Hi my friends,

The funny thing about creativity is that you have to go through a whole lotta failures to get to something decent, let alone something good.

From the outside, it can sometimes look like creative projects emerge fully formed. Gorgeous and poignant and resonant.

But truthfully, they’re super messy, often awkward, and filled with some really bad stuff within the process.

Here’s an example:

Years ago, I worked on a collaborative theatre project about traumatic brain injury called After the Crash, and worked with some incredible collaborators (artists and researchers). These people were not only creative in the best way, but they were also the most kind, generous, fantastic people who held the most amazing space to challenge and support each other.

To create the project, we worked with people living with traumatic brain injury, as well as their families and health care providers. We listened to their stories, their struggles, their heartbreak, their frustrations with the healthcare system, their grief, their love. And from these stories, together with this community, we created a play that toured across the country.

As you can imagine, to work with such tender and raw stories, we needed the most terrific humans and artists to approach this with the utmost care and joy and enthusiasm. I felt so, so lucky.*

I’m not gonna lie - it was hard work.

Especially because we knew that failure and “getting things wrong” were an important part of the creative process. Which felt daunting when working with these stories from and about people’s lives as the foundation for the project, that would ultimately be shared to generate public conversations about experiences of brain injury survivors and how we might all do better to support them.

We definitely didn’t want to “get it wrong” - but also knew there was going to be lots that was “wrong” (or messy and awkward) in our process.

So, to help us in our process, we created The Wall of Bad Ideas.

What is “The Wall of Bad Ideas,” Julia?

This was literally a wall in the room where we were working, where we would write the not-so-great, kinda-awful, and often hilarious ideas that we all suggested throughout our creative process.

We kept a visible record of the crap. We faced it everyday. We encouraged it.

This was not a wall of shame, but one of celebration.

“Oh man, why did you do this??” you might be thinking… “Shouldn’t you try to avoid the bad and awkward stuff??”

We all knew that we needed lots of bad ideas to get to the good stuff. And sometimes bad ideas turn into good ones. Sometimes you don’t know if it’s bad or good or somewhere in between until you put it into the world - so put it out there!

One of the best ways to generate lots of ideas, especially related to tender stories, is to be playful. To be joyful. Not to laugh at each other, but laugh with each other, lift each other, and help each other find the great nuggets that could one day be shared with others. So to create a celebrated place and name it The Wall of Bad Ideas, we playfully encouraged each other to keep going.

And isn't that worth striving for, always? A world where we laugh with each other, lift each other, help each other find the great nuggets to be shared? To playfully encourage each other to keep going?

You know, the good stuff.

Here’s to creating your own Wall of Bad Ideas, so you can get to the good stuff,

Julia

*You can find more about the project here, and here.

Julia Gray, PhD

​Website | Instagram | LinkedIn​

• award-winning writer, researcher, teacher
• mentored hundreds of students & clients
• playwright, theatre creator
• chocolate devotee, Mum of 2, ex-bun-head

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