Finding Your Golden Thread
For a lot of creative people, passion for a medium or craft comes before passion for a particular subject matter. You’re going about your life, and BOOM! There it is.
This passion often expresses itself early in life, perhaps as a proclivity for translating the world into drawings and doodles, or a preternatural fascination with books and letters, or feeling oneself irresistibly drawn to a particular instrument or artistic medium.
The lure of the prized medium often feels instinctual and automatic; like something that chooses you. And that sense of inevitability can carry you a long way.
But if you want to derive greater meaning, satisfaction, or, ya know, income from making whatever it is you most love to make, the thing you must to do is to find your Golden Threads —those connective themes that stitch the color and life into your work, the topics you return to over and over in ever deepening and ever more intricately interconnected ways.
In short, a Golden Thread is a subject you could spend the rest of your life riffing on, picking apart, and learning about without growing bored.
All this isn’t as easy as it sounds, even if you demonstrate early mastery of a particular medium or form.
I’ve been fascinated by words for as long as I’ve been aware of their existence. I just instinctually got them, teaching myself to read when nobody was paying attention and taking up poetry-writing and journaling at age five. And though I sensed early on that I wanted to somehow spend my life working with words, it took me roughly 26 years and two writing degrees before I caught hold of my own golden threads: personal essays, social-justice reporting, and writing about the creative process.
When I did latch on to them, though, all the other stuff I’d dabbled in – short stories and fiction, poetry, travel writing and general-assignment reporting – fell to the backburner. I still jump mediums regularly, particularly if there’s a good financial or personal payout involved, but for me, those three Golden Threads are so life-giving that I grow antsy and anxious if I blow them off for more than a month or two.
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How, then does a person find a Golden Thread?
They are elusive and often unexpected, but if you stay alert and practice your craft regularly, you’re bound to run across them in the course of your creative explorations.
You’ll know you’ve found one by the instant spark of deep fascination, purpose, or cosmic direction.
In short, it’ll seem as if this particular expression of your passion has chosen you as much as you’ve chosen it; a kind of mutuality that feels just meant to be.
Think of a Golden Thread as a passion that travels alongside you through your life. You’ll explore other subject matters, of course, but you’ll return, over and over, to that thread, finding that you can pull and pull on it and never reach the end point.
Golden Threads act as a creative filter, crowding out the non-essential, or at least giving it its proper proportion.
They infuse your work with a vibrant, ineffable quality that tends to captivate your audience and invite deeper-than-usual engagement with your work.
They’ll also challenge you to no end, forcing you to deepen your practice, to think more concretely about your platform, and to interrogate your long-term creative goals.
Chasing these threads can be a tangly business in some moments, but don’t let that stop you. There’s magic in the unraveling, friends.
Finding Your Golden Threads: Three Prompts to Help You Along
Which of my finished creative projects do I feel proudest of, regardless of how much attention or money they garnered? Do I feel particularly compelled to revisit or amend any of these projects, even if doing so seems unreasonable or impractical?
Which Big Questions do I return to, over and over, in my art and in my life, and what might these tics and repetitions indicate about where my passions and priorities lie?
Which subjects or themes could I reasonably imagine myself exploring for the next few decades without growing bored? Is there truly enough depth to these subjects to keep me occupied for that long? And is there an audience that seems to share my fascination with the topic?
