Recently in Creativity Category

I was going to write another post about arrogance and confidence and so on, but @DanielleLaPorte pointed me towards "How To Be As Confident As This Pig" on Josh Hargarne's blog, and I really don't have anything to add to that, so if you're hankerin' to read about ego and confidence and so on in particular, go there and do that. Meanwhile, I'll be writing here about a different yet tangentially-related thing. But if you go off to check out Josh's thing, this one will still be here. Amazing, what they can do nowadays with pixels and tubes and whatnot.

One of the reasons I took my January hiatus was because I needed to take a break from reading about writing, publishing, agents, contracts, Amazon shitting itself, and all of the other things which are necessary bits of knowledge to have while building a career but peripheral to the creative act of writing itself. I was swamped by everyone else's ideas and in danger of losing sight of my own, so I dropped out of sight. It was a good thing to do, and it feels good to discover I was actually missed (here and elsewhere).

I've never been a focused person--at least, I don't think so, other people in my life have disagreed--mainly because my interests and curiosity are broad. This is generally a good quality to have, but can make it difficult to sit still long enough to, say, write a novel. The rest of my life is full of real-life type things that take up time, so I spent January assessing what my own priorities are and figuring out what I needed to do to finish this book I've started. The first thing I decided to do was to stop listening to how other people write. The second thing I decided to do was cut short my nascent efforts to get involved with online writing communities.

Both of those decisions resulted from the same realization: at this point in my life my time is very limited, and I'd reached the point where I needed to discover my methodology and focus entirely on my work. There's a lot of good advice about writing out there, but I've been reading about writing for almost three decades, and the returns have diminished to the point where--right now--it's not worth it. If I'm going to invest time in reading, I'm going to read fiction, not books about fiction.

Some of the advice that's out there has to do with the benefits of community, and I'm sure that for a great many people such involvement is invaluable. But the thing about communities, particularly those built around writing, is that they take up time. You can't really join up without committing yourself to reading the works in progress of others, and thinking critically about them, and offering your thoughtful and constructive opinions. Not, that is, if you expect others to do the same for your work. Unless you're an asshole, there's got to be giving to accompany the taking. I made the decision to prioritize my creative work over that of other people.

But I still needed feedback and criticism. Useful feedback and criticism. I also needed some expert help in getting over my 25,000 word hump. I've got a drawer full of unfinished projects here, and all of them died around the 25,000 word mark. I don't know why, but clearly there is some barrier that I have heretofore lacked sufficient creative steam to either power over or smash through (I call it a hump, see, but it could be a wall...or maybe a pit of some kind, or an expanse of sticky tar with, like...spikes in it...or something...).

In my current situation, there was really only one way to get regular, focused, and useful criticism without any expectation of reciprocation: hire someone to give it to me.

That was a big leap for me, and I don't regret it. I happened to know someone with over two decades in the business, who lived on my side of the continent, who I clicked with--which is vital; you don't want to work with someone whose criticisms are based on their failure to understand rather than your failure to properly express. She's cheaper per hour than my therapist was, she doesn't blow smoke up my ass, and I'm confident that when the time comes to kick said ass, she'll do so. Best money I've ever spent.

I'm not telling you all this by way of advice, because it'd be ridiculous for me to tell you that what you need to do is hire a development editor.¹ However, I'm confident enough to suggest that the key transferable bit of my little process here is the identification of my priorities, the peculiarities of my unique situation, and--most importantly--the honest assessment of my weaknesses. I know what my strengths are, but those aren't what fucks a man up, now are they? Maybe what works for you, your situation, and your weaknesses is gathering a little local group of aspiring writers together and meeting in a dive bar once a week to get drunk and hack each other to literary bits.

What's important is knowing when you've listened enough, and knowing when it's time to start feeding your own creative beast whatever meat it wants, regardless of what any Expert says.

---

¹Just as it's silly for Warren Ellis to say, "If you don’t have some kind of kit for capturing ideas, even if it’s a 50p reporter’s notebook and a pencil from the local shop for local people, you’re doing it wrong." Lots of folks do that, lots of folks recommend doing that (which keeps Moleskine in business), and it works for them. I've always been of the opinion that if I can't remember an idea that came from my own skull it isn't worth remembering, and as I have a prodigious memory, that's worked pretty well for me. So: not doing it wrong, thanks.

Asked why writers were often troubled souls, [neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Lieberman] said that the writing itself may be a reaction to severe emotional problems.

"I am sure that it is one of their motivators to write," he said. "You have to ask yourself what they would be like without the writing.

Well, I know that I certainly feel like crap when I'm not doing it, but there's always the question of whether I feel like crap because I'm not writing, or whether I'm not writing because I feel like crap. Sure, I may become a deity when crafting my tales, but it's a peculiar sort of god who risks descending into neurosis and curtains-drawn depression if he stops creating, isn't it? Did YHWH go on a pill-popping, vodka-snorting bender after he rested on the seventh day? Hell no. He was up bright and early Monday morning creating mankind, planting the garden of paradise, and growing a shitload of trees.

Over the past several days, I've been very aware of output. That is, of all the activities that result from energy and intention flowing from me and out into the world. This includes creative output, but also all of the other things that require focus on something or someone outside of myself. And once I thought about all that was going out, I naturally starting thinking about what was coming in, which includes any sort of energy and intention flowing into me, or simply being focused upon by someone else.

I realized that I haven't had much in the way of input recently, and this may account, somewhat, for my lack of output. Which is not to say that I haven't been putting out--hurrrr--but I haven't been creating as much as I've wanted to. I recorded some vocals yesterday, on a tune that's been bouncing around since late 2007, but I had been intending to start work on a whole new thing, and never quite mustered up the juice to create that new project file in Digital Performer.

This, in turn, brings to mind the volumes of research about the highly social nature of humans and other primates, and how social deprivation turns baby rhesus monkeys into head-rocking basket cases. I haven't been huddled up in a ball in the corner keening and hitting myself in the head with clenched fists, not at all. But I'm very aware that I've got to do something to keep the mental battery packs charged up, whether that's reluctantly consenting to associate with my fellow primates or just leaving the frakking apartment to go look at the goddamn ocean being all blue and wobbly and soothing. Hell, I've got mountains here too, I could drive up one of them and pretend to be master of creation, or at least the portion of it where Oprah lives.

Old habits die hard, and I've observed that creating new ones is, for me, a stop-and-go process. I'll have a swinging few weeks in my new routine, and then I'll get knocked off of it for one reason or another, and it's terribly easy to slide back into the well-worn grooves of prior habits.

Bloody annoying, if you ask me. I blame neural plasticity, and the tastiness of cheese.

Later...

As of 3:28 AM, 528 shiny new words on the monkey story. Broke the deadlock with:

"Did you catch that bit about 'defiling our women?'" the pen wanted to know. "What do you suppose that was about?"

So, take that, creative malaise. I crush you!

...a lunacy of sorts, and enough of a bribe to keep the heart from falling off into nowhere, an attempt to make true what simply cannot be: a controlled grace, constantly upholding, never letting go, never letting down. It is a trick, of course. An attempt to fool the I/eye, to shield us from a simple truth: out in the world, art is graceless and hapless because it is all wrapped up in our surface-ridden bodies, held together by the tangle of imaginings that harbor the self within.

Rebecca Emlinger Roberts
The Art of Looking Down [.PDF excerpt]
The Georgia Review, Fall 2008

The art process itself is the painful thing—the day-to-day struggle to deliver the level of writing I want. In James Lord's A Giacometti Portrait, he quotes the artist's recognition about the burden of trying to work at our highest level: "The very measure of our creative drive is that we longingly dream of one day being free of it." I really understand that. I want to be able to stop when at last I'm satisfied with the work on the page. But the thing is, the art spirit never lets you feel you've done as well as you can do tomorrow.

Maria Flook
Interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson
from The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Inspiration and Discipline

Don't tell anyone, but...the novel.  It's happening again. 1,300 shiny new words, many of which start the work of addressing the Big Big Problems that ground everything to a halt months ago. Shh!

Most of the book takes place in a certain eastern city,  so I'll be there later this week, taking pictures and doing "setting research" to spiff up my recollections of the place. Apparently it'll be raining most of the time I'm there, but that won't stop me from riding around on my bike (yes, I have one that fits in a big purple suitcase, so I'm bringing it along). There will be a visit to the cathedral, perhaps the local clandestine deviant rendezvous spot if it's not all muddied up (for research, not sex), a swing through the queer part of town to observe the natives, and maybe a drink at a particular bar of note if I can manage it, because sometimes I'm nostalgic for events that occurred before I was a blastula.

But really, the best part of this is the energy...creaking creative conduits beginning to flow with idea-juice, or some other overwrought metaphor about actually paying attention to what I intend to do with my life and putting renewed effort into it. Fab!

I will for now ignore the looming Terror of the Middle. I will also take heart from Malcolm Gladwell's piece in last month's New Yorker, titled Late Bloomers.

When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions--before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain's trial-and-error method: "His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again." Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on "Huckleberry Finn" so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Not that I am equating myself with Cézanne or Twain, of course. But there's a great deal of comfort in knowing that people who pay attention to this sort of thing have noted that there's more than one kind of creative process, and that I needn't feel like an abject failure just because I haven't yet hit my stride as I approach the beginning of my fourth decade on the planet.