Sculpting Clay Is Like Sculpting Words Is Like Sculpting Life

Image by author

If you’ve never sculpted clay, imagine it like this. You have a big plop of a much firmer version of mashed potatoes on a flat surface. Now you want to turn this into, say, a beautifully glazed ceramic pineapple. You look at this big plop which resembles a jagged hill or a tilted chunk of cake. Where do you start?

The answer is anywhere at all.

The other day, while I was walking, I ran into my neighbor as she worked on pruning tree dead branches.

“Hi!”

“Hello!”

We quickly convened on her driveway and chatted about the latest and greatest, which gave way to talk about writing. At one point, she said, “You know, writing is like sculpting.” I thought I was going to fall over.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “I say that all the time.”

“No! You’re joking. That’s amazing!”

I thought she might be my identical twin with blonde hair. (I have dark brown.) I’ve never heard someone else say this, and neither had she. It was joy bundled up in metaphorical twinhood.

But we both say this because this is how many things are, at least to my mind. And you might think so, too.

Back to the clay plop.

For a second here, I think, “Steph, that’s not quite true, that you can start anywhere at all. There are some clear starting points with clay — or any endeavor.”

In the case of clay, I ask, “What am I trying to make?” If it’s a bowl, perhaps I take the clay and form a ball, and from there make an indentation in the ball to gradually shape it into a bowl. I only say this because I remember doing this once.

If I’m trying to make a pineapple, perhaps I also make a ball, but maybe a more oblong one, and from there coax out the top leaves and the jagged skin of the fruit. Everything after the ball formation stage is where the “sculpting” comes in. This is where you move back and forth between structure and creative decision-making.

It’s like free-form dance, improvisational music, or expressive drawing. It’s a flow of intuition, choice, and action upon action. It’s super fun when you allow yourself to experience it. In fact, it’s amazing.

The sad thing is that we often don’t realize every day is an opportunity to allow ourselves this organic flow. Even though my background includes the visual arts and now writing, I can easily forget that living each day is not some ultra-structured thing, but a process of creative choice.

Sometimes I think people approach a decision with an unacknowledged background assumption there’s a right and wrong decision. This would mean, of course, should they choose the wrong way, bad things will happen.

Contrast this with our general go-with-the-flow attitude toward waking each day and letting the day play out. We know that we could get into a car accident. We know we could have a positive surprise at work. We also know nothing of consequence could happen instead. Regardless, we don’t agonize about the future when we aren’t making decisions, yet the future will come to our day-to-day just the same. Whether we second guess ourselves or not, the unknown is coming for us no matter what.

If there were a right and wrong direction for a decision, by definition, it would be predetermined which is which. You figure there’d also be an inherent procedure for how to choose. So far, life doesn’t look to me like a process of end-on-end procedure. It seems more of a process of winging it.

Don’t get me wrong. Clear steps and finely tuned procedures are good and necessary things. There’s no doubt you don’t want to leave a scalpel inside your surgery patient or have ill-suited O-rings in your Space Shuttle. You also don’t want to forget to pack something for a trip, so double-checking is a helpful, fine-tuning action.

Still, there’s a flowy dance to our goals because we live life in the context of incessantly interconnecting factors. Sometimes we simply must take the next best step within a tango of planning, desire, and intuition. Not only is this okay, but frankly, it’s the way of the world.

What we do in life is a dance within a structure, a working of clay toward an end-state, or a crafting of words to arrive at an experience or concept. We need food to live, but how we get it becomes a dance throughout life. We can scavenge from trash cans, work to attain money to buy it, or grow it and cook it on our own. The starting point is hunger. The structure is how we’ll get food. The sculpting process is the way we work within that structure. Do we collect from several trash cans and stock up, or eat as we go? Do we shop at only one grocery store once a week, or several stores a few times a week? What will we grow, and will we freeze our crop or dry it?

As I see it, crafting words is the same thing. If I want to go down a particular road for my next paragraph, will I write the pithy thing first, or end on that note? I try one of those options and see if it works. If it flops, then I word it differently.

Right now, I’m attempting to write my first book of fiction. Talk about having unlimited choices. I have zero idea where this will go, where the story will end up, or whether I’ll feel it was worth the time and effort. But the process is teaching me so much already.

I can see in trying to craft a story from nothing, this is sort of how we craft ourselves without knowing it. Whether consciously or not, we decide what pieces of ourselves will come into being. As our history grows, we keep what’s important while the remainder falls from our memory because memory is selective, limited, and believe it or not, a constant rewriting.

We’re never the result of one decision in our lives, nor is our whole story composed of one choice we made. Rather, we’re the result of many decisions over time that slowly sculpt the words on the page of who we are.

At the end of our lives, we’ll write our life story — for the single reader for whom it’s meant — from the collection of these decisions. And even then, it’ll be sculpted in creative response to the times.

For now, I’ll just keep sculpting stories, real or imagined, and try to enjoy the process as much as possible. If I do, I bet I’ll want to feature that in the final story of me.

---

Hope you have a nice rest of your week, friends.