How to Think (and Write) Like Leonardo da Vinci, Part II: Dimostrazione
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
“Dimostrazione: A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.”
This is the definition of Dimostrazione, the next da Vinci principle. It can be translated as “demonstration,” “proof,” or “evidence.”
At first glance, you may wonder how this applies to writers. To which I would say:
Writers learn from writing.
Writing is, in fact, a constant process of testing knowledge through experience, being persistent, and learning from our mistakes.
You can learn a lot about what makes good writing through reading others’ works, through close examination of texts, through reading craft books, or from good writing teachers. But in the end, you learn the most from actually sitting down to write some words, and seeing how it turns out. Does it flow? Does it communicate the idea you want to communicate? Is it engaging?
This quote from Ira Glass has resonated with many creatives over the years:
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
To close the gap, you’ve got to do the work. In doing the work, you write a lot of crap. You get better as you learn, but your first draft of anything is not going to look much like the shining dream you have in your mind. It takes lots of drafts, lots of experimenting, to get closer to that ideal.
To create anything, you have to be willing to wade into the muck of the unconscious and grapple with whatever you find there. It’s messy. It’s unpredictable. It’s frustrating and gloriously fun at the same time. You make mistakes, and backtrack. At some point it may get into such a tangled mess you wonder, with despair, how you’ll ever make something comprehensible out of it, never mind good.
Such is the creative process.
The fear of making mistakes, of not being good enough, can cripple you into not trying at all. Or, it can lead to throwing your work out there before it’s ready, either because you don’t yet have the skills to see where it needs improvement, or because you’re too afraid to confront the muck and try to make something of it.
I get it. It’s scary. When you dig deep, you don’t know what you’ll find. When you allow yourself to say, “I don’t know,” you have to take a big leap of faith that you will figure it out. Most of us don’t like to live in that place of uncertainty. We like some sort of order and control - or at least the illusion of control.
We can take back some of that sense of control by having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.
In Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she says that the fixed mindset is focused on talent and being automatically good at something. People with a fixed mindset feel that their skills, personalities, intelligence, and talents are fixed, and that they probably won’t change much over time.
People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, feel that through application, practice, and effort, they can change, grow, and improve. A rejection is just information, and they remain open to the possibility of doing things differently until they see the results they want. They practice until they get it right. They view activities like writing as an iterative process, always evolving.
We tend to grow up with particular beliefs, reinforced by how authority figures (parents, guardians, teachers) raised us. How they viewed us, how much of a fixed vs. growth mindset they had, how they talked to us, their expectations and desires all played a part in how we view ourselves and our abilities.
If you were told you were a good writer, for example, that might have led you to believe more in the fixed mindset as far as writing is concerned. If, on the other hand, people took the time to tell you “you described the forest really well here, but what does the person look like?” or to say, “I can see you worked really hard on learning the different types of meter for this poem” it probably helped you to embrace the growth mindset, where you realized that you can learn and improve and your success is due to your efforts rather than simply some gift or ability.
Of course, natural talent plays a part. But when we commit to the principle of Dimostrazione, we are committing to learning and growing from our experiences. We take feedback and use it to make our writing stronger. We learn from reading good writing, and we even learn from bad writing that shows us what not to do. We become attached to the process of developing our craft, versus showing off a perfect product (which will never be “perfect” anyway).
That is how we close the gap between our ideal work, and what we can do now. We commit to showing up, day after day, and thrashing around in our personal creative swamp, getting a little closer, a little better, each time we’re willing to engage. The joy comes from the fact that there is no end to this process. It’s a lifelong commitment to growth and learning.
And that, to me, is the most exciting aspect of creativity. There is no “there” to get to. We’re always on the journey, never knowing exactly what’s around the next bend.
Isn’t that amazing?
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