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.

(back to) Shaped Poems

OK, I know it is sort of silly to write poems in shapes, like angel wings or diamond rings. I get that it has the tang of the effete, as in a goose quill humanist script penned by a hand encased in an ink-flecked flocked-velvet cuff. The words locked in the vise of a vase or crammed in a crate... but... I digress...
I can't stop.

Calligrams. Word warps. Shape shifters. Visual poems. What would you call them?

And like anything I take time with, the obvious is fading and I'm considering my rules of play with this enterprise. I won't call it "form" since the form is the shape. So what are my rules?

HOW TO WRITE A SHAPED POEM

1. Like a joke, move beyond the obvious punchlines and tame set-ups. Go ahead, write the first ideas that come to you and agree they are lame and write more. And more after that. Riff on a shape. Aim for exploring the unexpected.
2. Use meter, rhyme (both internal and slant), and pauses to make the poem read aloud as if it existed full and complete outside it's assigned shape.
3. Accept that line breaks are more arbitrary once the poem is packaged, so build suspense in other ways.
4. The "thingness" of the shape must be used to flavor the poem but not direct it.
5. After many a rewrite, give up when the foot won't naturally fit the shoe, it just won't be worth the blister.
6. Accept that only 1 in 25 shaped efforts will be worthy to move on for consideration for publication or inclusion in my as yet unnamed chapbook (soliciting title ideas from friends).
7. Consider the folly of assigning cookie cutter shapes to ideas; shrug, write more.

Get a grip and Flash on the Whoopi

Yesterday Flash needed an assistant to operate a mic at a live event. I am, of course, not world renowned for my skills in audio capture, but game, I am. So imagine me, dressed in black, in the elegant glass-domed Bartos auditorium, pre-show, trying to look like the grip of the century. I occasionally gave a thumbs up to the professional dude filming the event on my left. I suspect he could tell my skills weren't up to his when the mic demonically spun upside down several times and I tripped over the feet of our tripod.

This from the official press release after the event : "Live from the NYPL presented an evening to honor the publication of George Carlin's posthumous “sortabiography” Last Words (written with Tony Hendra)... an evening of warm and lively remembrances of late comedian George Carlin on Wednesday, March 24 in the Celeste Bartos Forum. Hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, the tribute featured special appearances by Carlin's family, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Ben Stiller, Amy Stiller, Kevin Smith, Lewis C.K., Dylan Brody, Floyd Abrams, and Lewis Lapham." Not to mention an impressive list of performers playing the role of audience in the front rows, including Steve Martin.

Flash is Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the New York Public Library and she draws responses to the spoken events they host, which are projected onto a screen as she does them. Later, she creates  videos, a.k.a. Conversation Portraits. Last night she tried adding a new approach, by inviting audience members to step up to the mic, tell a joke, and she'd illustrate it for them and the entire audience would see the joke drawn and written in real time and projected over their heads.

Sadly only a few stepped forward to tell their jokes. But given that George Carlin was one of the funniest guys ever, and the main event, who would feel equal to adding their brand of humor as a warm up? Precious few. For those that came forward, I managed to walk them to the mic, press the record button and laugh at their jokes, usually in that order. Luckily Flash had brought a slew of Carlin jokes and illustrated them.

Dressed in her usual black and white patterns, she sat and drew madly, using pens, watercolors, and expressive moves of hand, zoom and paper to make the art of her response the main show for me. Until they ran the Carlin films. Then I was laughing so loudly the video guys will have to edit out my hoots and wheezing snorts. Flash and I laughed until we cried during a live recitation of Carlin one-liners looking at each other the way you do when it is that funny. After, we agreed Carlin was a master of language, a poet of humor, with inner rhyme and rhythm.

Great to see all the Stiller family on stage, not one of them demure. Whoopi is totally natural. Lots of cussing all around. But hey, this is for George Carlin after all. They played his 7 words bit. The lawyer who protected his right to use those words spoke, and everyone said how much he had helped them and other comedians. 

Flash and assistant (me) were invited to the after party! Of course we had to pack up the pens, pencils, duct tape, brushes, cables, earphones, and papers first. When we got there, we didn't see Whoopi. I was so hoping to hear someone introduce Whoopi to Flash. "Flash meets Whoopi!" or "Whoopi meets Flash," Sounds like a vaudeville act. I may need to change my name to a verb soon. Although "Enjamb" (or would that be "N-Jam") doesn't have the same ring, does it?

As I walked in I reminded myself to respond to celebrities like real people and avoid the empty fannish things that can blurt out of my mouth and kill conversation. So over the chopped veggies I recognized performer Caroline Rhea and instead of blathering about Sabrina or The Biggest Loser, I said what I would to someone I didn't know, "Hi, I'm Claudia, what's your name?" because actually, I really didn't remember her name, just her face. We talked about the food, she loaded my plate with carrots and cucumber saying after all the years of catering it was hard for her not to serve. She introduced me to someone I didn't know, Scott Blakeman, saying his classes in improv helped launch her and Jon Stewart's careers. He was both modest and self-assured and has the ability to listen in a way that makes you feel interesting. The three of us had a lovely conversation punctuated with flashes from cameras, which I am guessing, weren't focused on me. I told them about Natalie, just finishing up at Actors Theatre of Louisville and most likely coming to NYC to pursue improv instead of Shakespeare. It is always great the way people who know, give a little start, when you tell them your daughter is in the best acting apprentice program in the country. Like saying junior got into Harvard. We talked about political humor and Scott's role as the liberal minority on Fox. I likened it to my year working at Lehman Brothers with very conservative folks that were smart, often sweethearts, even though their politics were so different than my own. I told them I was a poet and reading my poems was as close to performing as I wanted to get!

I met several editors of the Latham journal (love talking literary press talk), Ben Stiller's good-looking sister Amy, library important persons, and then I met a very very tall woman who told me she is in a tall person's club. I mentioned I was the shrimp of my family, with my 6'4" brothers and daughters of Amazon heights. You aren't short she exclaimed, you must be 5'8" or so. No, really I'm average, just under 5'6". Nooooo, no way, you must have heels on. No, no heels I assured her, I just stand tall. She peered at my sneakers with disbelief. Apparently they serve very tall cakes and record their adventures on very tall newsletters. I felt a bit like Alice in Longerland.

The whole evening was dreamlike actually. I walked Flash back to her studio and we couldn't stop laughing. She has an ability to respin the world and words, I have never heard her use a cliche, ever. We passed the windows of Lord & Taylors featuring spring frocks. "That one, only the skirt is worth wearing," she said, then to the next window "that one, only the color is good," and finally, "in that one only the window is good!"

And then I took the subway home, happy my career as a grip passed without a gripe.