How Kintsugi Made Me a Better Writer
Tell the truth. When you were young—anywhere from eight to about twenty-eight—you probably aspired to creating a perfect life. You thought you might have an ideally harmonious relationship, deeply fulfilling work, a successful career, a happy family life, enough money to make you comfortable, the respect of others. Right?
Yeah; me, too. And then the day I turned thirty, I spent hours lying facedown on my living-room rug, moaning. I’d had a list of things I was going to have accomplished by then. A novel on the bestseller list. A PhD. Owning a modest home. Didn’t have any of them, of course, and it felt like I’d completely failed at Life 101.
Why hadn’t I accomplished all that? Partly because the goals weren’t realistic (do you know anyone in a doctoral program who has time to write novels, or money to buy a house?), and partly because life just gets in the way.
And life deals far worse things, too. Deaths. Injuries. Illnesses. Financial ruin. Divorce. The list can go on and on. Life’s disasters; life’s imperfections. If you dwell on them, you can actually become so fearful you’ll stop living at all. You go through the motions. You cry a lot. Everything around you feels imperfect, broken, useless. What happened to that marvelous life you’d promised yourself?
I’m a writer. I have to feel I’m putting words out there that are meaningful, or helpful, or beautiful. I looked at the world, and my aspirations, and for a long time I stopped creating anything.
There’s a Japanese form of artistry called Kintsugi, or “golden rejoining,” a fifteenth-century master craft dedicated to restoring broken pottery by rejoining the shattered pieces with gold-laced epoxy to create a stunning masterpiece. This traditional Japanese art uses a precious metal—liquid gold, liquid silver or lacquer dusted with powdered gold—to bring together the pieces of a broken pottery item… and at the same time enhance the breaks.
Instead of trying to hide them, Kintsugi calls attention to the break lines made by time, rough use, or accident. Instead of being a source of shame, the break lines become the center of attention. The scars aren’t only part of the whole—they’re the strongest and most beautiful part of the whole.
Most people would like damages to their broken items concealed and hidden by repair, making the object look like new. Kintsugi says the old can be even more beautiful than the new.
What does that mean for us as writers, as creators?
Kintsugi is a physical manifestation of resilience. From time to time, I decide to do spring cleaning and I pull out old files—ideas for poems, half-finished stories, entire novels that were never published. It can be a depressing exercise, because—as you know—every day we write, we get better at it. There’s a certain built-in impermanence about the practice of our craft, despite the very permanent result of the work being published, printed, and finished.
I look at writing I did a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, and my greatest temptation is to pop it in the trash. What was I thinking? When did I decide it was okay to cliché? Can you spell redundant?
But I’d been reading about Kintsugi, and I set myself a challenge: choose one old piece, and give yourself one hour with it. Instead of dumping it, see if it can be repaired. See if some gold could give it new life. One hour; anyone can afford one hour. And then decide.
When you start thinking about usefulness instead of perfection, you start viewing everything differently. My parents’ generation knew that. In their world, repair shops fixed things—perhaps not with the beauty of Kintsugi, but giving them new life all the same. They weren’t perfect, but they were useful.
And usefulness has its own beauty. I keep an ancient typewriter in my workspace. It was created and produced to be useful; but I see it with a different eye, and I find it exceptionally beautiful.
So if even an ordinary repair can make something beautiful, then what of a repair that’s the best thing to happen to the object?
What happens is Kintsugi. I took one short story from my old files, I set my timer to one hour, and I looked at its brokenness with love rather than my usual critical eye. There were things in it worth saving. There were fissures of language, of plot, of description, of course; but now, with the passage of time, I was bringing a better writer to the task. Someone who knew what to do with those fissures. Someone who could repair them with compassion, skill, and grace.
The story was published.
Practicing Kintsugi in your life and in your craft leads to a concept called kansha, the act of expressing gratitude for the good and the bad. When you are grateful for everything you already have, you’re able to heal faster from brokenness and be more resilient; you’ll be living in the present moment and not wishing for things you don’t have. Kansha means letting go of your ego and reframing experiences so you rewire your brain to see the positive instead of the negative. I look at those old files and instead of seeing mistakes, I see years and years of apprenticeship, of working hard to become something, of stress and tears and success and failure, and I’m grateful for them all. I am a writer today because of all of it, the good and the bad. Without those experiences, that fumbling, that really, really bad prose, I wouldn’t be writing now.
All this leads me to three conclusions, conclusions you can apply to both your writing and to your life as a whole.
First, set aside the self-defeating stories you tell yourself about how impossible it is to make your life or your work “right” again after it’s been broken, after you feel you’ve failed. “The wound,” wrote Rumi, “is the place where the light enters you.” When we begin to believe in the possible, we are on the way to transforming what is broken into something beautiful.
Secondly, remember the Kintsugi master needs to pick up every broken fragment in order to see how each fits into the whole. He needs to know their exact shape, position, and feel. Each piece needs to be returned to its original position. When you look at your journey as a writer, you also need to look at each broken piece in your life. Each piece fits. Each broken piece has a story to tell and a place it belongs.
And, finally, Kintsugi teaches that broken objects aren’t something to hide, but rather to display with pride. We celebrate the person we’ve become through our life’s journey when we celebrate our scars rather than hiding them. Both positive and negative experiences can be appreciated for the lessons we learn from them. Celebrate all the bad writing you’ve produced… and take the time to mend it into something far better, far greater.
Once we’ve mended the pieces with gold, we’ll be more beautiful than we ever were before.