Starting with a Squiggly Line

When our growing family took road trips -- back in the olden days before movies, devices, phones, and other convenient distractions-- shoe-horned into our car, our four girls used to play a little game.  I would draw a dot or angle or squiggly line on a small pad of paper, identical for each of them, despite their range of ages.  They would each draw something starting from that initial doodle.  It was amazing how they all saw it differently.  One would sketch a house, another an English garden, a circus tent with an elephant, a baseball game.  And then they would beg to play it over and over.

Every layer of creativity starts with a squiggly line.

In his monumental The Work of Art:  How Something Comes From Nothing (2024), author Adam Moss starts his book with a squiggly line sketched by architect Frank O. Gehry and how from that he envisioned and designed the extraordinary Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain.

Gehry's initial doodle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What unfolded from that squiggle:  The completed museum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moss interviewed writers, painters, sculptors, artists of all genres, about how they bring about their work from a proverbial squiggly line, a few scribbled words on the back of an envelope, an idea on a subway, the shaping of notes, words and circumstances, the failures and accidents that didn't prove to be mistakes at all.  

The common line through this immense diversity of artists of all kinds is reflected in the title of Moss's book:  the work of art.  Bringing something from nothing requires working at it.

Masterpieces don't just happen.  The people listed in this book are talented, no doubt, but their work didn't just appear fully detailed and shaded in full-color.  They grabbed hold of a tiny little idea and worked with it, many layers over many years.  Took one shape and added something totally irrelevant to it.  Threw away a lot along the way.   Even pulling the discarded out of the wastebasket, dumpster-diving for what was initially overlooked and dismissed.  

They practiced over and over again, worked long hours and sometimes years, until it held together.

Creatives -- and all of us are creatives in one sense or another -- serve the work.  And as Christ-followers, we love serving God and His kingdom through what we do.

What made iconic chef Julia Child so creative was something as simple as, "What if I added cheese to that recipe?" Or oops, a little too much onion.  And it makes me wonder how many of us in this world never bother to pursue that crazy idea of ours.   The missed opportunities, the ignored encounters, and half-sketched thoughts are stuffed in a drawer for later.  The greatest deceit of all is that "what I do doesn't matter anyway." 

Very few writers begin their novels with a full arc already in place, but develop the characters and narrative as it goes along.  In a recent interview, novelist Leif Enger spoke about his recent 2024 book I Cheerfully Refuse.  He started with a simple scene of a house painter eating a cheese sandwich in a warm library.  The story built on itself from there.

Enger paid attention to the squiggly line that appeared seemingly from nowhere. 

The late Alice Munro felt like she was surrounded by squiggly lines -- stories in the making all around her.  "I never have a problem with finding material.  I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up.  It's dealing with the material I'm inundated with that poses the problem."

What squiggly line has God granted to us today?  What are we doing with it?  We may never realize the masterpiece of goodness that emerges.  But sometimes we do.