The Gift of Chaos

How good it feels to be organized. When you can find your keys at a moment’s notice. When you know exactly how much money you spent this month. When your time is scheduled and your objectives clear. No wonder professional organizers charge hefty fees to come into our businesses and homes, and put everything right. Order feels good.

The most common complaints I hear from writers are about disorder. Half-way through his novel, a writer finds his carefully planned plot taking unexpected twists. Another begins an essay about the nature of love only to find herself focusing on artichoke growing. Many of us sit in front of our computers not sure what we’re writing, where it’s going, or whether it’s working. The chaos makes us feel helpless and vulnerable. In our well-regulated culture, confusion seems pathetic.

Yet, for writers, disorder is not the blight our culture leads us to believe. In fact, it is a gift. Used well, it can be invaluable.

Disorder holds abundance. Organizing a closet starts with throwing things away. So does organizing our writing. We sort through unused ideas, scattered notes, and unfinished works deciding what to discard. We relegate some of our half-written poems to the “keep” file and some to the trash. We send our failed short stories to the recycle bin.

The problem is that the stuff we’re discarding might be seeds waiting to flower. The story that didn’t work might be the source of a poem that does. The essay that faltered in January might come together in June. An idea may lie dormant for years before coming to life. Instead of throwing out the fragments and failures, we should keep them, treasure them, and give them time.

Disorder keeps us flexible. Following up plans, schedules, and flow charts makes us rigid.

Take a writer I’ll call Sally—a first-time novelist with a plan. Stage 1 was to outline her plot, Stage 2 to draft each chapter, Stage 3 to revise, and so on. She’d gotten through the plotting stage, but three years later, she was still on Stage 2 and nowhere near finishing. As she wrote, she’d think of plot changes and new characters, but she considered them distractions and always rejected them. Her plot wasn’t working very well, but she was determined to forge ahead with it. Meanwhile, she was continually coming up with ideas for short stories, but refused to take time out of her schedule to write them.

A former corporate manager, Sally deeply believed that success comes from creating a plan and sticking to it. But her plan was forcing her into a creative straightjacket and stifling the life out of her writing. It took awhile to convince her that abandoning her plan wasn’t the same as abandoning her novel. But once she could approach her work without a pre-determined schedule—open to what came up and free to follow her ideas—her work blossomed.

Disorder allows for innovation. What happens when the story we were once so excited about falters? We improvise. How do we come up with the perfect word for our poem? We experiment. The minute we become perfectly clear about the direction our writing is taking, we lose the ability to use guesswork, exploration, and trial-and-error—that is, to innovate. Confusion not only allows us to innovate, it forces us to. Once we get rid of our need to do things in a pre-determined way, we can stop, turn around, leap ahead, play, and explore. Those activities are the lifeblood of creativity.

Of course, there is a place for order in our writing lives. Our novel will eventually need a plot that makes sense. We should keep reasonably clear records, and stick with deadlines. But that kind of organization is only a framework for the messy work of creating writing.

Art does not happen because we plan it. It happens because it happens. It doesn’t grow from diagrams and graphs, but from accidents, chance, mistakes, messes, and the deep recesses of our imaginations. Instead of berating yourself for not being more organized, embrace disorder. Think of it as compost. That jumble of banana peels, coffee grounds, and wilted lettuce may smell awful, but out of it will grow sunflowers, sage, and juicy, sweet berries.