“I don’t want to be sitting around,” he would moan. “I want this to all add up to something. I want this to become my job!”
Even back then, I thought there was something off about his attitude.
Mind you, I wasn’t being published, either, and I was hungry, too. I would’ve loved to have all the same stuff he wanted—success, reward, affirmation. I was no stranger to disappointment and frustration. But I remember thinking that learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job of a creative person. If you want to be an artist of any sort, it seemed to me, then handling your frustration is a fundamental aspect of the work—perhaps the single most fundamental aspect of the work. Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process. The fun part (the part where it doesn’t feel like work at all) is when you’re actually creating something wonderful, and everything’s going great, and everyone loves it, and you’re flying high. But such instants are rare. You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.
I recently read a fabulous blog by a writer named Mark Manson, who said that the secret to finding your purpose in life is to answer this question in total honesty: “What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?”
What Manson means is that every single pursuit—no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may initially seem—comes with its own brand of shit sandwich, its own lousy side effects. As Manson writes with profound wisdom: “Everything sucks, some of the time.” You just have to decide what sort of suckage you’re willing to deal with. So the question is not so much “What are you passionate about?” The question is “What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?”
Manson explains it this way: “If you want to be a professional artist, but you aren’t willing to see your work rejected hundreds, if not thousands, of times, then you’re done before you start. If you want to be a hotshot court lawyer, but can’t stand the eighty-hour workweeks, then I’ve got bad news for you.”
Because if you love and want something enough—whatever it is—then you don’t really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it.
If you truly love having babies, for instance, then you don’t care about the morning sickness.
If you truly want to be a minister, you don’t mind listening to other people’s problems.
If you truly love performing, you will accept the discomforts and inconveniences of living on the road.
If you truly want to see the world, you’ll risk getting pickpocketed on a train.
If you truly want to practice your figure skating, you’ll get up before dawn on cold mornings to go to the ice rink and skate.
My friend back in the day claimed that he wanted to be a writer with all his heart, but it turns out he didn’t want to eat the shit sandwich that comes along with that pursuit. He loved writing, sure, but he didn’t love it enough to endure the ignominy of not getting the results he wanted, when he wanted them. He didn’t want to work so hard at anything unless he was guaranteed some measure of worldly success on his own terms.
Which means, I think, that he only wanted to be a writer with half his heart.
And yeah, soon enough, he quit.
Which left me hungrily eyeballing his half-eaten shit sandwich, wanting to ask, “Are you gonna finish that?”
Because that’s how much I loved the work: I would even eat somebody else’s shit sandwich if it meant that I got to spend more time writing.
Your Day Job
The whole time I was practicing to be a writer, I always had a day job.
Even after I got published, I didn’t quit my day job, just to be on the safe side. In fact, I didn’t quit my day job (or my day jobs, I should say) until I had already written three books—and those three books were all published by major houses and were all reviewed nicely in the New York Times. One of them had even been nominated for a National Book Award. From an outside perspective, it might have looked like I’d already made it. But I wasn’t taking any chances, so I kept my day job.
It wasn’t until my fourth book (and that book was freaking Eat Pray Love, for heaven’s sake) that I finally allowed myself to quit all other work and become nothing other than a writer of books.
I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life. I knew better than to ask this of my writing, because over the years, I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills. I’ve seen artists drive themselves broke and crazy because of this insistence that they are not legitimate creators unless they can exclusively live off their creativity. And when their creativity fails them (meaning: doesn’t pay the rent), they descend into resentment, anxiety, or even bankruptcy. Worst of all, they often quit creating at all.
I’ve always felt like this is so cruel to your work—to demand a regular paycheck from it, as if creativity were a government job, or a trust fund. Look, if you can manage to live comfortably off your inspiration forever, that’s fantastic. That’s everyone’s dream, right? But don’t let that dream turn into a nightmare. Financial demands can put so much pressure on the delicacies and vagaries of inspiration. You must be smart about providing for yourself. To claim that you are too creative to think about financial questions is to infantilize yourself—and I beg you not to infantilize yourself, because it’s demeaning to your soul. (While it’s lovely to be childlike in your pursuit of creativity, in other words, it’s dangerous to be childish.)
Other self-infantilizing fantasies include: the dream of marrying for money, the dream of inheriting money, the dream of winning the lottery, and the dream of finding a “studio wife” (male or female) who will look after all your mundane concerns so that you can be free to commune with inspiration forever in a peaceful cocoon, utterly sheltered from the inconveniences of reality.
Come, now.
This is a world, not a womb. You can look after yourself in this world while looking after your creativity at the same time—just as people have done for ages. What’s more, there is a profound sense of honor to be found in looking after yourself, and that honor will resonate powerfully in your work; it will make your work stronger.
Also, it may be the case that there are seasons when you can live off your art and seasons when you cannot. This need not be regarded as a crisis; it’s only natural in the flux and uncertainty of a creative life. Or maybe you took a big risk in order to follow some creative dream and it didn’t quite pay off, so now you have to work for the man for a while to save up money until it’s time to go chase your next dream—that’s fine, too. Just do it. But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.
I held on to my day jobs for so long because I wanted to keep my creativity free and safe. I maintained alternative streams of income so that, when my inspiration wasn’t flowing, I could say to it reassuringly, “No worries, mate. Just take your time. I’m here whenever you’re ready.” I was always willing to work hard so that my creativity could play lightly. In so doing, I became my own patron; I became my own studio wife.
So many times I have longed to say to stressed-out, financially strapped artists, “Just take the pressure off yourself, dude, and get a job!”
There’s no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your
entire existence. This is why, whenever anyone tells me they’re quitting their day job in order to write a novel, my palms get a little sweaty. This is why, when anyone tells me that their plan for getting out of debt is to sell their first screenplay, I’m like, Yikes.
Write that novel, yes! Definitely try to sell that screenplay! I hope with all my heart that good fortune finds you and showers you with abundance. But don’t count on the payoff, I beg of you—only because such payoffs are exceedingly rare, and you might very well kill off your creativity by holding it to such a harsh ultimatum.
You can always make your art on the side of your bread-and-butter job. That’s what I did for three whole books—and if it hadn’t been for the bananas success of Eat Pray Love, that’s what I’d still be doing now. That’s what Toni Morrison did when she used to get up at five o’clock in the morning in order to work on her novels before going off to her real-life career in the publishing world. That’s what J. K. Rowling did back when she was an impoverished single mother, struggling to get by and writing on the side. That’s what my friend Ann Patchett did back when she worked as a waitress at TGI Fridays and wrote in her spare hours. That’s what a busy married couple I know does—both of them illustrators, both of them with full-time jobs—when, every morning, they rise a full hour before their children awake to sit across from each other in their small studio space and quietly draw.
People don’t do this kind of thing because they have all kinds of extra time and energy for it; they do this kind of thing because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of extra sacrifices for it.
Unless you come from landed gentry, that’s what everyone does.
Paint Your Ox
For most of human history, then, the vast majority of people have made their art in stolen moments, using scraps of borrowed time—and often using pilfered or discarded materials, to boot. (The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh says it marvelously: “See over there / A created splendour / Made by one individual / From things residual.”)
I once encountered a man in India who owned nothing of value but an ox. The ox had two handsome horns. In order to celebrate his ox, the man had painted one of the horns hot pink and the other turquoise blue. He then glued little bells to the tips of each horn, so that when the ox shook its head, its flashy pink and blue horns made a cheerful tinkling sound.
This hardworking and financially stressed man had only one valuable possession, but he had embellished it to the max, using whatever materials he could get his hands on—a bit of house paint, a touch of glue, and some bells. As a result of his creativity, he now possessed the most interesting-looking ox in town. For what? Just because. Because a decorated ox is better than a non-decorated ox, obviously! (As evidenced by the fact that—eleven years later—the only animal I can still distinctly remember from my visit to that small Indian village is that fantastically decked-out ox.)
Is this the ideal environment in which to create—having to make art out of “things residual” in stolen time? Not really. Or maybe it’s fine. Maybe it doesn’t matter, because that’s how things have always been made. Most individuals have never had enough time, and they’ve never had enough resources, and they’ve never had enough support or patronage or reward . . . and yet still they persist in creating. They persist because they care. They persist because they are called to be makers, by any means necessary.
Money helps, to be sure. But if money were the only thing people needed in order to live creative lives, then the mega-rich would be the most imaginative, generative, and original thinkers among us, and they simply are not. The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust—and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.
I once read a heartbreaking letter that Herman Melville wrote to his good friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, complaining that he simply could not find time to work on his book about that whale, because “I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances.” Melville said that he longed for a big, wide-open stretch of time in which to create (he called it “the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose”), but that sort of luxuriousness simply did not exist for him. He was broke, he was stressed, and he could not find the hours to write in peace.
I do not know of any artist (successful or unsuccessful, amateur or pro) who does not long for that kind of time. I do not know of any creative soul who does not dream of calm, cool, grass-growing days in which to work without interruption. Somehow, though, nobody ever seems to achieve it. Or if they do achieve it (through a grant, for instance, or a friend’s generosity, or an artist’s residency), that idyll is just temporary—and then life will inevitably rush back in. Even the most successful creative people I know complain that they never seem to get all the hours they need in order to engage in dreamy, pressure-free, creative exploration. Reality’s demands are constantly pounding on the door and disturbing them. On some other planet, in some other lifetime, perhaps that sort of peaceful Edenic work environment does exist, but it rarely exists here on earth.
Melville never got that kind of environment, for instance.
But he still somehow managed to write Moby-Dick, anyhow.
Have an Affair
Why do people persist in creating, even when it’s difficult and inconvenient and often financially unrewarding?
They persist because they are in love.
They persist because they are hot for their vocation.
Let me explain what I mean by hot.
You know how people who are having extramarital affairs always seem to manage to find time to see each other in order to have wild, transgressive sex? It doesn’t seem to matter if those people have full-time jobs and families at home to support; they still somehow always manage to find the time to sneak off and see their lover—no matter what the difficulties, the risks, or the costs. Even if they get only fifteen minutes together in a stairwell, they will take that time and they will make out with each other like crazy. (If anything, the fact that they have only fifteen minutes together somehow makes it all even hotter.)
When people are having an affair, they don’t mind losing sleep, or missing meals. They will make whatever sacrifices they have to make, and they will blast through any obstacles, in order to be alone with the object of their devotion and obsession—because it matters to them.
Let yourself fall in love with your creativity like that and see what happens.
Stop treating your creativity like it’s a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art! (You can get a lot of making out done in fifteen minutes, as any furtive teenager can tell you.) Sneak off and have an affair with your most creative self. Lie to everyone about where you’re actually going on your lunch break. Pretend you’re traveling on a business trip when secretly you’re retreating in order to paint, or to write poetry, or to draw up the plans for your future organic mushroom farm. Conceal it from your family and friends, whatever it is you’re up to. Slip away from everyone else at the party and go off to dance alone with your ideas in the dark. Wake yourself up in the middle of the night in order to be alone with your inspiration, while nobody is watching. You don’t need that sleep right now; you can give it up.
What else are you willing to give up in order to be alone with your beloved?
Don’t think of it all as burdensome; think of it all as sexy.
Tristram Shandy Chimes In
Also, try to present yourself to your creativity as if you are sexy—as if you are somebody worth spending time with. I’ve always taken delight on this point from
the novel Tristram Shandy, written by Laurence Sterne, eighteenth-century British essayist, novelist, and general man about town. In the novel, Tristram presents what I see as a marvelous cure for writer’s block—to dress up in his finest regalia and act all princely, thus attracting ideas and inspiration to his side on account of his fabulous ensemble.
Specifically, here’s what Tristram claims he would do when he was feeling “stupid” and blocked, and when his thoughts would “rise heavy and pass gummous through [his] pen.” Instead of sitting there in a funk, staring hopelessly at the empty page, he would leap from the chair, get a fresh razor, and give himself a nice clean shave. (“How Homer could write with so long a beard I don’t know.”) After that, he would engage in this elaborate transformation: “I change my shirt—put on a better coat—send for my last wig—put my topaz ring upon my finger; and in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion.”
Thus decked out to the nines, Tristram would strut around the room, presenting himself to the universe of creativity as appealingly as possible—looking every inch like a dashing suitor and a confident fellow. A charming trick, but best of all, it actually worked. As he explained: “A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth’d at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination.”
I suggest that you try this trick at home.
I’ve done this myself sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly sluggish and useless, and when I feel like my creativity is hiding from me. I’ll go look at myself in the mirror and say firmly, “Why wouldn’t creativity hide from you, Gilbert? Look at yourself!”
Then I clean myself up. I take that goddamn scrunchie out of my greasy hair. I get out of those stale pajamas and take a shower. I shave—not my beard, but at least my legs. I put on some decent clothes. I brush my teeth, I wash my face. I put on lipstick—and I never wear lipstick. I clear my desk of its clutter, throw open a window, and maybe even light a scented candle. I might even put on perfume, for God’s sake. I don’t even put on perfume to go out to dinner, but I will put on perfume in an attempt to seduce creativity back to my side. (Coco Chanel: “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”)
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