combine methods like that and have them be specific and actionable in that way.”
Creativity is Born out of Chaos
Rachel actually has a master’s degree in poetry but landed in the world of nonfiction writing and editing. In a piece of writing, she talks about her idea-gathering methods and how she gets started in her own creative process. Looking back on when she was writing her thesis, one of the specific methods she used was “to gather bits of randomness, misheard things, overheard things, typos in magazines, I would write down if I found them. And I always start from that point. I have a million of these tiny little pocket notebooks where I recorded flaws that I would see, stuff that didn't quite make sense. I would deliberately take things out of context. And then I revisit that notebook full of chaos, to help me get started, I’ll find whatever sparks my interest, write it down, or type it up and start from there. So it was a deliberate part, that sort of harnessing of that chaos, it was really a method for me.”
Finding your own creative process begins with the first spark, but the remainder of the process is born out of chaos and it’s all about finding the different ways to strategize around the chaos. It’s important to also allow yourself to deal with the “idea that things need to start in a perfect place in order to continue. And I think sort of once you lay down those truths, and commit yourself to them becomes easier to practice them. So I feel lucky that I've been able to sort of see how that strategy has worked for me in my own creative process.”
One of the most vital things in the creative process is totally accepting the fear, which can be super difficult because “it takes quite a bit of faith in yourself and in the process. The only way to keep going with that is to trust that it will be eventually.” Rachel has also noticed that for writers specifically, but I’m sure most people in the creative realm can relate, get stuck in too difficult a place to even start the first draft of something. We’ve convinced ourselves that “he thought needs to be fully formed before it's put down. Because making something corporeal is really scary. It's like a challenge. It's like a mirror all of a sudden when it's just chaotic thoughts in your head, and you're not sure what you think yet. It's a lot less scary. But once you've sort of taken something, you know, is kind of wrong, and written it down or given it to somebody else. Well, now it's part of how people perceive you, at least that's how we think about it. And so that becomes another sort of blocker to begin.” But what’s important to remember is that starting is often the most difficult part, but it’s also the very beginning of what could end in a beautiful creation.
The Power of Journaling
Journaling is something Rachel and I both love and recommend for so many reasons but especially because it “can help us process and recognize trauma. I think there's a lot of you know, misunderstanding about what that terminology means but self-judgment and doubt and confusion and feelings of isolation and emptiness, misunderstandings about our own behavior, these are things that all people experience regardless of specific events in their past. I think that this is applicable for all of us to help us sort of recognize what we have been through and what's been effective for us, and what's contributed to our behavior and difficulties or successes in our relationships.”
Journaling allows us to do exactly that over time, and it doesn’t have to be through a specific question or exercise, it can be something like stream of consciousness writing and laying out your feelings at the moment. Then, over time, you’re able to “reach back and sort of start to think I'm having this memory, maybe this feeling that I'm having that I want to write down, you start to build a sense of what has happened to you. The power of that recognition is that it helps us remove, or medicate the effects of self-doubt when it comes to why am I like this, or why can't I just be different, or why aren't things easier in this way, it's really hard for us to access what's happened to us in a way that helps us actually understand that we are the result of a lot of different things.”
Another thing journaling is able to provide is a sort of meditation when it comes to understanding and recognizing. All of the voices in your head constantly shouting at you, you’re finally able to have a conversation with to start understanding “maybe I'm reacting in this way, or I'm having this emotional response in this part of my body in this part of me. Just being able to see that play out over time, you can even see your writing style change sometimes. And I think those can be really just I really profound, profoundly helpful. And again, what I think that can do, once you start to be able to see some of that in yourself, you might become more compassionate about what other people are dealing with.
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I allow myself to play and inspire those around me to do the same.
Links From the Show
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