Oftentimes it starts with a faint idea. You notice a pattern in something, so you instantiate an idea that ties that pattern together into a cohesive structure, and then work on the structure until it is resting firmly upon the reality it is describing.
I've expressed the thought plenty of times before that once you get down a working idea and let it sit and you get to looking at it, you can start to see additional ways in which that idea can be worked. You might start seeing a contradiction that needs to be worked out for example, or you might see some gaps in what the idea is trying to address that you didn't see before.
Eventually it starts to dawn on you that you can keep fiddling with the idea any which way, and it is good to have this flexibility. But there is only so much time and energy available in the day. Eventually you do have to stop fooling around and let the idea go and be itself.
Something can be overworked and over-shaped. Never quite deciding on a coherent aesthetic for example, or adding too much ornamentation and the thing gets too busy. Or as I found working heavy wire on a fence, you can put an incredible amount of force and tension on that wire; it is incredibly strong, but then if you bend it one way and then decide you want to bend it the other, it weakens the wire and that's when the thing fails.
But what this also reveals is that you can get a whole lot of play out of the idea itself. Yeah, there is a solid foundation down there that you have to work around and which imposes a real constraint, though hell if you have the means and the wealth you can cut right through the rock below if you wanted to, which makes the navigation of reality a matter of the availability of energy too. But still, at the end of the day you only have so much energy to work with.
The idea allows for comfort and the navigation of the reality that it rests upon or sheathes, but that it is also all negotiable and mutable and that the bare reality underneath is really strange and baffling, and should be treated with respect, which implies a humility in the idea too.
