The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

  Now it’s your turn. Do your version of the White Swan scene. Create a gesture or movement that would need many words to convey its meaning. It could be something like the Italian gesture of putting thumb to fingertips, palm upraised, and bouncing your hand. If you had to explain this in writing, what would it mean? (Early in Movin’ Out, a character mimes kicking a field goal and raising his hands above his head to signal “Score!” The move takes 1.3 seconds, but it suggests everything—football, Saturday afternoons, high school, girls and boys, cars, youth.)

  If you can do this, you have the skill to develop congruities and affinities. If you have that skill, you can always find spine. When words fail, spine does not.

  21 Spinal Tap

  Pick a favorite work of art and try to determine what spine, if any, the artist built into it. It could be a novel, movie, painting, play, opera, ballet, cartoon, TV sitcom, whatever. This is an exercise in seeking out the hidden architecture of a piece.

  Some artists give you strong hints, such as the quest myth spine of Malamud’s The Natural, that only become obvious when studied or revealed outright.

  Others make it easy for you. The German novelist Thomas Mann offers a field day for would-be spinal tappers. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, is clearly built around the spine of a decaying organism; we watch a family dynasty as it disappears. A later novel, the sprawling Joseph and His Brothers, takes its plot literally and directly from the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus. Mann’s novel itself is fourteen hundred pages long, but the spine of the book is a Bible story covering just a few pages, Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt. In Doctor Faustus, Mann makes no effort to hide the fact that the Faust legend provides the infrastructure for his story about a composer who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for fourteen years of unbridled creativity. The spine is right there in the title.

  I happen to like these books, so I’m attuned to the authors’ motives and methods. You can do the same with works that speak to you. Just because they are literary doesn’t make their spines any easier to gauge than that of a symphony or painting. If the work matters to you, you will eventually discern the material the artist built upon.

  Entering into the convolutions of an artist’s mind can be as bewildering as trying to explain a dream. But this is an exercise, not a test; there are no right or wrong answers here. The spine is one of the first places to look if you want to understand how a work of art gathers substance and integrity. If you can find the spine in work that already speaks to you, you can build better spines for work of your own.

  22 What’s Your MQ?

  The process by which we transform the meaning of one thing into something different is an essential part of human intelligence. Without symbols, and the ability to understand them, there would be no writing, no numbers, no drama, no art. Everything you create is a representation of something else; in this sense, everything you create is enriched by metaphor.

  Developing a spine is the first step in building what I like to think of as your MQ, or metaphor quotient. In the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ.

  You get an inkling of this in tests constructed to measure intelligence. Many of these challenge your capacity to recognize and construct metaphor. Take a question like “Canyon is to bridge as mountain is to (a) cave, (b) mine, (c) peak, (d) ridge, or(e) tunnel.” The question is designed to test your ability to see patterns where patterns don’t obviously exist and then to re-create them. A bridge lets people get to the other side of a canyon in the same way that a tunnel lets people get to the other side of a mountain. Much about IQ tests revolves around comparing—comparing a series of five objects to determine which does not belong or comparing a sequence of three drawings and choosing a fourth that completes the sequence. Comparing is the engine that drives metaphor.

  Let’s take it a step further with these seven exercises. They won’t tell you how smart you are, but if they bring you more in touch with all the metaphor around you, they can change the way you think.

  1. How many images and objects can you see in three minutes of cloud gazing? This is metaphor as visual translation.

  2. While doing a “mindless” chore, like washing the dishes, try to become the rhythm of the process. What’s the rhythm of scrub, wash, or rinse? Hum the rhythm. Give it a name. What other “mindless” chores have a matching rhythm? This is metaphor as object or task.

  3. Distill a mechanical sound and mimic it. For example, take the click-click of a blinking turn signal in a car. Lock the tempo and beat within you and then mimic it when you speak. Now hear the beat in other people speaking. Then see how the world begins to move to your beat. (This happened to me one day in a taxi on my way to rehearsal. The turn signal clicking worked its way inside my head. It made me think of kids skipping rope, which led to an image of kids skipping double Dutch. That positioning made me think of dancers standing on opposite sides of a line onstage; I used the image that day at rehearsal, while it was still in my head. All from a turn signal.) This is metaphor as aural and visual stimulus.

  4. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” Do you ever find yourself behaving superstitiously in order to control your destiny? Focus on a superstition, like knocking on wood to bring yourself luck or tossing salt over your shoulder to fend off evil spirits. What image springs to mind? A happy ending or the devil? Follow your thoughts wherever they lead. This is metaphor as faith.

  5. Study a word’s linguistic roots. Where does it take you? How far back must you go? What are you thinking about when you come to the source? For example, the word tragedy always makes me think of goats. Tragedy derives from the Greek trages, which means goat. In ancient times, goats were used as sacrifices to the gods. The story goes that some goats ate the grape leaves in a vineyard of the gods, thus offending the deities. The goats took the fall. Eventually the Greeks stopped sacrificing valuable goats and, in their place, created rituals and plays to appease the gods. Heroes replaced goats, but the actors were only killed symbolically. Their characters took the fall. The plays were known as tragedies, after the goats. This is metaphor as theater.

  6. Find two works of art you can connect to each other. What is the connection? Is this what the creators intended, or are you seeing something they didn’t or perhaps couldn’t see? You are making the works your own by putting them together in new and interesting ways. For example, I saw a blockbuster Picasso/Matisse exhibition that succeeded in demonstrating incredible parallels between the two painters. But what interested me more than the comparisons was my realization that Matisse would never have created his late-period paper cutouts if not for Picasso’s youthful paper collages done thirty years earlier. I had always thought that cutouts were Matisse’s invention. This exhibition suggested otherwise. The connection was a revelation to me. This is metaphor as curating.

  7. Turn Narcissus around. Try to see another person in your image. Then reverse it and try to see yourself in that person’s image. Imagine your life if you had that person’s wealth (or looks, or taste, or biases) or that person had yours. This is metaphor as empathy. And it’s a common one. You’re walking the proverbial mile in someone else’s shoes. People do this every day (in its uglier incarnation, it is known as envy).

  Metaphor is all around you. It’s never too late to raise your MQ.

  Chapter 9

  skill

  Pope Leo X heard

  that Leonardo da Vinci was experimenting with the formulas for varnishes instead of executing a painting. He declared, “This man will never do anything, for he begins thinking about the end before the beginning of his work.”

  However, Leonardo understood that the better you know the nuts and bolts of your craft, the more fully you can express your talents.

  The great painters are incomparable draftsmen. They also know how to mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative; no task is too small to be worthy of their attention.

  The great composers are usually dazzling musicians. They have to know their ins
trument before they can make it sing the tune in their head. Johann Sebastian Bach took this further, learning how to build organs as a young man and becoming one of Europe’s leading experts on its sound. He literally knew the instrument inside and out.

  A great chef can chop and dice better than anyone in his kitchen.

  The best fashion designers are invariably virtuosos with a needle and thread. Even when they have armies of assistants preparing their designs, they still know how to cut and sew better than anyone working for them.

  The best writers are well-read people. They have the richest appreciation of words, the biggest vocabularies, the keenest ear for language. They also know their grammar. Words and language are their tools, and they have learned how to use them. (Joseph Epstein blanches with anger and embarrassment when he runs across a word he doesn’t know. To him, not knowing a word is like a doctor not knowing the name of an obscure but vital nerve, or a carpenter forgetting the name of a type of nail. Perhaps he’s being a bit extreme, too harsh on himself; it’s impossible to know all the million-plus words in the English language, but you can’t help admiring his desire to know them all.)

  A successful entrepreneur can do everything and anything—stock the warehouse, negotiate with vendors, develop a product, design an ad campaign, close a deal, placate an unhappy customer—as well as, if not better than, anyone working for him.

  What all these people have in common is that they have mastered the underlying skills of their creative domain, and built their creativity on the solid foundation of those skills.

  Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple. Picasso once said, while admiring an exhibition of children’s art, “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

  You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin. You should never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were all keyboard virtuosi, but each demanded more of his music than the exploitation of keyboard skill. Beethoven, for example, wrote greater (and more difficult) music in his later years (when his keyboard skills declined) than he did in his youth. The craft in his fingers had diminished but the skill in his head had grown.

  An awareness of your particular set of skills will tell you what sets you apart. When asked to explain his success, Billy Joel says, “I have a job where I get to do the only things I’m good at doing. I can sing in tune. I can play an instrument. I can write songs. And I can get on stage and perform. I’m not a virtuoso at any single one. I’m competent and I do my job. But I’m in a field, the music industry, that sees this as extraordinary.”

  Sometimes the most important skills are forced upon you by other people. The first time I worked with Jennifer Tipton, the lighting designer, was on my very first ballet in 1965, Tank Dive. There was a moment in the piece when I told her, “Jenny, at this point you will turn off the lights so I can exit.”

  “No, I won’t,” she said. “Get yourself offstage.”

  I loved her attitude. From then on, I never counted on lighting to do my job for me. It forced me to confront and learn one of the most difficult skills in stage directing: how to get performers on and off the stage. (This is not just an issue for directors and choreographers. The novelist John Gregory Dunne, explaining the difficulties of writing novels, says, “Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier. Each book in fact is a tabula rasa; from book to book I seem to forget how to get characters in and out of rooms—a far more difficult task than the nonwriter might think.”)

  Yogi Berra once said that for Christmas he told his father, “I want a baseball bat, a glove, and a ball.” His father said, “Which one of the three do you want?” As a good parent, he was saying, I can’t give you everything, but if you’re really serious about baseball, you’ll figure out how to get the other two. That’s a powerful lesson: Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.

  Odd as it may sound, personality is a skill. You can choose and develop aspects of it that will draw people to you and make them want to help you learn and improve. When I was playing hooky from college and running every day to a Manhattan dance studio near Carnegie Hall to take classes, Margot Fonteyn came into the dressing room one day wearing a mink coat, with all the accoutrements of the grande dame that she was. This was unheard of in the dancing world as far as I knew. No one was that rich! She looked like an opera star. But then she took out this simple wardrobe—a pair of pink tights and a black leotard—and that was all she wore. She went into the studio and worked in the back. The instructor would always make a point of inviting her to the front, and we would all back off as if to say “This is your room.” But she would never move forward. One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that, I learned.

  One dancer I know insists her greatest skill is a talent for seduction. She told me that she grew up with a Siamese cat and a Great Dane, and she spent hours watching the cat gain control over the vastly larger dog. It was a life lesson in seduction, and she brings that skill with her every time she takes the stage.

  At auditions I find I can size up a dancer and determine if he’s right for my company or project by the way he comes in the door and puts his bag down. That and asking him to come forward and move into fifth position will tell me all I need to know about his training, his attitude, his propriety and modesty, even his charisma. If he has the skill, there’s no hiding it. Without skill, there is no confidence. You cannot fake it.

  Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. This means vigilant practice and excellent practice habits. You’ve heard the phrase “Practice makes perfect”? Not true. Perfect practice makes perfect. The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

  All dancers lead the same life; the lowliest corps member and the megastar still have to go to the same class at 10:00 A.M. to stay in shape. Painters still have to prepare their own paints. Soloists spend hours at their instruments before they rehearse with the orchestra. These habits don’t disappear when you become recognized, honored, rich, famous, and otherwise validated. In fact, though everyone is free to practice as much as they want, it’s the most acclaimed and skilled people who work the hardest to maintain those skills. The greatest musical virtuosos spend more hours a day practicing than do the members of an orchestra. Mikhail Baryshnikov was always the hardest-working student at the Kirov school; his teacher Pushkin singled him out for his abilities and made him continue working after everyone went home for the day. He maintained that ethic of working harder than anyone else twenty years later when he was the most admired dancer in the world. It’s the same in sports. The greatest (and highest-paid) athletes, like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, practice harder, longer, and better than their rivals. Moreover, they extend that discipline to the most basic elements of their craft. Prima ballerinas work as diligently and carefully at the barre as any novice. (Actually they work more diligently on basics that lesser dancers might consider beneath them.) The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.

  You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that’s a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.

  The real issue is conditioning. It’s an obvious c
oncern for a dancer, who won’t return to the studio after two weeks away with the same physical coordination and stamina as when he left. It’s not as obvious for a concert pianist, yet I don’t know any virtuoso who would take the stage without weeks of preparation and practice. It’s the only way to be sharp, even if the performer is the only one in the hall who hears the difference. And a surgeon once told me that he notices if one of his scrub nurses has been off for a week; he can see a fraction of a second difference in the way she reacts to his requests at the operating table. He detects the same lack of acute skill in himself if he has been on vacation for a week or two. It might not be obvious to his colleagues, but he knows it. It takes him a day or two to lose the rustiness.

  Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work. It’s pleasant to repeat the things we do well, while it’s frustrating to deal with repeated failure. I see this all the time with dancers. If they have great leg extension but deficient arms, they will spend more time working on leg extension (because the effort is rewarding—it looks good and feels good) and less time on their arms. Common sense should tell them the process ought to be reversed. That’s what the great ones do: They shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.

  The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.