The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (28 page)

Do not call procrastination laziness. Call it fear.

Fear is what blocks an artist. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of not finishing. The fear of failure and of success. The fear of beginning at all. There is only one cure for fear. That cure is love.

Use love for your artist to cure its fear.

Stop yelling at yourself. Be nice. Call fear by its right name.

ENTHUSIASM

“It must take so much discipline to be an artist,” we are often told by well-meaning people who are not artists but wish they were. What a temptation. What a seduction. They’re inviting us to preen before an admiring audience, to act out the image that is so heroic and Spartan—and false.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

DUKE ELLINGTON
AND IRVING MILLS

As artists, grounding our self-image in military discipline is dangerous. In the short run, discipline may work, but it will work only for a while. By its very nature, discipline is rooted in self-admiration. (Think of discipline as a battery, useful but short-lived.) We admire ourselves for being so wonderful. The discipline itself, not the creative outflow, becomes the point.

That part of us that creates best is not a driven, disciplined automaton, functioning from willpower, with a booster of pride to back it up. This is operating out of self-will. You know the image: rising at dawn with military precision, saluting the desk, the easel, the drawing board ...

Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us.

Enthusiasm (from the Greek, “filled with God”) is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all playmates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond.

True, our artist may rise at dawn to greet the typewriter or easel in the morning stillness. But this event has more to do with a child’s love of secret adventure than with ironclad discipline. What other people may view as discipline is actually a play date that we make with our artist child: “I’ll meet you at 6:00 A.M. and we’ll goof around with that script, painting, sculpture ...”

Our artist child can best be enticed to work by treating work as play. Paint is great gooey stuff. Sixty sharpened pencils are fun. Many writers eschew a computer for the comforting, companionable clatter for a solid typewriter that trots along like a pony. In order to work well, many artists find that their work spaces are best dealt with as play spaces.

Dinosaur murals, toys from the five-and-dime, tiny miniature Christmas lights, papier-mâché monsters, hanging crystals, a sprig of flowers, a fish tank ...

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

RENÉ-FRANÇOIS-
GHISLAIN MAGRITTE

As attractive as the idea of a pristine cell, monastic in its severity, is to our romanticized notion of being a real artist, the workable truth may be somewhat messier than that. Most little kids would be bored silly in a stark, barren room. Our artist child is no exception.

Remember that art is process. The process is supposed to be fun. For our purposes, “the journey is always the only arrival” may be interpreted to mean that our creative work is actually our creativity itself at play in the field of time. At the heart of this play is the mystery of joy.

CREATIVE U-TURNS

Recovering from artist’s block, like recovering from any major illness or injury, requires a commitment to health. At some point, we must make an active choice to relinquish thejoys and privileges accorded to the emotional invalid. A productive artist is quite often a happy person. This can be very threatening as a self-concept to those who are used to getting their needs met by being unhappy.

“I’d love to, but you see ... I have these crippling fears ...” can get us a lot of attention. We get more sympathy as crippled artists than as functional ones. Those of us addicted to sympathy in the place of creativity can become increasingly threatened as we become increasingly functional. Many recovering artists become so threatened that they make U-turns and sabotage themselves.

We usually commit creative hara-kiri either on the eve of or in the wake of a first creative victory. The glare of success (a poem, an acting job, a song, a short story, a film, or any success) can send the recovering artist scurrying back into the cave of self-defeat. We’re more comfortable being a victim of artist’s block than risking having to consistently be productive and healthy.

An artistic U-turn arrives on a sudden wave of indifference. We greet our newly minted product or our delightful process with “Aw, what does it matter anyhow? It’s just a start. Everybody else is so much further ahead....”

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

STENDHAL

Yes, and they will stay that way if we stop working. The point is we have traveled light-years from where we were when we were blocked. We are now on the road, and the road is scary. We begin to be distracted by roadside attractions or detoured by the bumps.

• A screenwriter has an agent interested in repping a script with just a few changes. He doesn’t make the changes.

• A performance artist is offered a space to use for work-shopping his new material. He does it once, doesn’t like his mixed reception indicating more work is needed, then stops working on new material at all.

• An actor is told to get his head shots together and check back in with a prestigious agent. He doesn’t get his head shots, doesn’t check back in.

• An actress-producer with a solid script is offered a studio deal to further develop her project. She finds fault with the deal and then shelves the project entirely.

• A painter is invited into a group show, his first, but picks a fight with the gallery owner.

• A poet reads some poems to very good public reception at a neighborhood open mike. Instead of continuing at this level and gaining strength, the poet enters a
slam
(a sort of boxing match for poets judged by nonpoets), loses, and stops reading publicly altogether.

• A lyricist hooks up with a new composer, and they literally make beautiful music together. They demo three songs, which get enthusiastic response, and then stop working together.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

ANAÏS NIN

• A fledgling photographer is greatly encouraged by her teacher’s interest in her work. She botches developing one roll of film and then quits the class, claiming it was boring.

In dealing with our creative U-turns, we must first of all extend ourselves some sympathy. Creativity is scary, and in
all
careers there are U-turns. Sometimes these U-turns are best viewed as recycling times. We come up to a creative jump, run out from it like a skittish horse, then circle the field a few times before trying the fence again.

Typically, when we take a creative U-turn we are doubly shamed: first by our fear and second by our reaction to it. Again, let me say it helps to remember that
all
careers have them.

For two years in my mid-thirties I wrote arts coverage for the
Chicago Tribune.
In this capacity, I talked to Akira Kurosawa, Kevin Klein, Julie Andrews, Jane Fonda, Blake Edwards, Sydney Pollack, Sissy Spacek, Sigourney Weaver, Martin Ritt, Gregory Hines, and fifty-odd more. I talked to most of them about discouragement—which meant talking to them about U-turns. As much as talent, the capacity to avoid or recoup from creative U-turns distinguished their careers.

A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures. The trick is to survive them. It helps to remember that even our most illustrious artists have taken creative U-turns in their time.

Blake Edwards has directed some of the funniest and most successful comedy of the past three decades. Nonetheless, he spent seven years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland because a script that he felt was his best was taken away from him in preproduction when his take on the material differed from that of the star the studio had acquired to enhance it.

Fired from his own project, Edwards sat on the sidelines watching as his beloved film was made by others and botched badly. Like a wounded panther, Edwards retired to the Alps to nurse his wounds. He wound up back directing seven long years later—when he concluded that creativity, not time, would best heal his creative wounds. Sticking to this philosophy, he has been aggressively productive every since. Talking about this time-out to me, he was rueful, and pained, about the time it cost him.

Have compassion. Creative U-turns are always born from fear—fear of success or fear of failure. It doesn’t really matter which. The net result is the same.

To recover from a creative U-turn, or a pattern involving many creative U-turns, we must first admit that it exists. Yes, I did react negatively to fear and pain. Yes, I do need help.

Think of your talent as a young and skittish horse that you are bringing along. This horse is very talented but it is also young, nervous, and inexperienced. It will make mistakes, be frightened by obstacles it hasn’t seen before. It may even bolt, try to throw you off, feign lameness. Your job, as the creative jockey, is to keep your horse moving forward and to coax it into finishing the course.

First of all, take a look at what jumps make your horse so skittish. You may find that certain obstacles are far more scary than others. An agent jump may frighten you more than a workshop jump. A review jump may be okay while a rewrite jump scares your talent to death. Remember that in a horse race, there are other horses in the field. One trick a seasoned jockey uses is to place a green horse in the slipstream of an older, steadier, and more seasoned horse. You can do this, too.

• Who do I know who has an agent? Then ask them how they got one.

• Who do I know who has done a successful rewrite? Ask them how to do one.

• Do I know anyone who has survived a savage review? Ask them what they did to heal themselves.

Once we admit the need for help, the help arrives. The ego always wants to claim self-sufficiency. It would rather pose as a creative loner than ask for help. Ask anyway.

Bob was a promising young director when he made his first documentary. It was a short, very powerful film about his father, a factory worker. When he had a rough cut together, Bob showed it to a teacher, a once-gifted filmmaker who was blocked himself The teacher savaged it. Bob abandoned the film. He stuck the film in some boxes, stuck the boxes in his basement, and forgot about them until the basement flooded. “Oh well. Just as well,” he told himself then, assuming the film was ruined.

I met Bob half a decade later. Sometime after we became friends, he told me the story of his film. I had a suspicion that it was good. “It’s lost,” he told me. “Even the lab lost the footage I gave them.” Talking about the film, Bob broke down—and through. He began to mourn his abandoned dream.

A week later, Bob got a call from the lab. “It’s incredible. They found the footage,” he related. I was not too surprised. I believe the creator keeps an eye on artists and was protecting that film. With the encouragement of his screenwriter girlfriend, now his wife, Bob finished his film. They have gone on to make a second, innovative documentary together.

Faced with a creative U-turn, ask yourself, “Who can I ask for help about this U-turn?” Then start asking.

BLASTING THROUGH BLOCKS

In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear). What do we mean by that? We mean that any buried barriers must be aired before the work can proceed. The same holds true for any buried payoffs to not working. Blocks are seldom mysterious. They are, instead, recognizable artistic defenses against what is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a hostile environment.

Remember, your artist is a creative child. It sulks, throws tantrums, holds grudges, harbors irrational fears. Like most children, it is afraid of the dark, the bogeyman, and any adventure that isn’t safely scary. As your artist’s parent and guardian, its big brother, warrior, and companion, it falls to you to convince your artist it is safe to come out and (work) play.

Beginning any new project, it’s a good idea to ask your artist a few simple questions. These questions will help remove common bugaboos standing between your artist and the work. These same questions, asked when work grows difficult or bogs down, usually act to clear the obstructed flow.

1. List any resentments (anger) you have in connection with this project. It does not matter how petty, picky, or irrational these resentments may appear to your adult self. To your artist child they are real big deals: grudges.

Some examples: I resent being the second artist asked, not the first. (I am too the best.) ... I resent this editor, she just nitpicks. She never says anything nice.... I resent doing work for this idiot; he never pays me on time.