When you look at a painting… Or watch a film… Or listen to some music…
Your attention is grabbed by what’s there.
But your experience is shaped just as much by what’s not there.
A master creator spends at least as much time deciding what to leave out as what to add in.
Deliberately leaving something out is an effortless way to create curiosity.
It also delivers focus.
Include everything and the result is no focus. It’s only when you deliberately leave things out that the focus becomes clear.
The empty space is what allows the focal point itself to stand out.
You probably aren’t consciously aware of what gets left out. It happens without you thinking about it. There will be things you never even considered that others would have put in.
But this has a big effect. Your ‘omissions’ automatically send your creation down a different path. Your individual style is defined just as much by what you naturally leave out as by what you automatically put in.
Embrace this unique aspect of yourself. But also be aware that you can choose to shape these decisions deliberately if you so wish.
This is a way to reveal and sharpen your own unique style. When there are no restrictions on what to include then people tend to throw similar things into the melting pot.
But when you restrict yourself… And force yourself to cut things out…
Then what’s left captures your unique personality.
This starts with the ‘frame’.
The frame is obvious when you look at a photo or a painting. But it’s there in anything you create. You’ve always got to choose a boundary and say “This is where I stop”.
It’s a magic dividing line.
Outside… nothing. Inside… whatever your imagination desires.
But that’s not the end of it. Even inside the frame you can leave parts of the canvas blank. You can have as much empty space as you choose.
What would happen if you dared to leave much more empty space than you thought reasonable? What if you left several important things outside the frame altogether?
The creative process is formed of two — and only two — steps. A divergent thinking stage. Then a convergent thinking stage.
In the divergent stage, you’re gathering and identifying all the possible things that could be a part of your final creation.
In the convergent stage you take that huge ‘mess’ of possibility and give it order. It’s where you organise the connections between things. But, just as importantly, it’s where you throw out a huge number of things that could quite happily fit.
Don’t make the mistake of letting the convergent thinking happen ‘automatically’. This is where the hard choices are made that shape the feel of the final work.
Think of a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone to reveal a beautiful statue inside. It would be crazy to think that the work is done as soon as they’ve chosen their block of stone. Or even when they’ve got a rough outline.
The real work is in removing everything unnecessary.
The best creations are greater than the sum of their parts.
This happens when there’s a unifying theme rather than a whole load of ‘features’ that have been thrown together willy-nilly.
You don’t get this by accident. That theme arises out of a deliberate decision. Then you look at what’s there and carefully remove everything that doesn’t fit the theme.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”