Wild Cherry

After not being in touch for many years, Cherry left some comments last year on my blog. I wanted to share them here:

"I reckon you could get some really interesting insights into people’s approach to creative problem solving by watching how they do a jigsaw!

During my chemo, Paul and I permanently had a jigsaw on the go because it helped us forget about the stress of what we were going through and it was something we could do together.

My approach was very much instinctual - gather a bunch of pieces that looked like they go together and try to join them up. I wouldn’t bother looking at the box until I got stuck or needed to figure out where my assembled pieces fitted in the whole. P, on the other hand, was generally much more intentional about his process - painstakingly sorting through the entire box of pieces and sorting in them into different colours. He would then scrutinise the image on the box to match each piece to its location.

As you can guess, I’m the sort of person who gets half way through assembling an IKEA bookshelf only to discover I forgot to do some vital step because I didn’t read the instructions 😆 Thank heavens I have Paul to force me to follow the steps 😅"

And for another article:

"There’s a much shared video interview of Ira Glass (search YouTube) in which he talks about the idea between the gap of what we want our creative work to be and what it currently is. It’s a mark of our creative intelligence that we can SEE that gap because that’s what allows us to improve.

It’s a gap that closes as we hone our skills in a particular area, but for most creatives it never disappears completely because we constantly demand more of ourselves. That’s how we and our work grow!

I’m struck by what you say about your writing being ‘better’ in the past and the title for your book though, Pilar. I definitely feel that my writing took a dive for the worst when I discovered SEO. I’ve in a state of unlearning how to write ‘content’ in favour of ‘normal writing’ ever since. But there was a moment of uncensored collective innocence in the early days of blogging when the ability to share and respond to thoughts online was so novel…It feels impossible to ever return to that."