Maybe I won’t always be successful at my creativity, but the world won’t end because of that. Maybe I won’t always be able to make a living out of my writing, but that’s not the end of the world, either, because there are lots of other ways to make a living besides writing books—and many of them are easier than writing books. And while it’s definitely true that failure and criticism may bruise my precious ego, the fate of nations does not depend upon my precious ego. (Thank God.)
So let’s try to wrap our minds around this reality: There’s probably never going to be any such thing in your life or mine as “an arts emergency.”
That being the case, why not make art?
Tom Waits Chimes In
Years ago, I interviewed the musician Tom Waits for a profile in GQ magazine. I’ve spoken about this interview before and I will probably speak about it forever, because I’ve never met anyone who was so articulate and wise about creative living.
In the course of our interview, Waits went on a whimsical rant about all the different forms that song ideas will take when they’re trying to be born. Some songs, he said, will come to him with an almost absurd ease, “like dreams taken through a straw.” Other songs, though, he has to work hard for, “like digging potatoes out of the ground.” Still other songs are sticky and weird, “like gum found under an old table,” while some songs are like wild birds that he must come at sideways, sneaking up on them gently so as not to scare them into flight.
The most difficult and petulant songs, though, will only respond to a firm hand and an authoritative voice. There are songs, Waits says, that simply will not allow themselves to be born, and that will hold up the recording of an entire album. Waits has, at such moments, cleared the studio of all the other musicians and technicians so he can have a stern talking-to with a particularly obstinate song. He’ll pace the studio alone, saying aloud, “Listen, you! We’re all going for a ride together! The whole family’s already in the van! You have five minutes to get on board, or else this album is leaving without you!”
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes you have to let it go. Some songs just aren’t serious about wanting to be born yet, Waits said. They only want to annoy you, and waste your time, and hog your attention—perhaps while they’re waiting for a different artist to come along. He has become philosophical about such things. He used to suffer and anguish over losing songs, he said, but now he trusts. If a song is serious about being born, he trusts that it will come to him in the right manner, at the right time. If not, he will send it along its way, with no hard feelings.
“Go bother someone else,” he’ll tell the annoying song-that-doesn’t-want-to-be-a-song. “Go bother Leonard Cohen.”
Over the years, Tom Waits finally found his sense of permission to deal with his creativity more lightly—without so much drama, without so much fear. A lot of this lightness, Waits said, came from watching his children grow up and seeing their total freedom of creative expression. He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs all the time, and when they were done with them, they would toss them out “like little origami things, or paper airplanes.” Then they would sing the next song that came through the channel. They never seemed to worry that the flow of ideas would dry up. They never stressed about their creativity, and they never competed against themselves; they merely lived within their inspiration, comfortably and unquestioningly.
Waits had once been the opposite of that as a creator. He told me that he’d struggled deeply with his creativity in his youth because—like many serious young men—he wanted to be regarded as important, meaningful, heavy. He wanted his work to be better than other people’s work. He wanted to be complex and intense. There was anguish, there was torment, there was drinking, there were dark nights of the soul. He was lost in the cult of artistic suffering, but he called that suffering by another name: dedication.
But through watching his children create so freely, Waits had an epiphany: It wasn’t actually that big a deal. He told me, “I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people’s minds.” Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That’s all it is. That realization, Waits said, seemed to open things up for him. Songwriting became less painful after that.
Intracranial jewelry-making! What a cool job!
That’s basically what we all do—all of us who spend our days making and doing interesting things for no particularly rational reason. As a creator, you can design any sort of jewelry that you like for the inside of other people’s minds (or simply for the inside of your own mind). You can make work that’s provocative, aggressive, sacred, edgy, traditional, earnest, devastating, entertaining, brutal, fanciful . . . but when all is said and done, it’s still just intracranial jewelry-making. It’s still just decoration. And that’s glorious. But it’s seriously not something that anybody needs to hurt themselves over, okay?
So relax a bit, is what I’m saying.
Please try to relax.
Otherwise, what’s the point of having all these wonderful senses in the first place?
The Central Paradox
In conclusion, then, art is absolutely meaningless.
It is, however, also deeply meaningful.
That’s a paradox, of course, but we’re all adults here, and I think we can handle it. I think we can all hold two mutually contradictory ideas at the same time without our heads exploding. So let’s give this one a try. The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented creative life, goes something like this: “My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).”
Sometimes you will need to leap from one end of this paradoxical spectrum to the other in a matter of minutes, and then back again. As I write this book, for instance, I approach each sentence as if the future of humanity depends upon my getting that sentence just right. I care, because I want it to be lovely. Therefore, anything less than a full commitment to that sentence is lazy and dishonorable. But as I edit my sentence—sometimes immediately after writing it—I have to be willing to throw it to the dogs and never look back. (Unless, of course, I decide that I need that sentence again after all, in which case I must dig up its bones, bring it back to life, and once again regard it as sacred.)
It matters./It doesn’t matter.
Build space in your head for this paradox. Build as much space for it as you can.
Build even more space.
You will need it.
And then go deep within that space—as far in as you can possibly go—and make absolutely whatever you want to make.
It’s nobody’s business but your own.
Persistence
Taking Vows
When I was about sixteen years old, I took vows to become a writer.
I mean, I literally took vows—the way a young woman of an entirely different nature might take vows to become a nun. Of course, I had to invent my own ceremony around these vows, because there is no official holy Sacrament for a teenager who longs to become a writer, but I used my imagination and my passion and I made it happen. I retreated to my bedroom one night and turned off all the lights. I lit a candle, got down on my honest-to-God knees, and swore my fidelity to writing for the rest of my natural life.
My vows were strangely specific and, I would still argue, pretty realistic. I didn’t make a promise that I would be a successful writer, because I sensed that success was not under my control. Nor did I promise that I would be a great writer, because I didn’t know if I could be great. Nor did I give myself any time limits for the work, like, “If I’m not published by the time I’m thirty, I’ll give up on this dream and go find another line of work.” In fact, I didn’t put any conditions or restrictions on my p
ath at all. My deadline was: never.
Instead, I simply vowed to the universe that I would write forever, regardless of the result. I promised that I would try to be brave about it, and grateful, and as uncomplaining as I could possibly be. I also promised that I would never ask writing to take care of me financially, but that I would always take care of it—meaning that I would always support us both, by any means necessary. I did not ask for any external rewards for my devotion; I just wanted to spend my life as near to writing as possible—forever close to that source of all my curiosity and contentment—and so I was willing to make whatever arrangements needed to be made in order to get by.
Learning
The curious thing is, I actually kept those vows. I kept them for years. I still keep them. I have broken many promises in my life (including a marriage vow), but I have never broken that promise.
I even kept those vows through the chaos of my twenties—a time in my life when I was shamefully irresponsible in every other imaginable way. Yet despite all my immaturity and carelessness and recklessness, I still honored my vows to writing with the fealty of a holy pilgrim.
I wrote every day throughout my twenties. For a while, I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and he practiced every day. He played scales; I wrote small fictional scenes. It was the same idea—to keep your hand in your craft, to stay close to it. On bad days, when I felt no inspiration at all, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and make myself sit there and scribble something, anything. I had read an interview with John Updike where he said that some of the best novels you’ve ever read were written in an hour a day; I figured I could always carve out at least thirty minutes somewhere to dedicate myself to my work, no matter what else was going on or how badly I believed the work was going.
Generally speaking, the work did go badly, too. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I felt sometimes like I was trying to carve scrimshaw while wearing oven mitts. Everything took forever. I had no chops, no game. It could take me a whole year just to finish one tiny short story. Most of the time, all I was doing was imitating my favorite authors, anyhow. I went through a Hemingway stage (who doesn’t?), but I also went through a pretty serious Annie Proulx stage and a rather embarrassing Cormac McCarthy stage. But that’s what you have to do at the beginning; everybody imitates before they can innovate.
For a while, I tried to write like a Southern gothic novelist, because I found that to be a far more exotic voice than my own New England sensibility. I was not an especially convincing Southern writer, of course, but that’s only because I’d never lived a day in the South. (A friend of mine who actually was from the South said to me in exasperation, after reading one of my stories, “You’ve got all these old men sittin’ around the porch eatin’ peanuts, and you ain’t never sat around a porch eatin’ peanuts in your life! You got some nerve, girl!” Oh, well. We try.)
None of it was easy, but that wasn’t the point. I had never asked writing to be easy; I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me. Even when I couldn’t do it right, it was still interesting to me. It still interests me. Nothing has ever interested me more. That profound sense of interest kept me working, even as I had no tangible successes.
And slowly I improved.
It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at. For instance: If I had spent my twenties playing basketball every single day, or making pastry dough every single day, or studying auto mechanics every single day, I’d probably be pretty good at foul shots and croissants and transmissions by now.
Instead, I learned how to write.
A Caveat
But this does not mean that unless you began your creative endeavors in your twenties, it’s too late!
God, no! Please don’t get that idea.
It’s never too late.
I could give you dozens of examples of amazing people who didn’t start following their creative paths until later—sometimes much later—in life. But for the sake of economy, I will only tell you about one of them.
Her name was Winifred.
I knew Winifred back in the 1990s, in Greenwich Village. I first met her at her ninetieth birthday party, which was quite a wild bash. She was a friend of a friend of mine (a guy who was in his twenties; Winifred had friends of all ages and backgrounds). Winifred was a bit of a luminary around Washington Square back in the day. She was a full-on bohemian legend who had lived in the Village forever. She had long red hair that she wore piled glamorously on top of her head, she was always draped in ropes of amber beads, and she and her late husband (a scientist) had spent their vacations chasing typhoons and hurricanes all over the world, just for fun. She kind of was a hurricane herself.
Winifred was the most vividly alive woman I had ever met in my young life, so one day, looking for inspiration, I asked her, “What’s the best book you’ve ever read?”
She said, “Oh, darling. I could never narrow it down to just one book, because so many books are important to me. But I can tell you my favorite subject. Ten years ago, I began studying the history of ancient Mesopotamia, and it became my passion, and let me tell you—it has totally changed my life.”
For me, at the age of twenty-five, to hear a ninety-year-old widow speak of having her life changed by passion (and so recently!) was a revelation. It was one of those moments where I could almost feel my perspective expanding, as if my mind were being ratcheted open several notches and was now welcoming in all sorts of new possibilities for what a woman’s life could look like.
But as I learned more about Winifred’s passion, what struck me most was that she was now an acknowledged expert in the history of ancient Mesopotamia. She had given that field of study an entire decade of her life, after all—and if you devote yourself to anything diligently for ten years, that will make you an expert. (That’s the time it would take to earn two master’s degrees and a doctorate.) She had gone to the Middle East on several archaeological digs; she had learned cuneiform script; she was friendly with the greatest scholars and curators on the subject; she had never missed a related museum exhibit or lecture when it came to town. People now sought out Winifred for answers about ancient Mesopotamia, because now she was the authority.
I was a young woman who had only recently finished college. There was still some dull and limited part of my imagination that believed my education was over because NYU had granted me a diploma. Meeting Winifred, though, made me realize that your education isn’t over when they say it’s over; your education is over when you say it’s over. And Winifred—back when she was a mere girl of eighty—had firmly decided: It ain’t over yet.
So when can you start pursuing your most creative and passionate life?
You can start whenever you decide to start.
The Empty Bucket
I kept working.
I kept writing.
I kept not getting published, but that was okay, because I was getting educated.
The most important benefit of my years of disciplined, solitary work was that I began to recognize the emotional patterns of creativity—or, rather, I began to recognize my patterns. I could see that there were psychological cycles to my own creative process, and that those cycles were always pretty much the same.
“Ah,” I learned to say when I would inevitably begin to lose heart for a project just a few weeks after I’d enthusiastically begun it. “This is the part of the process where I wish I’d never engaged with this idea at all. I remember this. I always go through this stage.”
Or: “This is the part where I tell myself that I’ll never write a good sentence again.”
Or: “This is the part where I beat myself up for being a lazy loser.”
Or: “This is the part where I begin fantasizing in terror about how bad the reviews are going to be—if this thing even gets published at all.”
Or,
once the project was finished: “This is the part where I panic that I’ll never be able to make anything again.”
Over years of devotional work, though, I found that if I just stayed with the process and didn’t panic, I could pass safely through each stage of anxiety and on to the next level. I heartened myself with reminders that these fears were completely natural human reactions to interaction with the unknown. If I could convince myself that I was supposed to be there—that we are meant to engage with inspiration, and that inspiration wants to work with us—then I could usually get through my emotional minefield without blowing myself up before the project was finished.
At such times, I could almost hear creativity talking to me while I spun off into fear and doubt.
Stay with me, it would say. Come back to me. Trust me.
I decided to trust it.
My single greatest expression of stubborn gladness has been the endurance of that trust.
A particularly elegant commentary on this instinct came from the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who said that—when one is learning how to write poetry—one should not expect it to be immediately good. The aspiring poet is constantly lowering a bucket only halfway down a well, coming up time and again with nothing but empty air. The frustration is immense. But you must keep doing it, anyway.
After many years of practice, Heaney explained, “the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself.”
The Shit Sandwich
Back in my early twenties, I had a good friend who was an aspiring writer, just like me. I remember how he used to descend into dark funks of depression about his lack of success, about his inability to get published. He would sulk and rage.
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