To Tink or to Frog? How to Make Mistakes and Live Creatively

I’m not going to lie, my favourite knitting jokes are just the explanations for how frogging and tinking got their names.

— nnaoam on Reddit

This post was inspired by a video I came across on social media. Lateral with Tom Scott is a comedy quiz podcast in which three people attempt to unravel a cryptic question or challenge posed by the fourth member of the team. In this episode the question was as follows.

Sarah is spending a relaxing evening at home. After a while, she sighs, and decides she needs to tink. After tinking for a while, she sighs again and decides she needs to frog. What is causing her to tink and frog?

If you’d like to watch the episode before I let the frog out of the bag, you’ll find the video here.

Assuming you’re ready to proceed, I can reveal that tinking and frogging are terms used in knitting. The description that follows is from an article by Pam MacKenzie at My Central Jersey. (Disappointingly, My Central Jersey is a news outlet serving Central New Jersey in the US. This article aside, it has nothing whatsoever to do with sweaters, pullovers, jumpers, or any other woollen goods.)

When confronted with a mistake [...] you can tink or you can frog. Tink is knit spelled backwards, and it refers to undoing one stitch at a time. This is a safe way to undo your knitting because if you do it correctly, you won’t drop a stitch. But when you have more than 320 stitches on the needle, as I do, and you have to go back about four rows, as I did, this could take forever. My knitting colleagues know that I prefer to frog, meaning I take the knitting off the needles and pull the yarn, undoing rows of stitches at a time. Frogging gets its name from “Rip it, rip it,” which sounds like a frog’s croak.

That’s all very cool, but you’re probably wondering why I decided to write a blog post about it. Do I harbour a secret knitting fetish? Are my non-blogging hours spent conjuring woolly hats and scarves from balls of yarn? Sadly, no. My knitting experience is limited to having creating one zip-up cardigan on my mother’s knitting machine when I was in my teens. What caught my attention isn’t knitting itself but the fact that the craft has these two responses to the mistakes that occur in any creative discipline. Tinking and frogging, I realised, have applications beyond the realm of yarn. (In researching a generic term for such crafts I came across the Polish word dziergać which means to crochet, knit, or embroider.)

Mistake? What Mistake?

One response to mistakes is to deny their existence. That’s the message of this short video by artist Sarah Pequero. The audio is taken from a speech on creativity given in 1991 by English actor and comedian John Cleese. I’m not a huge fan of his but these words are relevant to our topic.

Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. True play is experiment. “What happens if I do this?” “What would happen if we did that?” “What if?” The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen. The feeling that whatever happens it’s ok. So you cannot be playful if you’re frightened that moving in some direction will be wrong. Something you shouldn’t have done. You’re either free to play or you’re not. So the best way to get the confidence to do that is to know that while you’re being creative nothing is wrong.

There’s wisdom here. It’s healthy not to beat ourselves up when things go wrong, and to challenge the societal norms that tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. I’ve written previously about my aversion to shoulds. That said, and whether we label them mistakes or not, things do happen other than we desire, anticipate, or expect. Cleese challenges us to approach such moments playfully but what does that actually mean?

Tinking and frogging offer practical ways to proceed when things are other than we’d like them to be. Thinking about it, I realise I’ve employed both techniques in the past, without realising they had names. I’ll share a few examples of tinking and frogging in my writing, in creative journaling and planning, and in my friendships.

Writing

Almost everything I write is tinked. I rarely begin a piece of writing with a template or outline, or indeed any clear idea how it will turn out. I start with an opening sentence or two and proceed from there. I write in short bursts. A sentence, even a few words, at a time. I pause often to review what I’ve just written. I change a word here or there or swap short sections around. Only when that paragraph or section is complete to my satisfaction do I move on. If you watch my hands on the keyboard the most commonly employed key combinations are Ctrl + left arrow, Ctrl + right arrow, and backspace. In other words, I edit as I go. More creatively expressed, I tink. (The preceding five word sentence was tinked four times at least.)

When the piece is more or less complete, I edit it from the top. More tinking but like Sarah in the video, “after tinking for a while, [Martin] sighs again and decides [he] needs to frog.” Rather than delete longer passages I move them to the bottom of the document in case I change my mind later. (This happens a lot.) A kind of reverse frog. A gorf, if you will. Using this blog post as an example, I drafted a paragraph outlining the dictionary definition of the word “mistake” and its relevance to the concept of wrongness. Sitting immediately after the John Cleese quotation, that paragraph was tinked more times than I care to admit. I finally frogged it out. The post is stronger as a result.

Creative Journaling and Planning

I’ve kept a daily diary for over fifty years. I rarely correct errors in my diary unless I’ve inadvertently written the incorrect date. I don’t use corrective fluid or tape, strike things through, or rip pages out. My creative journaling is different. I keep a memory journal in a Passport size Traveler’s Notebook. The pages are filled with photos, stickers, tickets, and other ephemera. I often move, correct, or remove items I feel are wrong or poorly placed. Rarely, I’ll remove, cover up, or otherwise frog entire pages if they no longer sit well with me.

I recently renewed my relationship with Filofax planners. As I began completing one of the weekly spreads, I realised I’d incorrectly recorded where I’d been that day. I shared my frustration with my friend Robyn who is also into creative journaling.

M: I made a mistake! Today it was McDonald’s first, not Starbucks! Now I have to decide what to do. Tippex tape or replace the page. I have a spare.

R: Try Tippex or a sticker, and if you don’t like it use the spare page?

M: Good idea ...

R: *nod nod* It’s annoying to make mistakes. Using cut up bit of sticky notes or an actual decorative sticker is a way to make it into a nice thing though.

I used my corrective tape and carefully wrote “McDonald’s” on top. I wasn’t altogether convinced but it looked okay.

M: I suppose it’s good to get the first mistake out of the way.

R: Yes! And you can learn from them and what works for you.

M: I’m glad I was with you when I noticed because you understand and helped me navigate the disappointment.

The Tippexed correction didn’t sit well with me, however. I found a decorative sticker and used it to cover both my original error and its correction. Robyn agreed the sticker made the page more interesting and pretty to look at. It was a great example of the tink–frog process. I’ve taken to writing entries on sticky notes if I’m in any way uncertain where to place them on the pages of my planner. It makes tinking far more convenient.

Friendships and Relationships

It might seem odd to use the knitting terms tinking and frogging in the context of friendships. These twin techniques nevertheless offer an insight into handling the issues and problems that arise in any relationship. Not all difficulties are the same. Some are relatively small, minor, or situational. Others are much more serious and fundamental. In a recent conversation my friend Jen recalled a line from the Billy Joel song Second Wind “... about mistakes and how they are the only things you can truly call your own. I wonder if he’s right.”

M: I’m not sure they are the ONLY things you can call your own (memories for example) but I like the idea.

J: True. But making mistakes is just part of growing and learning. Mistakes can be an opportunity ... or they can just be what they are.

M: Yes indeed. Not everything has to be a “learning opportunity.” And what are “mistakes” anyway? Usually it’s what we call things that don’t work out how we wanted them to or anticipated they would.

Jen asked if there was a mistake I’ve made in my life that stands out as being especially horrible. I said there are things I’ve done or said that have turned out badly for me or other people, but that I wouldn’t necessarily call them mistakes or regrets. I’ve never understood what it means to regret something. We can’t go back and change things we have done. Jen asked what label I’d use instead. “If I’m thinking about when it’s happened in the past,” I replied, “with Fran or with other friends, I’d say ‘That time when I got it wrong.’”

Semantics aside, mistakes occur in any friendship or relationship worthy of the name. I agree with Jen that they can be an opportunity for learning and growth, for the individuals and for the connection itself. I’ve had friendships that deepened as a result of successfully navigating some issue or setback, and others where the best way forward was a reset, up to and including breakup. Outlined in my 2019 blog post How to Be Honest without Losing Your Friends the former response could be seen as tinking: unravelling to and reknitting forward from where the issue occurred. The latter case of radical frogging is described in my recent article You Feel like Someone I Knew a Long Time Ago — Why Are Friendship Breakups So Hard? Both responses are valid, though it’s not always easy to tell which is the more appropriate.

I’ll close with a short exchange I came across on social media.

do you ever start writing a comment on the internet and then think “oh what the fuck am i going on about” and delete it?

I also enjoy writing an entire paragraph, thinking “you know, I don’t actually need to be involved in this conversation,” and deleting it.

I didn’t think to save a link to the original post but those two comments brought a smile. I know both situations so well!

Over to You

In this post I’ve described the knitting terms tinking and frogging and discussed their more general application to the oopsie moments that inevitably occur in our lives and relationships. I find it helpful to remember that while some things can be unravelled and reworked relatively easily, others invite a more radical response. Do you find this distinction useful? How do you approach and respond to issues, mistakes, and other undesirable happenings in your life? Fran and I would love to hear from you, either in the comments below or via our contact page.

 

Photo by Alfonso Betancourt at Unsplash.