But the Greeks and the Romans both believed in the idea of an external daemon of creativity—a sort of house elf, if you will, who lived within the walls of your home and who sometimes aided you in your labors. The Romans had a specific term for that helpful house elf. They called it your genius—your guardian deity, the conduit of your inspiration. Which is to say, the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.
It’s a subtle but important distinction (being vs. having) and, I think, it’s a wise psychological construct. The idea of an external genius helps to keep the artist’s ego in check, distancing him somewhat from the burden of taking either full credit or full blame for the outcome of his work. If your work is successful, in other words, you are obliged to thank your external genius for the help, thus holding you back from total narcissism. And if your work fails, it’s not entirely your fault. You can say, “Hey, don’t look at me—my genius didn’t show up today!”
Either way, the vulnerable human ego is protected.
Protected from the corrupting influence of praise.
Protected from the corrosive effects of shame.
Pinned Beneath the Boulder
I think society did a great disservice to artists when we started saying that certain people were geniuses, instead of saying they had geniuses. That happened around the Renaissance, with the rise of a more rational and human-centered view of life. The gods and the mysteries fell away, and suddenly we put all the credit and blame for creativity on the artists themselves—making the all-too-fragile humans completely responsible for the vagaries of inspiration.
In the process, we also venerated art and artists beyond their appropriate stations. The distinction of “being a genius” (and the rewards and status often associated with it) elevated creators into something like a priestly caste—perhaps even into minor deities—which I think is a bit too much pressure for mere mortals, no matter how talented. That’s when artists start to really crack, driven mad and broken in half by the weight and weirdness of their gifts.
When artists are burdened with the label of “genius,” I think they lose the ability to take themselves lightly, or to create freely. Consider Harper Lee, for instance, who wrote nothing for decades after the phenomenonal success of To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1962, when Lee was asked how she felt about the possibility of ever writing another book, she replied, “I’m scared.” She also said, “When you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go.”
Because Lee never elaborated more definitively on her situation, we will never know why this wildly successful author didn’t go on to write dozens more books in her lifetime. But I wonder if perhaps she had become pinned beneath the boulder of her own reputation. Maybe it all got too heavy, too freighted with responsibility, and her artistry died of fear—or worse, self-competition. (What was there for Harper Lee to be afraid of, after all? Possibly just this: That she could not outdo Harper Lee.)
As for having reached the top, with only one way to go from there, Lee had a point, no? I mean, if you cannot repeat a once-in-a-lifetime miracle—if you can never again reach the top—then why bother creating at all? Well, I can actually speak about this predicament from personal experience, because I myself was once “at the top”—with a book that sat on the bestseller list for more than three years. I can’t tell you how many people said to me during those years, “How are you ever going to top that?” They’d speak of my great good fortune as though it were a curse, not a blessing, and would speculate about how terrified I must feel at the prospect of not being able to reach such phenomenal heights again.
But such thinking assumes there is a “top”—and that reaching that top (and staying there) is the only motive one has to create. Such thinking assumes that the mysteries of inspiration operate on the same scale that we do—on a limited human scale of success and failure, of winning and losing, of comparison and competition, of commerce and reputation, of units sold and influence wielded. Such thinking assumes that you must be constantly victorious—not only against your peers, but also against an earlier version of your own poor self. Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play.
But what does any of that have to do with vocation? What does any of that have to do with the pursuit of love? What does any of that have to do with the strange communion between the human and the magical? What does any of that have to do with faith? What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations?
I wish that Harper Lee had kept writing. I wish that, right after Mockingbird and her Pulitzer Prize, she had churned out five cheap and easy books in a row—a light romance, a police procedural, a children’s story, a cookbook, some kind of pulpy action-adventure story, anything. You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Imagine what she might have created, even accidentally, with such an approach. At the very least, she could have tricked everyone into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee. She could have tricked herself into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee, which might have been artistically liberating.
Fortunately, after so many decades of silence, we do get to hear more of Lee’s voice. Recently, a lost early manuscript of hers was discovered—a novel that she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird (in other words: a book that she wrote before the entire world was watching and waiting for what she would do next, hovering with expectation). But I wish someone had been able to convince Lee to keep writing for the entirety of her life, and to keep publishing all along. It would have been a gift to the world. And it would have been a gift to her, as well—to have been able to remain a writer, and to have enjoyed the pleasures and satisfactions of that work for herself (because in the end, creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience).
I wish somebody had given Ralph Ellison the same sort of advice. Just write anything and put it out there with reckless abandon. And F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. And any other creator, famous or obscure, who ever vanished beneath the shadow of their own real or imagined reputation. I wish somebody had told them all to go fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah and just publish it, for heaven’s sake, and ignore the outcome.
Does it seem sacrilegious even to suggest this?
Good.
Just because creativity is mystical doesn’t mean it shouldn’t also be demystified—especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego.
Let It Come and Go
The most important thing to understand about eudaimonia, though—about that exhilarating encounter between a human being and divine creative inspiration—is that you cannot expect it to be there for you all the time.
It will come and go, and you must let it come and go.
I know this personally, because my genius—wherever it comes from—does not keep regular hours. My genius, for what he is worth, does not work on human time and he certainly doesn’t arrange his schedule around my convenience. Sometimes I suspect that my genius might be moonlighting on the side as somebody else’s genius—maybe even working for a bunch of different artists, like some kind of freelance creative contractor. Sometimes I grope around in the dark, desperately looking for magical creative stimulus, and all I come up with is something that feels like a damp washcloth.
And then suddenly—whoosh!—inspiration arrives, out of the clear blue sky.
And then—whoosh!—it is gone again.
I once took a nap on a commuter train, and while I was asleep, I dreamed an entire short story, absolutely intact. I awoke from my dream, grabbed a pen, and wrote down that story in one fevered burst of inspiration. This was the closest I’ve ever come to having a pure Ruth Stone moment. Some channel opened wide within me, and the words poured forth for page after page without any effor
t whatsoever.
When I finished writing that short story, I barely had to revise a word of it. It felt right just the way it was. It felt right, and it felt strange; it wasn’t even the kind of thing I would normally write about. Several reviewers later took note of how different that story was from the others in my collection. (One critic, tellingly, described it as “Yankee Magic Realism.”) It was a tale of enchantment, written under enchantment, and even a stranger could feel the fairy dust in it. I’ve never written anything like it before or since. I still think of that short story as the most superbly formed hidden jewel I’ve ever unburied in myself.
That was Big Magic at play, unmistakably.
But that was also twenty-two years ago, and it has never happened again. (And believe me, I’ve taken a lot of naps on a lot of trains in the meantime.) I’ve had moments of wondrous creative communion since then, but nothing so pure and exhilarating as that one wild encounter.
It came, and then it went.
What I’m saying is this: If my plan is to sit around waiting for another such unadulterated and impassioned creative visitation, I may be waiting for a very long time. So I don’t sit around waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me—waiting to see if I’m truly serious about this line of work. I feel sometimes like my genius sits in the corner and watches me at my desk, day after day, week after week, month after month, just to be sure I really mean it, just to be sure I’m really giving this creative endeavor my wholehearted effort. When my genius is convinced that I’m not just messing around here, he may show up and offer assistance. Sometimes that assistance will not arrive until two years into a project. Sometimes that assistance will not last for more than ten minutes.
When that assistance does arrive—that sense of the moving sidewalk beneath my feet, the moving sidewalk beneath my words—I am delighted, and I go along for the ride. In such instances, I write like I am not quite myself. I lose track of time and space and self. While it’s happening, I thank the mystery for its help. And when it departs, I let the mystery go, and I keep on working diligently anyhow, hoping that someday my genius will reappear.
I work either way, you see—assisted or unassisted—because that is what you must do in order to live a fully creative life. I work steadily, and I always thank the process. Whether I am touched by grace or not, I thank creativity for allowing me to engage with it at all.
Because either way, it’s all kind of amazing—what we get to do, what we get to attempt, what we sometimes get to commune with.
Gratitude, always.
Always, gratitude.
A Dazzled Heart
And as for how Ann Patchett saw what had happened between us?
As for how she regarded our curious miracle, about the Amazon jungle novel that had bounced out of my head and landed in hers?
Well, Ann is a far more rational soul than I am, but even she felt that something rather supernatural had occurred. Even she felt that inspiration had slipped away from me and landed—with a kiss—upon her. In her subsequent letters to me, she was generous enough to always refer to her Amazon jungle novel as “our Amazon jungle novel,” as though she were the surrogate mother to an idea that I had conceived.
That was gracious of her, but not at all true. As anyone who has ever read State of Wonder knows full well, that magnificent story is entirely Ann Patchett’s. Nobody else could have written that novel as she wrote it. If anything, I had been the foster mother who’d kept the idea warm for a couple of years while it searched for its true and rightful collaborator. Who knows how many other writers that idea had visited over the years before it came into my care for a while, and then finally shifted over to Ann? (Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, “No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of the forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly . . . it begins to speak with all the treetops at once.”)
All I know for certain is that this novel really wanted to be written, and it didn’t stop its rolling search until it finally found the author who was ready and willing to take it on—not later, not someday, not in a few years, not when times get better, not when life becomes easier, but right now.
So that became Ann’s story.
Which left me with nothing but a dazzled heart and the sense that I live in a most remarkable world, thick with mysteries. It all called to mind the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s memorable explanation of how the universe works: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
But the best part is: I don’t need to know what.
I don’t demand a translation of the unknown. I don’t need to understand what it all means, or where ideas are originally conceived, or why creativity plays out as unpredictably as it does. I don’t need to know why we are sometimes able to converse freely with inspiration, when at other times we labor hard in solitude and come up with nothing. I don’t need to know why an idea visited you today and not me. Or why it visited us both. Or why it abandoned us both.
None of us can know such things, for these are among the great enigmas.
All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life—collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
It’s a strange line of work, admittedly.
I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.
Permission
Remove the Suggestion Box
I didn’t grow up in a family of artists.
I come from people who worked more regularly at life, you might say.
My maternal grandfather was a dairy farmer; my paternal grandfather was a furnace salesman. Both my grandmothers were housewives, and so were their mothers, their sisters, their aunts.
As for my parents, my father is an engineer and my mother is a nurse. And although they were the right age for it, my parents were never hippies—not in the least. They were far too conservative for such things. My dad spent the 1960s in college and the Navy; my mom spent those same years in nursing school, working night shifts at the hospital, and responsibly saving her money. After they were married, my dad got a job at a chemical company, and he worked there for thirty years. Mom worked part-time, became an active member of our local church, served on the school board, volunteered at the library, and visited the elderly and the housebound.
They were responsible people. Taxpayers. Solid. Voted for Reagan. (Twice!)
I learned how to be a rebel from them.
Because—just beyond the reach of their basic good citizenship—my parents did whatever the hell they wanted to do with their lives, and they did it with a rather fabulous sense of insouciance. My father decided that he didn’t merely want to be a chemical engineer; he also wanted to be a Christmas-tree farmer, and so in 1973 he went and did that. He moved us out to a farm, cleared some land, planted some seedlings, and commenced with his project. He didn’t quit his day job to follow his dream; he just folded his dream into his everyday life. He wanted to raise goats, too, so he acquired some goats. Brought them home in the backseat of our Ford Pinto. Had he ever raised goats? No, but he thought he could figure it out. It was the same thing when he became interested in beekeeping: He just got himself some bees and began. Thirty-five years later, he still has those hives.
When my father grew curious about things, he pursued them. He had solid faith in his own capabilities. And when my father needed something (which was rare, because he basically has the material needs of a hobo), he made it himself, or fixed it himself, or somehow cobbled it together himself—usually without referring to the instructions, and generally without asking the advice of an expert. My dad doesn’t hold much respect for instructions or for experts. He is no more impr
essed by people’s degrees than he is by other civilized niceties such as building permits and NO TRESPASSING signs. (For better or for worse, my dad taught me that the best place to pitch a tent will always be the spot marked NO CAMPING.)
My father really doesn’t like being told what to do. His sense of individualistic defiance is so strong, it’s often comical. Back in the Navy, he was once commanded by his captain to make a suggestion box to put in the canteen. Dad dutifully built the box, nailed it to the wall, then wrote the first suggestion and dropped it through the slot. His note read: I suggest that you remove the suggestion box.
In many ways he’s a weird egg, my dad, and his hyper-antiauthoritarian instincts can border at times on the pathological . . . but I always suspected that he was kind of cool, anyway, even back when I was an easily embarrassed child being driven around town in a Ford Pinto filled with goats. I knew that he was doing his own thing and following his own path, and I intuitively sensed that this made him, by definition, an interesting person. I didn’t have a term for it back then, but I can see now that he was practicing something called creative living.
I liked it.
I also took note of it for when it came time to imagine my own life. It’s not that I wanted to make any of the same choices my father had made (I am neither a farmer nor a Republican), but his example empowered me to forge my own way through the world however I liked. Also, just like my dad, I don’t like people telling me what to do. While I am not at all confrontational, I am deeply stubborn. This stubbornness helps when it comes to the business of creative living.
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