The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

  Egg will take you places you’ve never been. Make it a part of your daily routine.

  14 Give Yourself a Little Challenge

  George Harrison once decided, as a game, to write a song based on the first book he saw at his mother’s house. Picking one up at random, he opened it and saw the phrase “gently weeps,” whereupon he promptly wrote his first great song, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

  You can give yourself the same kind of challenge whatever medium you work in: paint only in shades of green; write a story without using the verb “to be”; film a ten-minute scene nonstop with one camera. Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way, which is the prime goal of scratching.

  15 Take a Field Trip

  When scratching turns into frustration, take a walk. But don’t just walk anywhere. Add some utility to it. Have a goal. Turn it into a field trip by imbuing the walk with a steely determination to come back with something in hand.

  If I’m struggling for an idea, I often find myself leaving my studio, walking across Central Park, and ending up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Museums are my favorite field trips, and working in museum-rich Manhattan, I would be a fool to ignore the local resources. As Goethe said, “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” But it’s easy to lose yourself and exhaust yourself in a resource as rich as the Met. So you ought to go with a goal. Attack the museum with a purpose.

  For example, dancers see themselves in a mirror since their first day in a dance studio, and that is often the only way they perceive themselves. I want them to realize new ways of presenting the human body. This is particularly true with dancers new to my company and my work. So I take them to the Met to share some sources that inspired me—and may do the same for them.

  On one trip to the Met I started with the three-thousand-year-old Cycladic figures, the paper-thin sculptures whose crossed-arm position became the closing image of The Fugue. Then it was off to the African wing where the wooden fertility statues, with their bottom-heavy proportions, hunkering low to the ground, suggest the squatting in my 1998 dance Yemaya. Finally we moved to the Egyptian wing to look at an array of striding figures, all locked into the isometric tension that my fierce warriors would need for In the Upper Room. And then, with our minds opened but not overloaded, we were done.

  In this spirit, the whole world becomes a museum that you can own.

  Professional musicians are also huge beneficiaries of the world’s secret resources. They are always traveling to perform and, for them, music is a universal language. If they have ears, a visit to any new musical culture becomes a field trip. Thus, Antonín Dvorák visits Iowa in 1887 and the result is his Ninth Symphony, From the New World, his most famous composition. Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck tours the Middle East and India in 1958 where he becomes intrigued by folk music that doesn’t stick to 4/4 time and the result is his enormous commercial breakthrough, the 1959 album Time Out, with hits like “Take Five” in 5/4 meter and “Blue Rondo a la Turk” in 9/8 time. Paul Simon hears recordings of South African street music in 1984, visits South Africa in 1985, and the result a year later is his much-admired record Graceland.

  It doesn’t matter where you live. If you have a goal in mind, you can turn any venue or destination into a valuable field trip. If you’re looking for beauty and sensory relief, it could be a local gallery or a walk in the woods. If you want chaos and exposed human emotions, spend some time in a hospital emergency room or a bus terminal. If you want information, pore over documents in a forgotten archive at your library. If you want to observe people under pressure, check out a police station or loiter around a construction site. A mall, a blues club, a dairy farm, an open field—they are all worthwhile field trips if you have a clear purpose in mind. It’s your world. Own it.

  Chapter 7

  accidents will happen

  The most productive

  artists I know have a plan in mind when they get down to work. They know what they want to accomplish, how to do it, and what to do if the process falls off track.

  But there’s a fine line between good planning and overplanning. You never want the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of your work.

  The photographer Richard Avedon is as good at planning and preparation as anyone I know. Before he takes a portrait of a subject, he knows exactly what kind of camera, film, props, and background he will use. Everything is planned ahead. None of his technique is left to chance. Unlike many portrait photographers, Avedon takes preparation a step further and insists on meeting the subjects before the photo session. But all that planning ends at the moment the subject walks into the studio; that’s when instinct and creativity take over. Avedon doesn’t have a preconceived notion of what he wants the photo to look like, though he does know what feeling it should convey. He plans ahead, but not too far ahead, so he can recognize amazing when he sees it. When he photographed Charlie Chaplin, it was the very day the great comedian was leaving America. He was annoyed and it showed. He stubbornly refused to give Avedon any emotion other than a blank stare. But then there was a split-second moment when Chaplin’s theatrical instincts slipped through. Chaplin pointed his index fingers above his head, creating horns, and, with his scowl, became an angry devil. Avedon believed that a portrait of Chaplin had to have the feel of humor. Equally stubborn and determined, he worked on breaking Chaplin’s sullen mood. When Chaplin let his guard down, pretending to be a laughing devil with horns, Avedon snapped. End of photo session. He got what he wanted.

  A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears. That’s how I think of planning. It has to be sufficiently thoughtful and solid to get the work up and standing straight, but it cannot take over as you toil away on the interior guts of a piece. Transforming your ideas rarely goes according to plan.

  This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.

  When I was making Surfer at the River Styx, I had trouble coming up with an ending. I was yearning for something majestic and I wasn’t getting it. Then, one day in rehearsal, I saw it. I wanted all four men in the company on stage near the end of the ballet, and I had them partnering one of the women. Four men, one woman. This is not usually done. Perhaps something unusual can happen with that combination. They were holding her low off the ground, and as she was circling around their arms and bodies in a very risky form of aerial partnering, I could see her gradually but organically snaking her way up their bodies. She just kept evolving and moving higher as the group of four men walked slowly toward the right side of the stage. And then it hit me: Omigod, what if they lifted her as high as possible, holding her legs in a perfect split? Lit properly (that is, theatrically), she’d be floating in air. That’s the ending!

  It was a stroke of luck, but I was prepared to accept it for the simple reason that I needed an ending. At that moment I felt blessed, because it sent the piece into a sphere where the entire dance was suddenly coherent. I certainly hadn’t planned it. It was a gift. But I also felt I’d earned it.

  Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark—and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E. B. White’s phrase, “prepared to be lucky.”

  The key words here are “prepared” and “lucky.” They’re inseparable. You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident. The sports entrepreneur Mark McCormack,
whose career began with three enormous consecutive strokes of luck—golf legends Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus were his first three clients—once said, “Yes, I admit I was lucky. But I saw it and I was ready for it, whereas many people wouldn’t know a stroke of luck if it bit them on the nose.”

  Some people resent the idea of luck. Accepting the role of chance in our lives suggests that our creations and triumphs are not entirely our own, and that in some way we’re undeserving of our success. I say, Get over it. This is how the world works. In creative endeavors luck is a skill.

  The discovery of vulcanized rubber is the perfect example of the power of luck. Charles Goodyear, after years of experimentation, walks into a general store in 1839, accidentally spills his concoction of gum and sulphur onto a sizzling potbelly stove, and discovers that instead of melting like molasses the compound chars like leather, leaving a dry, springy material that keeps its flexibility at almost any temperature. Goodyear called the process “vulcanization” and almost every use of rubber depends on it. It is one of the most celebrated “accidents” in industrial science. Goodyear, of course, didn’t see it that way, and I side with Goodyear. He was active in his pursuit of a durable rubber, not passive; he was always experimenting and therefore always open to luck. Also, while the accident could have happened to anybody at any time, it took a person with an open mind to recognize the importance of what took place on that stove, and it took knowledge and skill to analyze it and repeat it in the laboratory. The hot stove incident held meaning, said Goodyear, only for the person “whose mind was prepared to draw an inference,” the one who had “applied himself most perseveringly to the subject.” (Gary Player put this principle succinctly: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”)

  Being prepared for luck is like getting a voice message that tells you, “Something good may happen to you between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. today. Make sure you’re at your desk (or in your studio or office or at your laboratory bench) working. And keep your eyes open for it.”

  Of course, you have to be present, in the room, to recognize the stroke of luck. Being in the room is a concomitant of Goodyear’s perseverance: The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.

  Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success in show business is showing up. It’s the same with luck: eighty percent of it is showing up to see it. My dancers can be doing the most marvelous things in the studio, but if I’m not there to witness it, it may as well be the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Never happened.

  Advertising wizard Phil Dusenberry established his career as a creative director by landing the General Electric account. GE was looking to consolidate all its advertising at one shop and they wanted a corporate slogan that unified the message. On the day before his presentation to the GE executives, Dusenberry didn’t feel the slogan was quite right. He had the concept—“We make the things that make life good…” or something like that—but he didn’t feel it gelled. So he laid out the various slogans and started rearranging the words, in much the same fashion as I play with my coins. Eventually the words fell into place and spelled out “We bring good things to life.” Dusenberry knew this was the winner the moment he saw it. Was this luck or accident? Would anyone else have recognized the perfect slogan? Would anyone else have bothered to play with the words? Dusenberry was prepared, he was persevering in the room, and he was able to see it.

  It’s tempting to try to rein in the unruliness of the creative process, especially at the start. Planning lets you impose order on the chaotic process of making something new, but when it’s taken too far you get locked into a status quo, and creative thinking is about breaking free from the status quo, even from one you made yourself. That’s why it’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.

  Over the years I’ve learned a thing or two—entirely the hard way—about the pitfalls of locking yourself into a predetermined course. I started out in the not-for-profit world of dance, where much of my sustenance came from foundation grants. I became adept at writing grant applications that required me to specify exactly what I intended to do with the grant money—from the music I would commission or license to whom I’d hire to design the costumes. No detail was left to chance. As a result, I fell into the habit of overplanning. Since I like to keep my promises, I developed a stoic reluctance to change. My focus on preparation and ritual made it difficult for me to veer away from my plan.

  But working in real time in the real world eventually showed me the error of my ways. I began to see that overplanning can be as pernicious as not planning at all. There’s an emotional lie to overplanning; it creates a security blanket that lets you assume you have things under control, that you are further along than you really are, that you’re home free when you haven’t even walked out the door yet.

  When I was first considering writing this book, I thought about calling it How Not to Plan. That title appealed to the contrarian in me. I wanted people to take note that planning isn’t everything, that being too organized can be a negative. It hems you into a corner, handcuffs you, and as a result, shortchanges your opportunities to be lucky. To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity. Plan only to a point. The great military strategists from Sun-tzu to Clausewitz have advised that you can plan only so far into the battle; you have to save lots of room for your adversary’s contribution.

  Let’s take a look at some of the problems that can derail your well-laid plans.

  Other People.

  When I prepare to work on a project, the field general in me comes out immediately. I marshal all my forces. I carefully assemble my team, from dancers to technical support. Anything less would be underplanning.

  But people sometimes let you down. For every person who inspires you and pushes you in the right direction, there is often another who is “missing in action,” either because he’s unreliable or simply closes you off rather than opens you up. No matter how well-intentioned someone else may be, things go wrong—dancers get injured, a loved one is taken ill, someone hits a creative roadblock just as you’re breaking through your own—and you have to be able to roll with the changes and work with them instead of resisting. The peg may have started out round but it’s square now; hammering harder isn’t going to make it fit.

  Relying too much on others, even in an inevitably collaborative process, makes you lazy. Don’t get me wrong, I love the people I work with. Unlike the solitary painter or writer, I do nothing but collaborations; it’s not me up there onstage dancing anymore. The dancers are my collaborators, as are the composer, the musicians, and the costume, set, and lighting designers. There is no one in the world more delighted than I when my production wizard Santo Loquasto, with whom I have worked for decades, strolls in with a set design that blows everyone away. But I can’t ever let myself think, “Well, this section of the ballet is subpar. Thank God Santo’s set design will save me here.”

  To protect himself against depending too much on movie stars, the film director Milos Forman has a style that keeps many actors on edge. He won’t show them the script too far in advance. He won’t rehearse them. He won’t permit them to launch into their arias. He just starts the cameras rolling and tells them to say their lines. Actors hate that; they feel unprepared, under someone else’s control. Which they are. It’s the director’s duty to let nothing interfere with the telling of the story, and in Forman’s view that includes the actors. He is the one with responsibility for the Big Picture, a perspective he has to maintain at all times no matter what the priorities might be for the performer on that day’s set. (On the other hand, they have to admit it works: three actors have won Academy Awards in his films. Forman’s efforts make his actors lucky.)

  Perfectionism at the Start.

  Another trap is the belief that everything has to be perfect before you can take the next step. You won’t move on to that secon
d chapter until the first is written, rewritten, honed, tweaked, examined under a microscope, and buffed to a bright mahogany sheen. You won’t dip a brush in the paint until you’ve assembled all the colors you can possibly imagine using in the course of the project. I know it’s important to be prepared, but at the start of the process this type of perfectionism is more like procrastination. You’ve got to get in there and do.

  I used to bask in the notion that all my obstacles to creative efficiency would vanish if I only had exactly the right resources: my own studio, my own dancers, my own theater, and enough money to pay the dancers all year long and to hire the best collaborators. But I’ve learned that the opposite is true: Limits are a secret blessing, and bounty can be a curse. I’ve been on enough big-budget film sets to appreciate the malignant influence of abundance and bloat.

  A good manager in business knows that there’s never a moment in the business cycle when a company’s objectives and resources are in perfect harmony. There’s never an ideal balance between how many orders you have and how much inventory you’re stocking. Your expenses and your income are never exactly in sync; one is always outpacing the other. Your people always demand more money, more resources, more investment spending than you’re willing to give; you always have more phone calls to return or paperwork to handle than time to get it all done. Good managers know this instinctively, so they never plan on an ideal harmony they can’t achieve. It’s better to be ready to go than to wait until you are perfectly ready.