Slow Starts

I start very slowly, and don't actually begin to write the book until I can't stand not to write it. This method derives from my sense that one can start a book too soon, but almost never too late. (Stevan Polansky in GlimmerTrain)

We writers and artists almost always have a bad word to say for ourselves, and often it is on our inability to get started on a project. Sometimes, even if we have a deadline, even if our food and rent depends on it, we just cannot begin. We have an idea, yes. We may even think it is a pretty good idea. But it isn't ready. We aren't ready, and we aren't sure we will ever be ready.

How do we know when to begin a project? Steven Polansky says it all when he says, "one can start a book too soon, but almost never too late." (Of course, we haven't heard from his editors on the subject.) But perhaps the reason most of us have drawers full of unfinished manuscripts, basements full of half-done canvases, hard drives full of video and photographs we're not sure about and scripts without an ending, is not because we don't have the will to finish, but because, driven by our own anxiety to begin, we started too soon.

Great ideas may seem sometimes to spring out of nowhere and demand our full attention, but the truth is, they've probably been stewing for some time, in some form, before they assume a final shape. Our minds take a little bit from here and a little bit from there, throw in a dash of this and that, do a rain dance to the muses for inspiration, and only then hold the concoction under our noses and insist - okay, okay, this is how it will be! Pay attention and get going! And it is in that moment when we really do have to build up some steam and prepare to chug away.

This isn't like waiting to be hit on the head by an apple (although one can argue that Mr. Newton's inspiration, as well, owed a lot to creative stewing.) We have to feed the process, with reading, or going to galleries, or watching films, and thinking, and sleeping, and possibly striking up a chat with the morose person sitting next to us at Starbucks who is also waiting for his or her moment. If you and nature are on close personal terms, you can go take long walks, and even try sitting under a welcoming tree.

While you are doing all this, you must make the attempt not to torture and threaten your idea into existence, but to gently lure it out, with the promise that it will have your full attention and its moment in the sun. Be kind to your idea, and be kind to yourself. And when, finally, it manifests itself in full - or at least close enough to be getting on with - don't be afraid to jump in and move forward. Institute your creative ritual; protect your creative time; let it be as central to your life as it can be without completely disrupting the rest of your life. It's almost never too late to start, but when it's time, it's time, and it's a moment to savor before you begin some of the hardest work of your life.

Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray

I saw an incredible work last night—Bill T. Jones’s dance piece about Lincoln, FONDLY DO WE HOPE…FERVENTLY DO WE PRAY. It was presented as part of the Lincoln Center Festival at Rose Hall, one of the 3 new Lincoln center venues at the Time Warner Center three blocks away from the rest of Lincoln Center. It’s hard to categorize this work, because it includes heavy doses of song and spoken narrative in addition to dance (though I’ve been told he frequently does that). Is it a one-act musical? A piece of performance art? Moving sculpture? Obviously this doesn’t matter, but the old aesthetics professor in me loves to categorize things.

It begins (after a sung prelude) with a woman performing a solo dance on a separate oval stage projected out diagonally a few yards from the main stage. As she dances, a voice recites a list of body parts—down to the minutest details (eyebrows, eye lashes, irises…). This recitation occurs at least three times during the piece, including at the very end. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of it (or if that even matters), but it suggested three different things to me by the end of the evening. The first, coming as it did at the very beginning of the piece, was a variation on a yoga class, where we’re asked to release each body part in succession until the body is fully relaxed. This seemed appropriate for both the audience and the dancer, since we were transitioning into a different reality. The second, because this was a piece about Lincoln—and because there was a passing reference to his unique beard—was a coroner’s inventory of the body laid out before him. The third—especially given a slave market scene that occurs about halfway through the piece—was of a slave auctioneer enticing buyers with a list of all that they will acquire when they purchase one of his slaves.

The mystery of this one element of the piece is indicative of the entire work, which is filled with movements, devices, moments that lend themselves to multiple interpretations or defy interpretation altogether. Structurally, it begins with short biographies of random individuals, both living and long dead—all presumably directly or indirectly influenced by Lincoln, including Lincoln himself and his wife, Mary Todd. It then moves into some biography of Lincoln and Mary Todd, reenactments of historical events, including debates, the previously mentioned slave market scene, and the Civil War and a long choreographed section depicting “Another War.” (I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be one of the wars occurring long after the Civil War—WWI? WW2? Vietnam?—or one of our current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or a future war not yet identified. Perhaps it was all of the above.) And then it ends with one last short biography of a 100-year-old woman looking back at history from the vantage point of 2109. Finally, as this same woman dances, we hear the now-familiar recital of body parts.

I’ve probably made the piece sound much more linear than it actually is. There are long stretches of movement where it’s not at all clear what’s happening and where we—joyfully—just study the movement. And that IS the most joyous part of the work—the incredible movement. Jones’s repertoire of movements is astounding. Very few are standard ballet movements. Many are surprising, sensual, athletic—and always fascinating. I was also struck by the individuality of each dancer. At the opposite extreme of choreography, the dancer’s individual body sometimes disappears into the universality of its movements (think of Swan Lake’s swans or La Bayadere’s shades). Here, however, each dancer appears as a profoundly unique presence. No one else could possibly stand in for any of these dancers—they could replace them with their own individual bodies, but they couldn’t stand in for them.

Having said all this, however, I still feel unprepared to say much about this glorious work. I almost need to go back and see it again, since I’m only beginning to get a sense of it—or only beginning to get to know it. I guess you could say we’ve only just had our first date. But as with all great works, I hope I’ll get to spend a lot more time with it.

www.williamfowkes.com

On Creativity Manuals

Lately I am designing and laying out a book about creativity. It is a paying job. And I make the rent as a graphic designer... It is a well meant book, full of examples and research. And I can understand why people want, and need, books that give them permission to express themselves through the arts. If I have any religion, it a feeling that the muse sometimes shows up, takes possession of me, and skews space and time while doing so.

But... so many books on creativity use too much paper validating their approaches in science. Or offer such detailed step-by-step recipes that I sometimes feel the message gets lost. Cheerleaders don't have footnotes. Muses don't fly on wings of statistics. My favorite books inspire me to create by example. Give me Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, and Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. There are more. Brenda Ueland, Ray Bradbury... But what makes each of them effective is the author's ability to take me on the journey with them, and to be there when the muse strikes their prose into unexpected and exhilarating swoops.

And when the less inspiring manuals tell me to contact my inner child or accept that I'm so Special because I'm so Very Sensitive, I shrug. The truth is I write and draw because it feels good. I like wrestling with words. I like making lines and smudges. Something happens when I allow myself to play. It could happen to you.

Reading, chocolates, reading

I have my addictions, you have yours.

I start out in withdrawal. Irate, jumpy, focusing on negative probable futures fueled by negative actual bank balance... Then I take the object of compulsion--a book--and semi-recline on a pile of pillows. Water and some fruit or chocolates are in easy grazing distance, and after looking at the title page I begin to read. If I am lucky the first paragraph or poem is so good I stop thinking something like this:

"Hmmm, Garamond the usual choice, but here it is handled nicely with the subtle caps and small caps of titles, great white space, and that interesting dingbat next to the folio--is that one of the ornaments from Jenson?"

If I'm no longer thinking like a designer, I'm reading, and actively shaping the author's world in my mind.
An hour later, the plate of strawberries is gone, the water cup empty, and I resurface. I'm calm, relaxed, excited by the story or craft, and most importantly, not snarling.

I didn't have time to read today. Hear my roar. Snort.

How Much Time Do You Spend Writing?

It’s a scary subject, time, and the lack thereof haunts our lives. As an exercise, I recently did a Time Log of all of my activities for a month. (This was recommended in Randy Pausch’s extraordinarily moving lecture on time management, given at the University of Virginia shortly before his death.) I tracked everything I did, in quarter or half hour increments, for the month of April. (And trust me, this took some commitment—you pretty much have to report in every hour or so if you don’t want to forget what it was you were just doing.)

I actually undertook this exercise, I think, with the idea of beating myself up about how much time I was wasting on TV and email and, okay, Tetris (will I ever crack 250,000 points?) And yes, there were definitely a number of hours wasted on Bravo TV that I will never get back again. But what really surprised me was how much of my time I spent reading. I’d been pretty convinced that I was no longer the reader I had been all through my teens and 20’s, when I was cutting a swathe through the Great Books, as well as science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, and every biography of Virginia Woolf ever written.

Maybe April was just a month of good books coming my way. But I read and I read – much more than I wrote, and even, very surprisingly, more than I watched TV. I read on the bus, and I read before bed, and I read all weekend long. And what was I reading? Literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, lots of newspapers and online news sites, and every book on the psychology of happiness and creativity ever written (well, maybe not every, there sure are a lot of them these days.) From this, you may guess that I am a lot more cheerful now than I was in my teens and twenties, and you would be right.

I could have still beaten myself up because I was reading more than I was writing, but I chose instead to believe that I was fueling my writing and my creativity with my reading. I think what you discover when you track your time is what is important to you. And, apparently, reading is important to me. As an exercise, I recommend it highly. Just pick a short month. February would be good. Because it takes a lot of time, and time is something we need to spend very, very carefully.

Just Do It?

Even before Nike adopted this phrase, it was extremely prevalent in our culture. It has a nice ring – just do it – forget all your hesitations and second thoughts, stop procrastinating, pull yourself together, and take the leap! Perhaps someone has even told you this about a creative project (or career) you’ve been thinking of undertaking, or a ritual you’ve been trying to establish.

Fine for Olympic skateboarders, but maybe it doesn’t work quite that way for you. It sure doesn’t work that way for me. And according to psychologist James Prochaska, it doesn’t work that way for most people. Studies done by Dr. Prochaska at UCLA have demonstrated that the process of actually doing something new—making a behavior change—begins in “pre-contemplation” – you aren’t even sure what it is you are thinking of doing yet—maybe you are asking yourself some questions, doing some self-exploration. The next phase is contemplation – you’ve identified the action you are thinking of taking, but you are sitting on the fence about it, weighing the pros and cons.

If you can convince yourself to act, you proceed to preparation—take a few small steps. You go out and buy the watercolor set or camera; you get that new laptop you’ve been thinking about for two years; you borrow a guitar from a friend and strum a tentative chord or two; you tweak your resume. Or you meet with a new potential collaborator, file away or store all remnants of your last project to carve out some working space, and clear a little time on your calendar.
Then, finally, having thoroughly convinced yourself it is possible, you may actually be ready to do it. Which isn’t to say you will keep doing it—if you’re trying to do something like set up a daily writing or practicing ritual, for instance, the UCLA studies say you need 4-6 months to trust that as a real change. Otherwise, back to contemplation!

This isn’t to say that you won’t wake up tomorrow at 3 AM with the greatest inspiration of your life, cast the covers aside, and start working on it immediately. In that case, please, Just Do It! But I’m willing to bet that in the months before, you have already set the stage for that creative breakthrough, and the materials and resources you need in that moment will be mysteriously close to hand.

Why It's Not So Much Fun to Finish

Posted by Deborah Atherton

When we are completely absorbed in a creative project, we experience some of the deepest engagement, and through it, happiness, that human beings ever manage to find. And then, suddenly, it’s over. The show opens. We finish editing the film. We place the last delicate stroke on the mural. We end the song on the final, perfect note. Or, as in my case last week, we add the last chapter to a novel we’ve been working on for a few years. Most likely, we experience one glorious moment of accomplishment and completion. And then?

And then, very likely, we plunge into a very, very dark moment. We become convinced that we will never have another idea, that our old ideas are all rotten, anyway, and, quite possibly, that critics everywhere, as well as everyone we know, will despise our completed work, if, in fact anyone ever sees or hears it. I like to call this post-gig depression (and no, you will not find it in the DSM.) Virginia Woolf suffered terribly in these moments – completing her books sometimes drove her to the verge of suicide. Most of us experience it in a milder form. But oh, we do experience it.

Perhaps somewhere out there is the artist who completes his or her work with total confidence, and with the assurance that all who ultimately experience it will love it. I myself do not know such an artist, but surely, among the many on this planet, a few live their lives out this way. But most of us run into a period of questioning and anxiety after the initial excitement of completion. (And this is even before all the other people with an opinion weigh in.)

I can’t give you a magical elixir that will help you through this (although some swear by Jack Daniels) but I can assure you that this, too, shall pass. Some artists we interviewed have told us that they get through it by jumping right into the next project, and not giving themselves time or space to question (and some artists, of course, labor under constant deadlines, so don’t always have the luxury of time under a dark cloud.) Some require a mourning period. I myself turned to some very good friends and coaches, who spoke to me about the inner critic and the shadow self, and the necessity of acknowledging the doubting dark side of the creative impulse. (And I’ll try to talk more about this later on, as I learn more myself!)

I think what we face, at the moment we finish, is the resistance that has been dogging us all along, surging for one final push to retain the status quo. And as artists, we have a responsibility to work through it and keep on. And to remember that, not too far in the future, we’ll be having that lovely, “Is it 3 AM already? I didn’t notice” feeling again, which is, let me remind you and myself, one of the best feelings in the world.