Everyone admires Michelangelo, the famous artist who lived during The Renaissance. He is considered a genius for his ability to sculpt marble stone into beautiful statues.
One of his most famous creations is his sculpture of David and when someone asked him how he created such a masterpiece, he replied, “It is easy. I just chip away at the stone that doesn’t look like David.”
Although he’s talking about sculpting stone, I love this quote and here’s how you can use it as an inspirational analogy to help you create and write to the best of your ability.
Michelangelo could not sculpt anything until he had the raw material, which in this case was marble. Of course, gathering the raw material is a bit different for writers than it is for stone sculptors because we’re involved in actually creating it. But the idea is the same. Your words become the stone and you need to gather enough words so you have a good-sized piece to work with.
The statue you visualize is your topic and all the supporting points you want to make. So when you have the basic idea and emotion you want to communicate, then it’s time to write and write until you gather a big marble stone of words that fit your topic.
At this point, since you have your vision, if you veer off the topic, you may want to stop and focus once again on the vision and then start writing some more. This writing does not have to be in sentence or narrative form, you can just make lists of phrases or points that come to mind if you want. Experiment and do what seems to work best for you. Keep going until you think you have created enough words to form the piece of written marble that you need.
Once you are satisfied with the size of the chunk of stone, it’s time to get out the chisel. Read through your writing and see what you had to say. It’s very likely that it will not exactly match your vision, so start chipping away the excess.
Now, one way this analogy doesn’t quite fit is the fact that you have the chance to put back pieces of your stone if you change your mind or make a mistake. This would be harder for a sculptor like Michelangelo. I mean, if he accidentally chopped off David’s manhood then it would have been pretty hard to put it back on! Fortunately we don’t have that problem. Even so, I still think the analogy works beautifully to provide inspiration to call out our individual creative genius.
So, strive to be Michelangelo with your writing and maybe you will succeed in creating a blog masterpiece. It’s easy. Visualize what you really want to say (your David) and “just chip away the words and phrases that don’t look like David.”
