Pull back
Craig Mod
I want them all to slow down. I want to whisper in their ears, “Pull back for a second.” Just for a moment. Stop and refine. Refine and refine.
Refinement is the hardest. It’s hard because it requires faith in the thing you’re refining- that the process of refinement will yield greater value in the output. To refine is some parts hubris, other parts humility, all parts vulnerability.
If you release the unrefined thing into the world and it doesn’t do well, you can always tell yourself, “Ah, if only I had refined, it would have been great.”
To leave something important to you unrefined - uniterated, firstdrafted - is the laziest safety net you can deploy. It’s almost lazier then not even attempting to create it in the first place. It’s also mean to those around you. Few things are meaner then foisting a lazy draft of a novel upon your friends.
Creation without refinement is a vicious loop. When the unrefined thing fails or falters, you tell yourself it isn’t worth refining anymore. And so you move onto the next thing. You build something else. You draft and release another thing sans refinement. And so on, and so forth.
To have faith in refinement, though, endows one with a certain private glory. There is a warmth found in the peeling back of rough onion layers to find that thing you felt but couldn’t produce on first blush.
In the process of refinement lies also meditations. A calm meditation like that found in sanding a hulking wooden table by hand, slowly, over the course of a week. Or it can be a resistive meditation filled with resignation, resignation to the need to rebuild and remake and possibly start over.
In refinement and iteration you finally get to know the thing you made. Really know it. Understand how bad it is. How great it could be. How much potential is still left unrealised. And within each iteration you move the thing forward; sometimes better, sometimes worse.
But first you have to stop. If just for a moment. And so I keep whispering to all of them as I walk down the street, “Pull back and refine and refine.”
Craig Mod is a writer and designer. A Japanophile. Peripateic. A MacDowell writing fellow and a TechFellow.
The above was an excerpt from Hiut Denim Co. — YearBook 2. We only printed 2000. They have all sold out. But you can get a free digital version of YearBook 1 when you sign up for our newsletter here.
