When we are not working, it is not because we are lazy. It is because we are frightened. We have bought into the idea that in order to work we must be able to work "well," and we are afraid of working poorly.
"I am willing to work poorly" is often a very good place to start. By surrendering our grandiose expectations, we come down to size. Being willing to work poorly, we may actually work very
well. Some of the best work is done on the worst days. Some of the finest ideas lie at the very bottom of the well.
When we are willing to scoop the well bottom, our inner perfectionist backs off a little. If there is one thing that the inner perfectionist cannot battle, it is humility. Think about it for a moment. Doesn't the inner perfectionist always hook you in the ego? "You're not going to be any good," the inner perfectionist spits out.
When we respond, "That's okay. I think I will try it anyhow," the inner perfectionist comes up fresh out of stratagems. There's no fighting humility. Humility carries the day.
Today was a day when I lay in bed, mere feet from my typewriter, and thought, "I'd like it to be easier." Fortunately, I am an experienced writer and I heard the demonic little voice for what it was. My inner perfectionist wanted me not to work today. I have been working a lot lately, which is good for my self-esteem, and the inner perfectionist just hates that. I knew that sabotage was afoot, and so I wrote.
I believe we are creations of the Great Creator and that we are intended to be creative ourselves. I believe that when we humbly cooperate by making something every day, we are making some-thing also out of ourselves, and it is a something that God intends for us—souls joyous and effective, active and self-actualized. I do not think it is pushing things too far to wonder if the hiss of the inner perfectionist isn't in fact somewhat satanic, the undoing of our good and our good nature.
It is my hope that the young artist who came to visit yesterday got to the page today. It is so easy, from my perspective, to see the criminal waste that comes from listening to the inner perfectionist
who urges us to wait until we can do something perfectly, and with ease, before we can do something at all. "Be gone, Satan!" we should snap, setting ourselves gently to the work, knowing that it is the doing of work that makes work easier, the simple doing of work no matter how hard it may feel to begin.
GETTING AT IT
Try this: Most of us accomplish far more in a day than we give ourselves credit for. Focused on what we haven't yet done, we ignore what we have. Almost any day is earmarked by small accomplishments that move us closer to our larger goals. Take pen in hand and number from 1 to 5. List five ways in which you have inched forward.
Did my Morning Pages
Took a Walk at lunch hour
Stayed on my diet
Called to check on my sister
Paid my bills
As a quick scan of your list will show, small ordinary actions can pay off in terms of our self-worth. We do not need to do something large or heroic in order to feel better about ourselves. Small, gentle daily actions do add up.
Keeping Safe
There is an inexorable, desiccating wind blowing in from the west. It is laden with red dust, and a walk outside means a quick trip to the shower afterward. We are in a season of heavy drought, and the wind underscores and exacerbates the parched earth. Like the famed, murderous Santa Anas that sweep down from the Hollywood Hills, these winds are seasonal, and veterans of living in New Mexico speak of them with respect. "The terrible winds are here.
Be careful."
As prissy as it may sound, "Be careful" is useful creative advice.
to
It means to be gently thoughtful of yourself and your progress, not to expect too much or, on the other hand, to require too little. "Keep on keeping on" is what the sages say, and it is well-earned
advice.
It is easy, in times of a creative drought, when the going is tough and seems fruitless, to engage in outsize drama. "It will always be like this," our fears say. The truth is that droughts pass and one day the terrible wind does not visit again. The truth is that if we can avoid drama, we are better off. But how do we avoid drama when drama is all around us? Many of us live and work in dramatic, high-stress environments. We do not so much avoid drama as endure it. With experience, we learn to set a governor on the level of drama we will tolerate. This governor keeps our creative engine from over-revving.
The first defense against drama is a schedule, a regular routine that is hewed to, easy days or hard. For me that schedule begins with Morning Pages. It includes a spate of steadying phone calls to my far-flung beloveds, and then it requires that I sit at the typewriter, press fingers to the keys, and march forward a little on the writing project of the moment. For my sister, Libby, a painter, her schedule demands easel time, time spent in her studio, at her work space, even if it is time spent preparing to work more than really working. For my friend Thea, a dancer, her schedule requires a daily workout, an homage to the importance of sheer fitness in the art she makes but is not always making. My friend Jackie, an actress, prepares new monologues and scenes. All of us have learned to work when we are not officially working. The regularity of a schedule goes a long way toward overturning the great artist's fear: I will never work again.
The second defense against drama is familiarity. It helps to schedule not only a regular regime of work but also a regular retinue of people. We are creatures who require companionship, and that is true even in pursuit of our art. I have learned to make what in 12-step work they call "sandwich calls." I pick up the phone, call a friend, and say, "I am about to work on my project." Then I get off the phone, work on the project, and when I have finished, I call back, making the sandwich: "I did just work. Thank you for being there."
There are people who feel that artists should be beyond such baby steps. I am not so sure about that. I have known many estimable artists. Some of the most celebrated have learned to treat their artistic process with the gentlest and yet most regimented care. A director I know posts a schedule with his office indicating
just when he will be working on what project. The schedule reinforces the fact that when two o'clock comes he will retreat to the editing room and that when five o'clock comes he will meet for a writing session on a new project. By scheduling his time and by naming the endeavor he will undertake in each slot, he imitates a schoolboy's schedule—English in second period, math in third, lunch break in fourth, biology in fifth, etc. The set schedule with its predetermined jumps also makes the artist a promise that there will be no exhausting bingeing in any one arena. In this regard, the modus operandi is "easy does it." The threat of dramatic deadlines is kept at bay because work is being done daily, a little at a time.
For many an artist, the best tool that he or she can muster is something called a "grid." A grid is a schedule of blocked-out time in which daily expectations are met. My grid, for example, contains time for Morning Pages, time for phone calls to friends and family, time for daily writing, and time for daily music. Additionally, as a sober alcoholic, I grid in time to keep my sobriety intact as a priority. If I meet my grid on any given day, I am guaranteed a productive day and my odds are better at having a nondra-
matic day.
Why all this talk about the danger of drama? It is because personal drama is the enemy of art. When our time is spent on high-stakes conflict, it is not spent on art. When our time is siphoned off into too many needy phone calls or too much hand-holding, then our imagination becomes engaged not in the making of art but in the making of peace. The phrase "peace at any cost" is telling, and often the price that we are paying is the making of our art.
With a grid in place and expectations of productivity laid out in black and white, it becomes easy to see how the emotional ben-
der can cost us work time. High drama is high-ticket behavior for most people but especially for artists.
Caroline, an actress, has a long investment both in her care
er and in a turbulent relationship. It is difficult to work on a monologue if last night's dramatic dialogue is still being played in her head.
"I just wish I had the same feelings for you that I have for her," Caroline's straying partner confronted her.
Caroline, actively seeking to avoid drama, listened but did not pick up the bait.
"I really have to work on my scene," she told her dramatic lover and, with that, poured all of her turbulent emotions into preparing Lady Macbeth.
"I knew I had a choice," Caroline says. "I knew I could use all of my energy going, 'Love me, love me' or I could do something that would make me feel more lovable. I chose to work on my work."
Most of us are lucky enough not to have Caroline's level of daily drama, but most of us know exactly where we can drum up some drama when we want to. Concerned about our friends' well-being, we can focus obsessively on their affairs. Alternatively, we can grid in friendship time and keep it largely confined to the block provided for it. This isn't heartless. Our friends are still close at hand, just not so close that they smother our working hours with their unconscious demands.
When the heavy, hot winds are blowing, veteran New Mexicans keep their doors and windows shut. Let the wind howl outside the house. Don't give it entry. In the same way, when the hot, dry winds of a creative drought seem to threaten us with extinc-
tion, we can make our creative house snug and serene. We can make a grid and stick to it gently. We can forge ahead, however modestly. We can remember that the phrase "easy does it" doesn't mean just "oh, calm down." It also means "easy accomplishes it," and the "it" we are aiming to accomplish is the making of art in an artful life.
KEEPING SAFE
Try this: In order to feel safety, most of us require that our lives contain continuity and structure. Many modern lives do not automatically contain these things. We must work to put continuity and structure in place. Take pen in hand and plan five ways in which you can increase your sense of safety by increasing your commitment to continuity and structure. For example:
Do Morning Pages
Call your sister back home once weekly
Send regular e-mails to your close friends
Select a buddy to check in with daily for
anything you find hard
Attend church, a 12-step group, or hobby
club regularly
Just Do It
Wildfires rage in Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico, pin-cered in between, is blanketed in smoke. The 13,000-foot Sangre de Cristo Mountains are erased; they simply cannot be seen behind the wall of smoke. There are advisory warnings posted for those with respiratory ailments. For everyone, eyes sting and tempers flare. As long as the smoke persists, so will a heightened irritability. Smoke and irritability go together. Simple as that.
For most artists, not working and irritability go together. There is nothing that medicates a certain kind of unease like working does. Cheerful self-chat—"You're a worthy person whether you are working or not"—does nothing to lighten its burden. No, when an artist is not working, there is mounting pressure that nothing can relieve but work.
It is for this reason that artists so often fare poorly in talk therapy. Therapy ignores the need to work and focuses on the underlying cause of the need. "If we just figure out why you have to prove yourself, you won't have to prove yourself any longer," the thinking goes, but it does not go far enough. The urge to create is a primal human urge. It cannot be eliminated any more than the sex drive or the instinct for self-protection can.
An artist who is not working is a miserable creature, and the best way to cure that misery is to work. We do not have to work a
lot. We do not have to work a long time, but we do need to work. The itch to make something is an itch that only making something will scratch. It doesn't need to be a good something—although it often is—it just needs to be something: a paragraph of prose, a rough sketch for a later painting, a stanza of poetry, the first verse of a song. In order to work freely, we must be willing to work badly, and once we are, we are often able to do good work indeed.
The smoke burns the eyes and chokes the throat. So, too, not working creates a discomfort that will not go away until we work. For an artist, not working sours an atmosphere just like smoke. It cannot be ignored for too long because the sheer physical discomfort becomes too much to take—the clenching of the stomach, the tightness in the chest, the tensing of jaw muscles—and not making art takes a physical toll on an artist. Conversely, when an artist is making art, there is a lightness to all other enterprises. Relationships sweeten. Temperaments unknot. It is uncanny, the simple joy of living that comes from putting in some time on our art.
"What's different?" people often will ask an artist who is happily working. "You look ten years younger. Did you have a facelift?" No, but we had a spirit-lift, and that is powerful indeed.
Vanity alone should make an artist work. The pride and self-enjoyment that comes from working translates across into all of our other endeavors. Other jobs come to us more easily when we are working. It is as though working on our art gives us energy rather than takes energy away. It is suddenly less of a chore to sort through that stack of papers, scrub out that tub, reorder the woodpile. When we work, we are often young at heart, and this youthful energy lingers with us after work is done.
Soldiering Through
JUST DO IT
Try this: Sometimes it is difficult to confront our work directly. We lack the nerve to look squarely at the course that lies ahead. This is our fear, and all artists have it. When we are fearful, it is best to sidle up to our next creative jump. Take pen in hand. Number from 1 to 5. List five actions that are indirectly related to your creative work. For example:
Get the extra papers off my desk
Organize my work area
Wash and fold the laundry
Buy new artist supplies
Buy envelopes and stamps to make submissions
Choose one action from your list and execute it.
The drought takes its toll. Thirty miles to the north, Colorado is burning. Flames have formed a wall one hundred feet high. Homes have been devoured, as have great swaths of forest acreage. A woman has stepped forward to take the blame for the blaze. She angrily disregarded fire warnings to burn a letter from her estranged husband. The letter set the conflagration.
For the moment, Taos is out of harm's reach, although forty miles to the east, in Cimarron, a blaze has broken out and they are setting a counterfire to control it. The smoke from the counterfire is expected to be dense enough that those in Taos Ski Valley with respiratory ailments are asked to remain indoors for the next three days. This from a sign at the post office.
As with a forest fire, a creative drought can quickly become a destructive blaze destroying life, certainly quality of life, and property. There are those among us—myself numbered here—who write for a living. If the words won't come, the money can't follow, so the words must be kept flowing somehow.
In order to be able to write at all, and especially when pinched by a creative drought, we must be willing to write badly. This doesn't mean we necessarily will write badly, but that we are willing to write no matter what, to soldier through at the page even as our ego is shrieking, "This is terrible. You really cannot write!" And the same is true for the other arts as well.
It is always the ego, in the form of our inner perfectionist, that can be identified, like the letter burner, as the first cause of damage. The ego doesn't want us merely to be able to write, paint, sculpt, dance, or act. It wants us to do these things well, to do them brilliantly, or—and here is where drought sets in—not at all. Writer Tillie Olsen calls the perfectionist "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art." She is accurate in this.
The perfectionist wants us to be able to work perfectly. It doesn't want to bother with rough drafts or sketches. It is out for the polished final product and it wants us to produce that first and
all the time. It is the perfectionist's fingering the blade of the knife that keeps us from working much of the time. The perfectionist cajoles the ego into taking it seriously—and the ego, which wants desperately to control our art, is glad to have something in its power after all. The ego has the power to keep us from making art, but it does not really have the power to make art itself. Art is an act of the soul.
When we are in the grips of a creative drought, we do feel the knife blade at our throat. We do feel the demand, "Stay right where you are. Don't get fancy. You're not going anywhere." And the "not going anywhere" gets to be a habit.
The 12-step program Arts Anonymous—an excellent pro
gram—talks about the anorectic high that an artist can get from
avoiding art. The fact that we are not making art becomes the
obsessive something that fills our days. And make no mistake, "I'm
not writing" takes up far more energy and space than "I am writ
ing" ever will.
It takes humility to dismantle a creative block, and it takes the vigilant practice of humility to keep from building one. The ego
wants to claim as much territory as we will allow it. "I am brilliant" is what the ego is after, not "I am of service," not "I am serviceable." And yet, it is in trying to be of service, in showing up at the page and listening rather than speaking, that we begin to make art that transcends the ego's brittle boundaries. At root, the ego is not an innovator. It wants its art to be validated, stamped with official approval. In this sense, it wants its art to be safe rather than daring.
When we are willing to make what wants to be made rather than make what we want, we become open to new directions. We begin to be able to let some of the seriousness out of our artist's life, and we begin to let some of the playfulness back in. It is an ironic fact that most great artists are inherently playful. As Carl Jung remarked, creativity is "the mind at play with the materials that it loves." This is a far cry from "production-line creativity."
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