The Wicked Bible and the Beautiful Mistake
Creativity lives where control breaks down.
This week, we’re talking about unanticipated mistakes that led to creative breakthroughs. Have you ever made a mistake that turned out better than what you originally planned? A happy accident? A wrong choice that opened a new door? DM me or share in the comments. I’d love to feature your Wicked Bible moments in an upcoming post.
You can’t plan to be brilliant. You can only stay curious enough to be surprised.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
In 1631, the royal printers of England made a very bad mistake. The kind of mistake that today would warrant nothing more than a simple typo correction and maybe an apology. But in the case of those ill-fated printers, their handiwork earned a nickname that would stick around for eternity.
The Wicked Bible.
Maybe the guy running the press that day had been up all night drinking. Maybe his wife had given him an earful for ogling the neighbor woman. All we know for sure is that the word “not” never made it into print. Ordinarily an innocent enough oversight. Except this particular oversight drew the raging fury of the king. Well, of course it did. Somehow, “Thou shalt commit adultery” didn’t quite have the same ring.
The printers were fined, disgraced, and stripped of their license. Most copies were destroyed. But a few remain to this day. Rare, scandalous artifacts of a holy blunder.
It’s easy to read the Wicked Bible as a warning. Proof that details matter. That excellence is in the edit. That every “i” must be dotted, every “not” accounted for. And there’s truth in that. But it’s also a reminder that sometimes, when we get it wrong, we might stumble onto something far more alive than anything we could have imagined on our own.
This isn’t to say we should aim for chaos. But creativity doesn’t always show up in the perfectly sharpened outline. It sneaks in through the cracks. The mess. The misfires. The accidental deletions and the stuff you almost didn’t say.
In the cramped barn-turned-studio on Long Island, Jackson Pollock stood staring at yet another blank canvas. He had tried everything. Brushes. Knives. Even sticks. He was chasing something. What, he didn’t know. A feeling. A rhythm. A kind of raw truth that dwelled beneath the surface of things.
That day, whether by exhaustion or impatience, his hand slipped.
A can of house paint tipped from his grasp, a splash of black streaking across the canvas that lay on the floor. It wasn’t a graceful stroke. It wasn’t precise. It was a mistake.
But instead of wiping it up, Pollock stood there staring at it.
There was something in that accidental spill. A kind of wild intelligence. The paint hadn’t been applied. It had landed.
Pollock was mesmerized by his uninvited guest. Instead of pulling away from it, he leaned into the chaos. In the hours that followed, he dipped a brush, a stick, a turkey baster, anything that could carry paint, and let it drip, fall, splatter onto the canvas.
Pollock didn’t invent abstract art. But in that moment, he unlocked something entirely his own. A style that would challenge everything art had been up to that point. There were no more frames, no more boundaries, no more illusions of control. Just raw energy laid bare.
Not unexpectedly, critics were divided. Some saw madness. Others saw genius. But no one could deny the impact. Art had changed. All because of a mistake. But also because Jackson Pollock was open to surprise. And that was his genius. He didn’t fight the mistake when it came. He listened to it.
Sooner or later, something you make is going to veer off course. A sentence is going to get away from you. A design will wander off the beaten path. A line of dialogue will go rogue. When it does, do yourself a favor. Don’t be so quick to make it right.
What about you? Have you ever made a mistake that turned out better than what you originally planned? A happy accident? A wrong choice that opened a new door? DM me or share in the comments. I’d love to feature your Wicked Bible moments in an upcoming post.