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Think about something new that’s on your horizon, anything in its nascent stages. A creative project you’re just beginning, a work or school assignment you’re about to tackle, a new relationship or responsibility, a crucial conversation you’re working yourself up to have.
Instead of thinking about what you want for it—your hopes, your aspirations, your goals—ask yourself instead: What do I not want it to be?
For those of us raised on a steady diet of positivity and positive thinking, this question can seem anathema. After all, how many self-help gurus have been telling us for years to focus on what we do want, to visualize it or make a “vision board,” and that doing so will allow us to “manifest” our desires?
But why listen to self-help gurus when you could listen to hip-hop artist Questlove?
I stumbled across his advice in this piece by reporter Lila MacLellan about the musician’s recently published book, Creative Quest (HarperCollins, 2018, with Ben Greenman). MacLellan talks about Questlove’s philosophy of “negative affirmation,” the idea of starting a new project by defining what you want it not to be. She quotes him: “If you know you are about to paint a portrait, make a list of all the things you don’t want it to be: overly realistic, say, or brightly colored. It’s sometimes hard to see the heart of an idea, so chip away at all the things that aren’t the heart.”
It’s a way of thinking about embarking on creative work that, on the surface, appears contrary to much of what we’re taught, especially in American culture with its focus on positivity that can border on obsession. But this process-of-elimination method can actually be an enormously clarifying approach, especially in a world where we are increasingly overwhelmed by options.
Let’s say there’s a chapter in the novel you’re writing that you’ve been procrastinating on dealing with for some time. Maybe it includes a difficult scene that you’re scared to write because of the logistical challenges it poses, the number of characters in it, or its emotional intensity. Or maybe you don’t know why but something about it just keeps propelling you anywhere but the page.
Instead of focusing on all the things you hope that chapter will accomplish in the novel, think about how you don’t want the scene to go. With each “don’t” that you strip away, you get closer to the core of what you need the scene to accomplish. When you’ve thrown everything on the table and swept everything you don’t want to the floor, what’s left will probably be very little—and in that specificity, there is clarity. And in that clarity, you will find your marching orders.
Writing is a process of elimination; in fact, so is life itself. Every time we make a choice for something, we choose it by rejecting other options. To write a good story, to live a good life, you cannot include everything. The art of writing, in many ways, is the art of selection. A wonderful writer doesn’t describe everything about a room or a character—they describe one or two details, but those details have been very thoughtfully selected and show us everything we need to know. Everything else has been consciously, deliberately eliminated for us by the hand of the writer.
In art and in life, the goal of our negative affirmation is the same: to find the heart. We strip away what isn’t aligned with the heart of us, our core values, the ideals that matter most to us. We often discover that we can afford to strip away much more than we thought. And what we absolutely cannot eliminate becomes what guides us forward, our lodestar.
So next time you are at the threshold of some new beginning, whether it’s a work of art, a chapter in your life (or manuscript), or a new day, ask yourself, What do I not want this to be? What can I strip away? What can I afford to lose?
What you’re left with just might lead you exactly where you need to go.
