creativity

I have to be kind of delicate here: when I talk about work that I’m dissatisfied with, the people that read this blog are the same people that would try and convince me of that work’s value. My circle is full of cheerleaders. That’s pulled me through a lot of bleaker seasons!

But if I’m not writing for the approval of others, that means I’m sometimes writing in spite of the approval of others. A writer’s relationship to their writing isn’t all that precious. I’ve written plenty I’m proud of, and gotten praise for it. I’ve done plenty of bad writing, and people have told me so. I’ve written things I stand by, but which weren’t well received, and naturally I’m not happy with some pieces despite audience approval. Zero correlation between pride and praise. (Although praise is very nice.)

So this slasher piece. Please go read it if this is the first you’re hearing of it — I don’t want to tip your opinion one way or another! But I’m not 100% happy with it. Why that is isn’t a mystery to me. The tone is too formal, the argument is too big. It took too long. On the other hand, the doing of the piece was fun and I’m proud of what I know now that I didn’t know before.

No, this post is not me noodling on how I can do better next time, and it’s definitely not me kicking myself. It’s that I’m missing a key step in the cycle of writing, and I’d like to suggest a couple links that could finish that cycle. After the legacy of Austin Kleon, I even drew a helpful circular diagram!

This is my — maybe a lot of writers’ — “cycle of confidence.” That’s what I’m calling it, although as always I’m open to the idea that I’m aping something already in existence.

You start with confidence that your ideas matter. (I say “you start with,” but confidence is hard-fought and hard-won.) From a place of self-esteem, you start generating quality ideas. They’re quality because they’re unique to you. One idea snags your attention.

Inspired, you throw yourself into that idea. For me this looks like a ton of research, scrunched up freewrites in my notebook, lots of chatting and walking around. Inspiration is the most fun an artist can have.

It’s really hard to stay inspired through the entire life cycle of a project, though, and eventually your energy crashes against the realities of production. Sometimes that’s competing responsibilities, or maybe it’s writer’s block. At an industry level, it’s money. You lose faith.

This is where “the process” becomes super important. I’m academically interested in what artists call “the process,” because it’s almost like a religion in creative circles. Something you cultivate and trust unshakeably, even though no one can describe what it is. Like, sure, there’s blogs and coaching plans that outline a holistic “creative process.” They tend to focus on the effects, the outcomes, the states of mind produced in various stages of the process, not the actual actions that go into it.

The process looks different for everybody. It’s the motions you go through after you lose faith. For me that’s looking through my collection, writing blog posts, rereading, chatting over a beer with my writer friends. When you can’t trust your brain to spontaneouly produce great ideas, you draw thousands of lines and find the picture that already exists. You can’t usually rely on the process to get you started. It’s meant to carry you past the post.

Finally, you have your finished product. That product replenishes your confidence — the joy of having finished something.

I drew a garden path arrow, though, because that’s the situation I’m in. What do you do when the thing you finished calls your confidence into question, rather than bolstering it? There’s a few candidates:

1. Rest. I hate the school of thought that writing is suffering and you should only do it if you’ve tried everything else. But I love Charles Bukowki’s words on writing: “unless it comes out of / your soul like a rocket, / unless being still would / drive you to madness or / suicide or murder,  / don’t do it.” I like this poem because he’s not saying you can’t succeed, he’s saying success isn’t the point. I’ve grappled with whether or not I want to be a writer, and I will again. But I know that when I don’t write for 36 hours I start really wanting to. Once I step away, I realize I don’t have any choice but to be confident.
2. Plan. I don’t need inspiration to come up with new ideas, because when I was inspired I planned ahead. I have a spreadsheet of ideas that excite me. Start having fun, and you can cheat your way into inspiration without remembering you were supposed to doubt yourself. This does mess up the chart though, since you have to plan in the inspiration phase.
3. Start. Some writers just show up. If that’s you — you have a time, and a place, and maybe even activity that you start at every single day — then you probably don’t need confidence in the first place. Not every day. Developing a routine like this takes time and a certain disposition. It also takes financial security, unless you’re glow-in-the-dark and do your best work at 5 a.m. or 10 p.m.
4. Survival. The counterpoint to financial security! If your life depends on daily creative work, you probably don’t have margin for self-doubt! Fear can be a paralytic as much as it can be a motivator, so I don’t think this works for everybody, but on the plus side if you’re making a steady living from your art then you’ve cleared unimaginably many hurdles already. That’s worthy of confidence in my book.
5. Cheer. Something we can forget as artists is that we’re our first audience. Like, you know how you can watch a TV show and have lots of opinions about how it should have gone? Your art is the one creative thing you can control. In other words, write what you want to read. Then, in your dark winter of the soul, read your own writing and remind yourself how good it is. Someone’s therapist said, you get to decide when each day starts and ends. You decide when a bad day is over. Same with writing: if your last piece doesn’t sparkle with you, pick a new last piece. You’re still the you that wrote it.

Haley Nahman wrote about what she calls “consciously life-affirming” art for her newsletter Maybe Baby. She talks about how consciously life-affirming art — her examples include “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL” graffiti and paralympic athletes in Cheerios commercials — prescribe good-feeling, which is why they’re sort of synonymous with marketing. Corporations “empowering” you to buy their products. She uses this to critique Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is an important thing to do for a movie that I loved but basically never questioned. Whether or not I agree with the critique is sort of irrelevant. But I do take exception to something in her central idea.

Disclaimer that this language helped to identify something that irked her personally, that felt patronizing. Totally valid.

What I think is dangerous as a broader claim, though, is this idea that art has to be unconsciously moving. That trying to be profound is a kind of salesmanship, that art has to be effortless. Some artists — although I’ve never met them — might just spill themselves out and, oops, they’re a genius. But I think everyone else needs some faith in the value of their ideas. Why are we doing all of this if we don’t actually believe that what we create has the capacity to move people?

Nahman mentions a poem she finds on a memorial wall. But it isn’t found poetry, a genre about noticing beauty hidden in everyday language. It’s a poem. Its author summoned the courage to write what they felt in a way that’s beautiful, trusting some reader to come find it in good faith, even though sharing anything of what’s inside yourself is completely embarrassing. What they did was conscious.

The world is full of people who carry that beauty and are careful to never let it out. These people still need someone to tell them it’s okay to believe in what they’re making. I’ve been affected — seriously uplifted from downward places — by “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL” street art. I felt silly. I thought, “Ugh, this is so basic.” It was a rock that said “You are more than a GPA.” But there was a me that needed some low branch to grab, and there was a rock that wasn’t obviously trying to sell me something.

I took it home. It was awkwardly shaped. It didn’t sit on my dresser in a way that displayed its message. So it sat facing straight up, illegible, displaying half that was painted blue and stony half that wasn’t supposed to be seen.

Cats don’t purr because they’re happy, exactly. I heard someone say that it’s more like the cat is saying “don’t go, please.” They just want whatever is happening to keep happening.

Long weekend. Fun weekend! But long weekend. Today I laid down in bed and every cell purred with ease. Maybe that’s also a kind of fun?

I’ll report back after I’ve laid here for, I don’t know, another nine hours or so.

One of the really frustrating corporatisms that I actually find myself wanting to use is “cadence.” Literally it refers to how often a regular meeting takes place, but spiritually it has something to do with rhythm, with rest, with many responsibilities arrange themselves into a pattern.

Another term I like, a double header military-to-nonprofit expression, is “mission creep.” That refers to the slow broadening of ambitions. Yesterday you set out to give hankies to the hankiless, and now you won’t rest until the common cold is eradicated. Cf. power creep and the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, what I lovingly refer to as “Naruto fights Madara on the moon.” (It’s actually Toneri, but I don’t know who that is.)

The opposite problem is nameless, as far as I know: When you wait just a little too long to bring an idea to fruition, and wait just long enough for it to fester. Extreme episodes lead to the total abandonment of the mission.

How do we stop the rot? Hank Green incepted the answer into my mind a looong time ago, and I still think about it often. The answer is to stop when you’re 80% done.

One of Rosanne Bane’s stages of creativity in Around the Writer’s Block. Today I napped.

I noticed the other day, three of the sticky notes on my sticky note wall are “don’t” advice.

• Don’t be somewhere, do something.
• Don’t throw away any of yourself.
• Don’t save your best ideas for later.

Don’t advice is worse than do advice, because there’s many many ways to not do something. Use your best ideas now. Keep all of yourself. Do things.