The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (26 page)

Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.

LINUS PAULING

“I’m too old to go to film school,” I told myself at thirty-five. And when I got to film school I discovered that I was indeed fifteen years older than my classmates. I also discovered I had greater creative hunger, more life experience, and a much stronger learning curve. Now that I’ve taught in a film school myself, I find that very often my best students are those who came to their work late.

“I’m too old to be an actor,” I have heard many students complain—and dramatically, I might add. They are not always pleased when I tell them this is not the case. The splendid actor John Mahoney did not begin acting until he was nearly forty. Ten years into a highly successful career, he is now often booked three films in advance and works with some of the finest directors in the world.

“I’m too old to really be a writer” is another frequent complaint. This is more ego-saving nonsense. Raymond Chandler didn’t publish until the far side of forty. The superb novel
Jules and Jim
was written as a first novel by a man in his seventies.

“I’m too old” is an evasive tactic. It is
always
used to avoid facing fear.

Now let’s look at the other side: “I’ll let myself try it when I’m retired.” This is an interesting side trip on the same ego-saving track. As a culture, we glorify youth and allow our youth the freedom to experiment. And we disparage our old-timers but allow them the right to be a little crazy.

Many blocked creatives tell themselves they are both too old and too young to allow themselves to pursue their dreams. Old and dotty, they might try it. Young and foolish, they might try it. In either scenario, being crazy is a prerequisite to creative exploration. We do not want to look crazy. And trying something like that (whatever it is) at our age (whatever it is) would look nuts.

Yes, maybe.

Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless. We discover that as we engage in a creative recovery. “I felt like a kid,” we may say after a satisfying artist date. Kids are not self-conscious, and once we are actually in the flow of our creativity, neither are we.

“How long would it take me to learn to do that?” we may ask, standing on the sideline of a longed-for activity.

“Maybe a year to be pretty good,” the answer comes back. “It depends.”

As blocked creatives, we like to pretend that a year or even several years is a long, long time. Our ego plays this little trick to keep us from getting started. Instead of allowing ourselves a creative journey, we focus on the length of the trip. “It’s such a long way,” we tell ourselves. It may be, but each day is just one more day with some motion in it, and that motion toward a goal is very enjoyable.

At the heart of the anorexia of artistic avoidance is the denial of process. We like to focus on having learned a skill or on having made an artwork. This attention to final form ignores the fact that creativity lies not in the done but in doing.

“I am writing a screenplay” is infinitely more interesting to the soul than “I have written a screenplay,” which pleases the ego. “I am in an acting class” is infinitely more interesting than “I took an acting class a few years ago.”

In a sense, no creative act is ever finished. You can’t learn to act because there is always more to learn. Arguably, you cannot even direct a film because you will always be redirecting it, even years later. You will know then what you might have done and what you will do next if you keep working. This doesn’t mean that the work accomplished is worthless. Far from it. It simply means that doing the work points the way to new and better work to be done.

Focused on process, our creative life retains a sense of adventure. Focused on product, the same creative life can feel foolish or barren. We inherit the obsession with product and the idea that art produces finished product from our consumer-oriented society. This focus creates a great deal of creative block. We, as working artists, may want to explore a new artistic area, but we don’t see where it will get us. We wonder if it will be good for our career. Fixated on the need to have something to show for our labors, we often deny our curiosities. Every time we do this, we are blocked.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

PAUL CÉZANNE

Our use of age as a block to creative work interlocks with our toxic finished-product thinking. We have set an appropriate age on certain activities: college graduation, going to med school, writing a first book. This artificial ego requirement asks us to be done when what we truly yearn for is to start something.

“If I didn’t think I’d look like a jerk next to the young guys, I’d let myself sign up for an improv class.”

“If my body looked anything the way it did twenty years ago, I’d let myself take that jazzercize class at the Y.”

“If I didn’t think my family would consider me a stupid old fool, I’d start playing the piano again. I still remember some of my lessons.”

If these excuses are beginning to sound flimsy to you, good! Ask yourself if you haven’t employed a few of them. Then ask yourself if you can acquire the humility to start something despite your ego’s reservations.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step.

FILLING THE FORM

What do I mean by
filling the form? I
mean taking the next small step instead of skipping ahead to a large one for which you may not yet be prepared. To be very specific, in order to sell a screenplay, you must first write one. In order to write one, you must come up with an idea and then commit it to paper, a page at a time until you have about 120 pages of script.
Filling the form
means that you write your daily pages. It means that when obsession strikes—as it will—about how the damn thing is not any good, you tell yourself that this is a question for later and turn back to doing what is the next right thing. And that means you write the pages of the day.

Art? You just do it.

MARTIN RITT

If you break a screenplay down into daily increments, that small smattering of writing can get done quickly and promptly—before the dirty laundry. And it can carry you through the rest of your day guilt-free and less anxious.

Most of the time, the next right thing is something small: washing out your paintbrushes, stopping by the art-supply store and getting your clay, checking the local paper for a list of acting classes ... As a rule of thumb, it is best to just admit that there is always
one
action you can take for your creativity daily. This daily-action commitment fills the form.

All too often, when people look to having a more creative life, they hold an unspoken and often unacknowledged expectation, or fear, that they will be abandoning life as they know it.

“I can’t be a writer and stay in this marriage.”

“I can’t pursue my painting and stay at this dull job.”

“I can’t commit to acting and stay in Chicago ... or Seattle or Atlanta ...”

Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop. This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing. By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. Who can concentrate on a first drawing class when he is obsessing about having to divorce his wife and leave town? Who can turn toe out in modern jazz form when she is busy reading the ads for a new apartment since she will have to break up with her lover to concentrate on her art?

Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time-or at all.

Instead of writing three pages a day on a screenplay, we prefer worrying about how we will have to move to Hollywood if the script gets bought. Which it can’t anyway since we are too busy worrying about selling it to write it.

Instead of checking into a life-drawing class at the local culture center, we buy
Art Forum
and remind ourselves that our stuff is not in style. How can it be? It doesn’t exist yet!

Instead of clearing out the little room off the kitchen so that we will have a place to work on our pottery, we complain about needing a studio—a complaint that we ourselves cannot take seriously since we do not have any work to argue our case.

Indulging ourselves in a frantic fantasy of what our life would look like if we were
real
artists, we fail to see the many small creative changes that we could make at this very moment. This kind of look-at-the-big-picture thinking ignores the fact that a creative life is grounded on many, many small steps and very, very few large leaps.

Rather than take a scary baby step toward our dreams, we rush to the edge of the cliff and then stand there, quaking, saying, “I can’t leap. I can’t. I can’t. ...”

No one is asking you to leap. That’s just drama, and, for the purposes of a creative recovery, drama belongs on the page or on the canvas or in the clay or in the acting class or in the
act
of creativity, however small.

Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. You mean I have to do something in order to feel better?

Yes. And most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead. One of our favorite things to do—instead of our art—is to contemplate the odds.

In a creative career, thinking about the odds is a drink of emotional poison. It robs us of the dignity of art-as-process and puts us at the mercy of imagined powers
out there.
Taking this drink quickly leads to a severe and toxic emotional bender. It leads us to ask, “What’s the use?” instead of “What next?”

As a rule of thumb, the odds are what we use to procrastinate about doing what comes next. This is our addiction to anxiety in lieu of action. Once you catch on to this, the jig is up. Watch yourself for a week and notice the way you will pick up an anxious thought, almost like a joint, to blow off—or at least delay—your next creative action.

You’ve cleared a morning to write or paint but then you realize that the clothes are dirty. “I’ll just think about what I want to paint and fine-tune it while I fold the clothes,” you tell yourself What you really mean is, “Instead of painting anything, I will worry about it some more.” Somehow, the laundry takes your whole morning.

Most blocked creatives have an active addiction to anxiety. We prefer the low-grade pain and occasional heart-stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction.

Filling the form means that we must work with what we have rather than languish in complaints over what we have not. As a director, I have noticed that the actors who get work are the actors who
work
—whether they are working or not. I am thinking specifically about Marge Kottlisky, a fine stage and film actress who has always made herself available to work and to workshop writers’ materials. She worked with the young playwright David Mamet in the St. Nicholas Theater Group in Chicago and now works with the somewhat older and more accomplished David Mamet wherever he is working. Rather than rest on any creative laurels, she engages in a very healthy sort of creative restlessness. When she is not engaged in the run of a show, she often takes a class to keep her hand in, and she always is available for read-throughs of new plays. Like all actors, she suffers from the “I’ll never work again” syndrome, but unlike many less-committed actors, she never allows herself to make her work something she does only for others or only when she is paid. Yes, she wants to be paid, and I am not arguing here that actors should work for free. What I am saying is that work begets work. Small actions lead us to the larger movements in our creative lives.

Many actors allow themselves the dubious luxury of handing their careers over to their agents instead of keeping their art in the custody of their souls. When an agent is in charge of your creative life, you can easily despair that “my agent doesn’t do enough” instead of asking what you yourself might do to hone your craft. Fill the form. What can you do, right now, in your life as it is currently constituted? Do that thing.

Take one small daily action instead of indulging in the big questions. When we allow ourselves to wallow in the big questions, we fail to find the small answers. What we are talking about here is a concept of change grounded in respect—respect for where we are as well as where we wish to go. We are looking not to grand strokes of change—although they may come—but instead to the act of creatively husbanding all that is in the present: this job, this house, this relationship.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.

AGNES DE MILLE

Recovering creatives commonly undergo bouts of fierce rage and grief over their lost years. When these creative kriyas occur, we desperately want to kick over the traces and get the hell out of life as it is currently constituted. Instead, make changes, small changes, right where you are. Fill this form with creative care until it overflows into a newer, larger form—organically.