The Artist's Way (17 page)

Stuck and stymied, Alan described his block this way: “I try to play and I hear myself, and what I can do is so far away from what I want to do that I cringe.” (And then quit.)

Working on his creative recovery, Alan began by allowing himself the luxury of buying a new recording a week. He stopped making music work and started making it fun again. He was to buy crazy recordings, not just high art. Forget high-minded aspirations. What sounded like fun?

Alan began exploring. He bought gospel, country and western, Indian drum music. A month of this and he impulsively bought a set of practice sticks at the music store. He let them lie and let them lie and …

Three months later, Alan was drumming on the handlebars of his exercise bike while rock and roll blasted through his Walkman. Two months later, he cleared a space in the attic and acquired a secondhand drum kit.

“I thought my wife and daughter would be embarrassed by how bad I was,” he explains. Catching himself in his blaming, he cops, “Actually, I was the one who was embarrassed, but now I'm just having fun with it and actually sounding a little better to myself. For an old guy, I'd say my chops are coming back.”

For Laura, a dime-store set of watercolor paints was her first foray into luxury. For Kathy, it was a deluxe Crayola set, “the kind my mother would never get me. I let myself do two drawings the first night, and one of them was a sketch of me in my new life, the one I am working toward.”

But for many blocked creatives, it takes a little work to even
imagine
ourselves having luxury. Luxury is a learned practice for most of us. Blocked creatives are often the Cinderellas of the world. Focused on others at the expense of ourselves, we may even be threatened by the idea of spoiling ourselves for once.

“Don't try to let go of Cinderella,” my writer friend Karen advises. “Keep Cinderella but focus on giving yourself the glass slipper. The second half of that fairy tale is great.”

What we are talking about when we discuss luxury is very often a shift in consciousness more than flow—although as we acknowledge and invite what feels luxurious to us, we may indeed trigger an increased flow.

Creative living requires the luxury of time, which we carve out for ourselves—even if it's fifteen minutes for quick morning pages and a ten-minute minibath after work.

Creative living requires the luxury of space for ourselves, even if all we manage to carve out is one special bookshelf and a windowsill that is ours. (My study has a window shelf of paperweights and seashells.) Remember that your artist is a youngster and youngsters like things that are “mine.” My chair. My book. My pillow.

Designating a few things special and yours alone can go a long way toward making you feel pampered. Chinatown anywhere offers a beautiful teacup and saucer for under five dollars. Secondhand stores often have one-of-a-kind china plates that make an afternoon snack a more creative experience.

Much of what we do in a creative recovery may seem silly. Silly is a defense our Wet Blanket adult uses to squelch our artist child. Beware of
silly
as a word you toss at yourself. Yes, artist dates
are
silly—that's the whole point.

Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play.

For the next week you will be discovering how you spend your money. Buy a small pocket notepad and write down every nickel you spend. It doesn't matter what it is for, how tiny the purchase, how petty the amount. Petty cash is still cash.

Each day, date a page and count—what you bought, what you spent, where your money went, whether it was for groceries, lunch in a diner, a cab ride, subway fares, or a loan to your brother. Be meticulous. Be thorough. And be nonjudg-mental. This is an exercise in self-observation—
not
self-flagellation.

You may want to continue this practice for a full month or longer. It will teach you what you value in terms of your spending. Often our spending differs from our real values. We fritter away cash on things we don't cherish and deny ourselves those things we do. For many of us, counting is a necessary prelude to learning creative luxury.

Complete the following phrases.

TASKS

CHECK-IN 

The ability to listen is a skill we are honing with both our morning pages and our artist dates. The pages train us to hear past our Censor. The artist dates help us to pick up the voice of inspiration. While both of these activities are apparently unconnected to the actual act of making art, they are critical to the creative process.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down. The directions are important here.

If we are trying to
think
something
up,
we are straining to reach for something that's just beyond our grasp, “up there, in the stratosphere, where art lives on high….”

When we
get
something
down,
there is no strain. We're not doing; we're getting. Someone or something else is doing the doing. Instead of reaching for inventions, we are engaged in listening.

When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon
surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as “The brush takes the next stroke.” In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. It is as though all the stories, painting, music, performances in the world live just under the surface of our normal consciousness. Like an underground river, they flow through us as a stream of ideas that we can tap down into. As artists, we drop down the well into the stream. We hear what's down there and we act on it—more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art.

A friend of mine is a superb film director who is known for his meticulous planning. And yet he often shoots most brilliantly from the seat of his pants, quickly grabbing a shot that comes to him as he works.

These moments of clear inspiration require that we move into them on faith. We can practice these small leaps of faith daily in our pages and on our artist dates. We can learn not only to listen but also to hear with increasing accuracy that inspired, intuitive voice that says, “Do this, try this, say this….”

Most writers have had the experience of catching a poem or a paragraph or two of formed writing. We consider these finds to be small miracles. What we fail to realize is that they are, in fact, the norm. We are the instrument more than the author of our work.

Michelangelo is said to have remarked that he released David from the marble block he found him in. “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through,” said Jackson Pollock. When I teach screenwriting, I remind my students that their movie already exists in its entirety. Their job is to listen for it, watch it with their mind's eye, and write it down.

The same may be said of all art. If painting and sculptures wait for us, then sonatas wait for us; books, plays, and poems wait for us, too. Our job is simply to get them down. To do that, we drop down the well.

Some people find it easier to picture the stream of inspiration as being like radio waves of all sorts being broadcast at all times.

With practice, we learn how to hear the desired frequency on request. We tune in to the frequency we want. Like a parent, we learn to hear the voice of our current brainchild among the other children's voices.

Once you accept that it is natural to create, you can begin to accept a second idea—that the creator will hand you whatever you need for the project. The minute you are willing to accept the help of this collaborator, you will see useful bits of help everywhere in your life. Be alert: there is a second voice, a higher harmonic, adding to and augmenting your inner creative voice. This voice frequently shows itself in synchronicity.

You will hear the dialogue you need, find the right song for the sequence, see the exact paint color you almost had in mind, and so forth. You will have the experience of finding things—books, seminars, tossed-out stuff—that happen to fit with what you are doing.

Learn to accept the possibility that the universe is helping you with what you are doing. Become willing to see the hand of God and accept it as a friend's offer to help with what you are doing. Because many of us unconsciously harbor the fearful belief that God would find our creations decadent or frivolous or worse, we tend to discount this creator-to-creator help.

Try to remember that God is the Great Artist. Artists like other artists.

Expect the universe to support your dream. It will.

Tillie Olsen correctly calls it the “knife of the perfectionist attitude in art.” You may call it something else.
Getting
it
right,
you may call it, or
fixing
it
before
I
go
any
further.
You may call it
having
standards.
What you should be calling it is
perfectionism.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.
Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”

The perfectionist fixes one line of a poem over and over—until no lines are right. The perfectionist redraws the chin line on a portrait until the paper tears. The perfectionist writes so many versions of scene one that she never gets to the rest of the play. The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.

The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain. The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist's creative household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued with a white-glove approach: “
Mmm
. What about this comma? Is this how you spell …?”

For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone.

Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outline it, see where it's going.

And where is it going? Nowhere, very fast.

The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, “This is pretty good. I think I'll just keep going.”

To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again.

No. We should not.

“A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places,” said Paul Gardner. A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity—letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.

We've all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining. The success of a creative recovery hinges on our ability to move out of the head and into action. This brings us squarely to risk. Most of us are practiced at talking ourselves out of risk. We are skilled speculators on the probable pain of self-exposure.

“I'll look like an idiot,” we say, conjuring images of our first acting class, our first hobbled short story, our terrible drawings. Part of the game here is lining up the masters and measuring our baby steps against their perfected craft. We don't compare our student films to George Lucas's student films. Instead, we compare them to
Star
Wars.

We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly. Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success. Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled, smothered, despairing, bored. But, yes, we do feel safe. And safety is a very expensive illusion.

In order to risk, we must jettison our accepted limits. We must break through “I can't because …” Because I am too old, too broke, too shy, too proud? Self-defended? Timorous?

Usually, when we say we can't do something, what we mean is that we won't do something unless we can guarantee that we'll do it perfectly.

Working artists know the folly of this stance. There is a common joke among directors: “Oh, yeah. I always know exactly how I should direct the picture—after I'm done directing it.”

As blocked artists, we unrealistically expect and demand success from ourselves and recognition of that success from others. With that as an unspoken demand, a great many things remain outside our sphere of possibility. As actors, we tend to allow ourselves to be typecast rather than working to expand our range. As singers, we stay married to our safe material. As
songwriters, we try to repeat a formula hit. In this way, artists who do not appear blocked to the outside eye experience themselves as blocked internally, unable to take the risk of moving into new and more satisfying artistic territory.

Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen. “If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I would try …”

In the movie
Raging
Bull,
boxer Jake La Motta's manager-brother explains to him why he should shed some weight and fight an unknown opponent. After an intricate spiel that leaves La Motta baffled, he concludes, “So do it. If you win, you win, and if you lose, you win.”

It is always that way with taking risks.

To put it differently, very often a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it. There is something enlivening about expanding our self-definition, and a risk does exactly that. Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges. Viewed this way, running a marathon increases your chances of writing a full-length play. Writing a full-length play gives you a leg up on a marathon.