Blue Sky
There’s a popular quote by Ira Glass, radio host and creator of This American Life podcast. Many creatives reference it as The Taste Gap, essentially between your taste and your actual work. Glass says,
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. 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.”
This gap is what I call my Blue Sky mode. It’s the dreamland, the brainstorm. Close enough to be attainable, but hazy enough to seem beautiful, no matter the angle or distance. In Blue Sky land, everything is possible. All ideas and creative projects and pieces of writing sing and resonate. They are untainted.
When I write or create, I find myself reluctantly leaving Blue Sky mode. The grandiose idea, the lovely poem or piece, lands on the page, and it’s messy and ugly. Sentences clash. Ideas that rang so clearly get misconstrued. It’s a bit like falling out of love. The attraction and immediate connection fizzles away into the mundane and the flawed. Suddenly their openness to the flow of life turns into annoying indecision at deciding what to order for your Friday dinner date. Their admirable display of affection turns into their need to cling to you at every social gathering or outing because they can’t bear to be alone. I look at my messy, ugly drafts, and I wonder, what was I thinking?!
But as lovely and comfortable as it is, nothing gets created in the Blue Sky. I could stay there forever, and I did for many years. And at some point, the pain of not creating became a tiny bit more painful than creating something, even if it’s ugly at first. Ideas and inspiration begin there, and it’s up to each artist, creator, writer, to yank them down to earth, where the real work is done.
