Introduction
If you have a social media account or hell even just friends who care about your well being, you may be under some pressure to share what you’ve been working on. While sharing what you’ve been working on has some benefits, like keeping yourself accountable, it can also add a lot of necessary pressure and restrictions to your creative process.
Your Secret Laboratory
Your alternative is this: a secret creative laboratory. This laboratory isn’t necessarily a physical space. Its a place (mental or physical) that you go to explore new ideas and have fun without any prying eyes. Here, you explore projects to your hearts content - protecting your time and creative energy in a pure, quiet space, just for you. If your project stops being fun, then you can quit doing without anyone judging you or awkwardly asking you how its going long after you’ve given it up.
Chances are as a creative you’ve experienced this: you’re really excited about a new project that you’re working on and you’re just dying to share it with your friends and family. But when you do, you get less than optimal reactions from them for whatever reason (maybe they don’t get it, or its hard to explain before its on paper). Their reaction feels like getting dowsed with cold water and you’re now less excited to create. Its deflating.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! This is why the secret laboratory is so valuable. You can keep that gung-ho feeling going much longer if you create a secret space to ruminate and develop before letting anyone weigh in.
Creativity, Flexibility, and Freedom
The case for creating your own super-secret creativity lab has nothing to do with shyness - it’s all about maintaining and protecting your creative freedom and flexibility. Its about working on your own terms before a project is ready to be shown to the world.
Creativity is flexibility. Its the ability to stretch, bend, and shape known character and story elements in brand new and refreshing ways. This requires that you give yourself room to grow - room for trial and error. Not all of your plots beats or character arcs will work great together the first time you put them to the page. Keeping your project to yourself when its in its infancy (or before its done) will give you opportunity to tweak and change it to be its best self before you share it with your friends and audience.
Your Internal Editor
External Editors
The most important part of creating a secret lab is that, in so doing, you are officially sealing the doors on your ideas to prying eyes (or ears). The only people you’ll invite inside are the ones who might help you build your new thing—and, then, only if necessary. We all need a place to kick around ideas or work on things that may never come to fruition. Knowing they won’t be examined (or even known about) by anyone outside the lab really takes the pressure off!
- Preserve flexibility
- Avoid self censorship
- Branch out without risk
- Avoid distractions and pressure
- Avoid negative and conflicting feedback
Conclusion
TL;DR: Don’t share creative projects that you’re working on too early
Give yourself wiggly room for failure. If you start developing a story and you don’t like it - its OK to trash it and start on a different one.
A secret project: one you don’t share publicly or talk about until it’s done (or one you never make public, it’s your call), can be beneficial to undertake in a way that might feel odd in this environment of non-stop digital disclosure.
Sometimes you need to just sit down by yourself and spend some quality time with your characters and your work - with no external pressure from anyone about what they should be or what you should be.
A secret space to work on new things helps to keep you from quelling your own interest early on, when you’re still figuring things out. There’s no judgment allowed in the lab, only wild experimentation and idea generation. You could ruminate on an idea for weeks, do some research, and ultimately decide that it’s just not that interesting to you after all. No one will be the wiser.
There’s no reason to explain to your friends or family why you’re suddenly dumping an idea. You’re the only authority in your lab. You also don’t have to give a presentation to a committee on why a certain project is taking so long to develop.