The Benefit of Just Showing Up

Never mind the fact that I have sixteen half-written blogs to choose from this morning, running across any article about the creative process warrants a stop at the lemonade stand.

(Eat, Love, Pray Author on How We Kill Geniuses by Kim Zetter)

Over the years, I’ve read a couple of really great books about the creative process by writers, dancers, choreographers, photographers, painters, designer, and ever a few actresses thrown in for good measure. Most of these books end up as best sellers. For one, people like me can’t walk past one in a bookstore without marching to the register. Granted I’m biased, but I think creativity captivates people because it has no formula. Beyond sitting at your desk to write everyday, or showing up at the studio to dance, there’s no guarantee that brilliance will come.

In fact, it rarely does.

According to the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there are 175,000 books published in the United States each year on average. Of those, less than 5% ever sell more than 5,000 copies, and the odds of winding up on the New York Times Best Seller list are 220:1. If my Times measuring stick doesn’t convert to your standard, consider this: On any given best seller list, more than five spots might be occupied by unbeatable bestsellers which have been on that list for years!

The point is that a million writers are putting thoughts to paper at any given moment, half of them have the intention of being published, a quarter of them will convince themselves that they deserve to be published, less than that will convince someone else (who can actually make that happen), 795 lucky writers have a shot at a Times best seller, and in the end, the one who strikes any of us as the creative genius wont even be able to tell us how they did it.

Whether it’s all just smoke and mirrors, divine intervention, hard work, or dumb luck, we'll never really know where creativity blurs to genius. Neither will the artist. Which is why I love this article I ran across yesterday.

If you haven’t already (Ali, Theresa…), read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’m not going to get into any selling points since 99.9% of you have read it. The real story is what happened after it became a huge success. With its success, Gilbert achieved unexpected attention, which she says, was all very nice until people began to wonder how she would ever top her achievement.

“Everywhere I go now people treat me like I’m doomed,” she said.

Following her tremendous success, Gilbert watched as her peers set her smack dab in the middle of their concocted “downhill dilemma.” It was not the way she saw it at all.

Last Thursday, Gilbert gave a speech in California entitled, “How We Kill Our Geniuses.” The idea is that American society kills its geniuses (aka best selling authors, and all types of artists) by demanding super-human powers from them. Gilbert argues that “…instead of seeing the individual as a genius, we should view the brilliance as a gift from an unknowable outside source –some might call it a muse, others a fairy or god force—that visits us on occasion to participate in an act of creation, and then leaves to help someone else.”

She received a full standing ovation for her talk from an audience of people who, according to Kim Zetter at Wired, “generally don’t give in to beliefs about muses, fairies and god forces.”

I’ve absolutely heard this theory before. In fact, I’m sure that it’s a mindset prescribed to artists for the same reason doctors prescribe Ambien. This type of thinking takes some of the pressure off someone trying to put everything they have into a creative endeavor. Renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp says that you can walk around every day hoping to get hit by a bolt of lightning (metaphorically speaking), but unless you hike up to the top of a hill, it’s less likely to happen. Okay, I’m sure her metaphor is a bit less gruesome, but she describes it as lightning, nonetheless.

It’s all about the legwork on our “mortal” end of things (if we’re talking divine intervention, that is). Gilbert said in her speech that she ran into a severe case of writer’s block while writing Eat, Pray, Love and resolved that if the book didn’t turn out to be as good, it wasn’t going to be entirely her fault. “So if you want [the book] to be better,” she said aloud to whatever entity it was that usually helped her, “then you’ve got to show up and do your part of the deal. But I’ll keep writing anyway, because that’s my job. And I’d like the record to report today that I showed up.”

Just do your job, Gilbert says. Show up everyday. Hike to the top of the highest point for inspiration –whatever it may be that positions you in the right place every day so that when the lightning/god force/220:1 probability/transcendent state/muse/fairy/inspiration decides to bless you, it will know exactly where you are.

I read Stephen King’s book On Writing when I was in high school, so I’ll end with my favorite quote:

“Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

...Awaiting Vermillion

Nothing makes me lose my voice faster than pouring my passionate little heart out to a near stranger over a lousy brass band.

Someone made the mistake of telling me that James is a writer. Not just any writer, James is a techno-terrified writer who reminded me so much of my pre-blogging-days self that I decided to convert him. Don’t worry, I said, blogging is easy. Then before I knew what was happening, I placed my hand on his shoulder, looked my newfound friend (of a friend) square in the eyes, and told him that someone out there cares about what he has to say.

I realized after our conversation that I may be responsible for giving birth to the world’s ten millionth sports blogger –and for that I will be very sorry.

That night I saw a touch of my own once-upon-a-writer's insecurity in James. When I’m not out shamelessly promoting Flirtationships at my new book club, or jotting notes down on Pearl Street Pub cocktail napkins, or mass-polling my friends across the country on g-chat, I sometimes wonder if I have anything worth saying at all. In these second-guessing moments I take comfort in a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson said that, “Every artist was once an amateur.” Simply put, you’ve got to start somewhere and it may not be pretty.

As in many quests for guidance, my musings led to the Google search bar in the upper corner of my computer screen. I thought to myself, James and I can't possibly be the only writers in history to have felt this way. (I realize I’m putting words into James’ mouth at this point, but let’s just call it a hunch). Discouragingly, my search for “writers + insecurity” turned up little more than ten sites with the same article. Worthless as it may be, I found a diamond in the rough(ly edited advice):

“Advice Tip Number 5: Ignore the Rules. Rules can be intimidating; intimidation a shortcut to insecurity. You may not know precisely when to use a comma and when to use parentheses, but that decision will never equal the importance of a good idea. We first need broad strokes to lend foundation. We wash our world in red, blue, yellow, and green. Chartreuse and vermillion come later.”

The advice is not nearly as succinct as my man Emerson, but still a valuable gem.

Speaking of treasures, one Christmas a friend of mine gave me a book so full of gems that Queen Elizabeth might have mistaken it for a crown. The book is Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. For those of you who don’t know Twyla, she is a world-class choreographer, and a disciplined soldier of the arts. She has choreographed more than 135 dances, five Hollywood movies, directed and choreographed three Broadway shows, written two books, and won so many awards you’d be warranted to stand up, quit reading this blog, and swear off potato chips forever.

I can honestly say that I’ve never read a book as slowly as that spring of 2008. When I opened to the first page I felt like a dry sponge sitting next to a kitchen faucet, and once I started, I could hardly get through two pages before I could absorb no more. I probably read The Creative Habit in 271 three-page sessions over the course of a year --I loved that book so much. Now whenever I think of my own creative process (or stick on a hang-up), her graceful wisdom comes to mind.

The exercises sprinkles throughout The Creative Habit are designed to sharpen one's creative process, from movement to perception,or any medium from dance to oil-on-canvas. True to “Anonymous Tip Number 5,” I started practicing the following exercise verbatim, until only recently discovering its vermillion, so to speak. It's simple. Twyla suggests sitting somewhere where you can observe another person from a distance, and making a list of their first 30 movements. The exercise draws your attention to the details and focuses your descriptive skills.

To put it lightly, my own “exercise” strays from the example. For instance, I’ve collected six 1” scraps of paper and four cocktail napkins in the past two weeks, each with its own blog idea scribbled to varyious degrees of legibility. I think to myself, this will make a really [insert adjective] blog tomorrow, but the funny part is that I haven’t written about a single one of those scribbles.

When I look at the scrap of paper the next day, I end up writing about something to my left from the night before, something that happened off screen, but never what happened right in front of me. Either way, my habit of writing something down, or as it turns out writing anything down, sharpens my attention to the setting ...if not the right scene. I'm clearly on to something here, but like a toddler putting her shoes on the wrong feet, I've got a few kinks to work out.

The moral of the story? If every artist was once an amateur, then who’s to say a quirk won’t make yourmethod work?

Dedicated to James.

My State of Being Convinced

I shot awake at 4:30 a.m. last Thursday, for no reason at all, and lay in bed waiting for the sensor spotlight outside the front door to shut off. I routinely imagine a burglar barging through the glass front door, all the while knowing it was probably a squirrel that set it off. When the light switched off again, I focused on the sound of footsteps in the room above my head. Dr. Thomas Fraser III, I imagined, clambering around for the first cigarette of the day. A man at the mercy of medical emergencies, he is no stranger to 4 a.m.

When you start your day in the wee hours like that, 1 p.m. can feel like the twilight zone. I dreaded that surreal feeling, and debated whether to try to sleep again or get a jump-start on my day. One by one, lists and ambitions and frustrations of the day crept into my head until I swam in an impossible sea of to-dos. Without exhaustion to put my mind to rest, I threw the covers off and woke up to the icebox known as my basement apartment.

At a loss for what to do with my morning, I figured that I would jump in the shower and head to work sooner than planned. There, I could sit at my computer with a hot cup of coffee and write for a few hours before anyone else arrived. I really hadn’t written anything in weeks, which apparently drives this writer to the brink of 4 a.m. insanity.

Though it sounded like a good plan, in reality I moseyed around the apartment for an hour and a half. When I had listened to the same Headline News loop a third and final time, I left for the office. For the first time in the history of any job, I was the first employee to arrive. They are all going to think something’s wrong with me, I thought. Once inside I cranked the heater, brewed a knock-your-socks-off pot of coffee, and sat down at my computer. By then it was 7:30. I had just enough time to check my email and type a sentence when my early bird coworker bounced through the door.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. Just like I knew she would. Everything was fine, I told her, and though she suggested a few scenarios with her eyebrows raised, she guessed nowhere near my real worry.

Three hours later I found myself sitting in her office, confessing. I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but private isn’t one of them. It’s like clockwork, I explained to her. Every so often --and I’m not even sure how often, just that it’s happened before, I get this unbelievably anxious-restless feeling. I can barely recognize that it’s happening at first, only that I become entirely preoccupied with questioning myself about the tantalizing direction of my 25-year old existence. Before I know it I’m analyzing how well I’m contributing to the things I’m passionate about (fashion, writing, politics, design, art…) in my life.

Then I scrutinize, criticize, bully, and beat myself up in comparison to the people I admire. How will I ever get there? How am I living for the things that I love? Am I surrounding myself with people who inspire me or merely fill empty space? Is my job, is my lifestyle too safe? Am I taking the necessary risks to be the artist I hope to become? Have I exposed myself to the right environments, the right people? When will I dare to chase my impossible dreams? And when will I know the time is right? …Am I doing enough? …Am I doing anything at all? And the questions keep coming…

It’s almost like a creative state of heat –a desperate, insecure, fragmented search for reassurance. This state of mind is like a pothole on the path to envisioning my dreams, designed to trip me up and throw me off course (ironically, the same state of mind has the ability to wake me from my dreams at 4 a.m.). For several nauseating days, I go through the motions of working, eating, and sleeping, while my mind wallows in a self-depreciating muck. It is a test against my worst fears of failure. My mind tries my body with restless nights, and for a moment, doubt paralyzes every artistic bone in my body.

Thinking back on the times I’ve felt this way, it’s been onset by a long, creative dry spell, that’s finally relieved by my obsession with a new idea, perspective or project. The return to sobriety after that makes me feel more focused and alive than before. On the other side of this intoxicating insecurity is a burst of confidence in myself, and I think that’s called conviction.

CON–VIC–TION [kuhn-vik-shuhn] –noun. An unshakable belief in something without need for proof or evidence. Lindsey's state of convincing herself that she can save enough money to move to New York and get a job in the publishing industry.

Conviction must be what separates creative minds that succeed from creative minds that fade into envy and once-was. I think an artist’s misguided conviction can be misinterpreted as egotism, vanity, or pride –when, in fact, it is the most important tool for survival. What do artists have if not the tools to convince the world of their worth? And where would the conviction be without the confidence to persuade them self? As jewelry designer, Robert Lee Morris, once said, “It’s good to see that kind of conviction [in a young artist], because you’re going to need a lot of it.”

I had a lot of questions to answer for myself last week, so maybe it makes sense that my coworker thought that something was wrong. I can tell you this: to an artist, even if nothing is wrong, it can take a whole lot of conviction to believe that you are right.

I Heart Art

Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to hear that I’m reading four different books right now in addition to the Obama Newsweek that arrived in my mailbox Saturday. It's not my glowing overachiever style, it's more of a short attention span reading style. But I’ve got the literary spectrum pretty well covered: two classic novels about life, a historical nonfiction saga about JFK, an incendiary memoir on sexual politics, and an artsy coffee table book collection of interviews called Influence.

I’ve been anxious to write about the Influence interviews since I picked up the book last week. It is a collection of interviews with creative visionaries who have made their mark in many mediums, from oils to interiors, and on many generations of artists in the twenty first century. To me, it is a brilliant attempt to proliferate the ideals, thoughts, theories, and design processes of these incredible interviewees.

I think the last time I was this excited about a book was when a friend gave me The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp last Christmas. And, true to form, I’ve devoured each book with an insatiable desire to understand the creative force. I also watched The Discovery Channel’s Unsolved History: The Chicago Fire from Netflicks last week --just to get all my nerdy skeletons out of the closet.

To the point: there is a part of the interview with Francisco Costa when he and the interviewer are discussing a little concept called “trusting your instincts.” The interviewer tells Costa, “I don’t read any magazines. I really just try to stay in my world and figure out what I want, what makes me happy. I’ve got to trust my instincts. I really try to block out all the media and all the press, magazines, everything. At the end of the day I’m with myself, and I feel like that’s the way I’ve been able to move forward.”

I stinking love it. Not in the isolationist sense, but I was literally thinking about this the other day. I was thinking to myself, “Self, when have been the most creative times in your life? And how can I recreate that feeling?” The answer is two things: confidence and (lack of) funding.

When I think back, one of the most creative, imaginative phases of my life happened during my junior and senior years of high school. It was the perfect storm of new found driver’s license independence, local thrift stores, style experimentation, fearlessness, and naivete. As managing editor of layout and design for the school newspaper, I was the queen of my own little world. Part of my job was to write a weekly column and, by god, it was my time to preach to the people. (Read: awkward Ayn Rand phase where I’m pretty sure no one knew what the hell I was talking about --including myself). The point is that I felt like the first person in the world who thought of driving downtown Indianapolis on a Sunday afternoon to search for thrift store treasures in the all-black neighborhoods. No one knew me there for certain, and no one at school knew where I was shopping for vintage duds. I could lose myself for hours sifting through costume jewelry cases, and my exposure to that world gave me a chance to develop my own style over time (while my classmates were shopping at the mall). And my own sense of confidence.

I was voted Best Dressed by my classmates at the end of Senior year and they presented me with a cheesy plaque. I gave the plaque to the owner of my favorite thrift store as a nod to all the “friends and family” discounts they had given me over the years. Though, looking back, maybe what I should’ve done was give the owner a new CD to play in the store. I stopped there when I was in town last July, and I swear the same Doors album has been playing since 2002.

The second element is a catch-22: money. When I didn’t have my own money to shop at department stores or afford a pair of shoes in every color, I seemed to do more with less. The process of asking my mom for money in high school and instead being sent back to my closet to see if I “already had something like that,” prompted hours of dress-up behind closed doors. I can literally remember standing in my closet, looking at my clothes with a pair of scissors in my hand, ready to deconstruct something I already had.

I experienced one of these maniac moments once while my grandmother was visiting. I remember cutting up a peach-colored dress and hastily sewing it back together in time to have a new skirt for the night. Embaressed of my mom and grandmother's reaction, I tiptoed down the hardwood stairs in my A-line(ish) skirt, and ragged-hem tank top. “Oooooh, look at you,” they humored me. “Turn around, and let us see what you did. Wasn’t that a dress before?” I smiled and twirled, and just as I grabbed my purse to scurry out the door, my grandmother stopped me. “Waaaait a second,” the master seamstress said. “Look at this crooked hem in the back, it goes clear from one diagonal end to the other. Where do you think you’re going dressed like that, young lady?” Needless to say, I'll never make a decent tailor without some training.

So, sure, I still express myself through fashion, it’s just that life goes by at a different pace when you’re older. Suddenly, I don't have the time or energy to play dress-up in my closet after a long day at work --much less hem a pair of pants. It's easier to walk into Banana Republic and grab a sweater off the shelf then spend hours digging through moth-ball remains. Searching for inspiration is such an active process that most days, it's easier to let someone else do the work. Eventually, the process is unconscious. I can pick up a magazine at the grocery store or watch an hour of TV to appreciate the end-result of someone else's imaginative process ...say, Marc Jacobs?

Soon my focus wanders off into places where other artists are going ...their vision, the things that inspire them. When an artist becomes more concerned about the creativity around them, they've lost their authenticity. And I don’t feel much like an artist when I don't have a vision. If best creative state of mind means living the way I used to (minus the braces), I'll need to slow down (spend more time alone in seedy thrift stores?), set aside time to indulge my ideas, and surround myself with people who encourage me to create. As Bob Colacello once said, "Real creativity is being true to yourself and getting people to go with you. That's influence."