The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

  If you do this, you approach a state of mastery, which is the acquisition of consummate skill and technique. But “technique is not enough,” writes Jacques Barzun. “Something more is needed—and perhaps something less. Take the music of Saint-Saëns. Here was a precocious, enormously gifted musician; he could turn out pieces that seemed as if written by Mozart or Beethoven or anybody he wished. But as Berlioz, who was his mentor, regretfully remarked, the young man lacked inexperience.”

  Every artist faces this paradox. Experience—the faith in your ability and the memory that you have done this before—is what gets you through the door. But experience also closes the door. You tend to rely on that memory and stick with what has worked before. You don’t try anything new.

  Inexperience is innocence, naïveté, and humility. It is a powerful ignorance that is summed up for me in an obituary I read of the All-American football player Ellis Jones. Jones, who died at age eighty in 2002, lost his right arm in an accident when he was eleven years old. But that didn’t stop him from playing guard on offense and linebacker on defense in the 1940s at the University of Tulsa and later in the fledgling National Football League. “I played football before I got hurt,” said Jones of the accident that cost him his right arm. “It never occurred to me that I couldn’t keep playing. I guess I was too dumb to think I could not do it.” Inexperience provides us with a childlike fearlessness that is the polar opposite of the alleged wisdom that age confers on us, the “wisdom” telling us some goals are foolish, a waste of time, invitations to disaster. In its purest form, inexperience erases fear. You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible.

  It is that perfect moment of equipoise between knowing it all and knowing nothing that Hemingway was straining for when he said, “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.” You cannot manufacture inexperience, but you can maintain it and protect what you have.

  Beethoven was constantly switching from one skill set to another. For example, he wrote thirty-two piano sonatas in his lifetime, but he did not write them all in one bunch. He composed piano sonatas at every stage in his career, early, middle, and late. Years would pass when he didn’t write any piano sonatas; during those gaps, he turned to symphonies and string quartets and piano trios and concertos. He knew there was a difference between what you could accomplish on a solo piano and the music you could achieve with a full orchestra, and he reveled in the difference and used both. Switching genres was his way of maintaining his inexperience and, as a result, enlarging his art. Whenever he came back to the piano, he would bring to the keyboard everything he had learned from the trios, quartets, concertos, and symphonies. That is why his thirty-second sonata, Op. 111, composed five years before his death, breaks your heart: Everything Beethoven had learned about musical form, ensemble, and masses of sound can be heard in this last sonata.

  Consciously or not, I have always followed one dance piece, successful or otherwise, by launching the next as far in the other direction as possible. I will deliberately follow a ballet for a large cast of dancers set to orchestral music with a piece for a small group to pop music or a jazz solo. I’m not interested in repeating my experience. I want to maintain some inexperience. Giving my next dance a new set of specs is one sure way to do that. Moving from modern dance to ballet is another. Switching gears from concert halls to Broadway is yet another. Norman Mailer calls this “rotating your crops.” Each new challenge is a way to protect your inexperience, make you remember something you never had a chance to forget. When it’s all done, you bring it back to your craft, stronger and wiser.

  Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first. It’s harder than it sounds (most useful habits are), but it’s the only way to improve. In A Book of Five Rings, the sixteenth-century Japanese swordfighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.” Warriors know they need to enlarge their arsenal of skills in order to avoid becoming predictable to their adversaries. It’s no different when the craft is a creative one, and the stakes are somewhat less than life and death. A photographer who can work with both small-and large-format cameras, in a controlled studio and outside in the real world, has exponentially enlarged his potential for developing his career. Likewise, a fiction writer who has mastered the short story and the novel form has more options available in telling a story than a short-story writer who has never flexed his muscles in a novel’s long form.

  When I’m considering my own skills, I break them down into categories:

  Musical skill:

  an understanding of musical structure and history.

  Dramatic skill:

  a sense of what will make people care, with a dollop of daring and flair that surprises people and qualifies as showmanship.

  Painterly skill:

  the ability to conceive images in two dimensions, which is very much like creating the balances and proportions in a painting.

  Sculptural skill:

  adding depth and a sense of mass to the painterly skill.

  Psychological skill:

  knowing the strategies and techniques to get people to do what you want done.

  Design skill:

  having enough knowledge and taste to communicate collaboratively with set, lighting, and costume designers.

  Theatrical skill:

  knowing how to sustain the peaks and valleys once you get moving in the right direction.

  Temporal skill:

  feeling time in your gut, so you know when a scene or phrase has gone on long enough.

  Motivational skill:

  making people want to work with you and for you.

  Entrepreneurial skill:

  getting the project up in front of people.

  Promotional skill:

  keeping it going after the first performance.

  Athletic skill:

  knowing as much as possible about how the body works and moves.

  Literary skill:

  having a sense of beginning, middle, and end.

  A writer might not need sculptural skill, since he doesn’t work in three dimensions; most creative endeavors don’t require athletic or musical or design skills. Still, I suspect everyone could use at least two-thirds of these categories to get the most out of his or her efforts.

  (Of course, there’s an ur-skill that I don’t even feel obliged to list. That, dear reader, is discipline. Everyone needs it. No explanation required.)

  The skills you’ve developed suffuse all aspects of your ability to create. The white-hot pitch of creativity is only useful to the person who knows what to do with it. In his notebooks, in discussing the power of the crossbow, Leonardo da Vinci makes reference to doubling its degrees of “fury” through applied technique and dexterity. This is a useful metaphor for your creative efforts: You double your intensity with skill.

  Before taking on a subject, Leonardo would consider it from an extraordinary number of directions. He had a poetic feel for scientific imagery. Take his description of waves upon the water:

  Observe the motion of the surface of the water, how it resembles that of hair, which has two movements—one depends on the weight of the hair, the other on the direction of the curls; thus the water forms whirling eddies, one part following the impetus of the chief current, and the other following the incidental motions and return flow.

  Leonardo’s breadth of interests was remarkable. So was his ability to bounce back from one area of study to another and find relationships between them. This refreshed him, kept alive his passion for the new. Painters, writers, musicians, we all need this breadth and passion if we’re going to keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.

  I saw this when I worked with Baryshnikov. He was the most skilled classical dancer of his time; there was nothing he couldn’t do in the cl
assical repertoire. Yet overriding all this ability was an enormous romantic desire to perform American dance. It’s the reason he left his country and family and defected to America. In hindsight, his success in the West looks like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t that obvious back in 1975 when he and I first met and worked together on the jazzy Push Comes to Shove. I could have easily given him a flashy dance with leaps and turns that took advantage of his great technique. It would have thrilled the audience—but it would have disappointed him. His desire to dance something new and different was overwhelming. He had turned his life upside down to fulfill that passion. So, while I did invent jumps and pirouettes for him (you have to let your thoroughbreds run at some point), I also gave him a character to play—the master of ceremonies, complete with hat—that he regarded as very American, practically vaudevillian. He took the character and somehow this great dancer made himself appear as an underdog to the audience—very vulnerable, very appealing. All because of his extreme passion to dance in a way he considered American.

  Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.

  exercises

  23 Take Inventory of Your Skills

  Before you can appreciate your skills and where you might need improvement, you need to take inventory. This is tougher than it sounds. Where do you begin? With basic skills you take for granted (like walking and talking), or the specific skills that enhance your craft? To help you get started, I asked my dance troupe to describe a successful dancer’s skill set. Here’s what they came up with:

  Obviously there is the athletic component. Dancers have to be exceptional athletes. And under athletic would be the basic skills of coordination, balance, poise, flexibility, endurance, and strength. These are so basic that dancers forget to mention them; moving and its component parts are like breathing to them.

  Then there’s acting skill. Dancers have to display a sense of timing and the ability to play a character.

  Musicality is also a skill. Dancers have to move in rhythm with the music and also know how to phrase against it.

  Perseverance is a big skill, too. The dancer’s life is tougher than most. It’s just like acting or singing, only in addition to remembering your lines and performing, you have to train like a prizefighter for four or more hours a day to maintain your athletic skills.

  Discipline goes hand in hand with perseverance.

  So does a sense of humor. Every great dancer has this, or at least a sense of the absurd. To a visitor from Mars, it’s a bizarre and silly art we pursue. We stand on one leg rather than two, we float our arms overhead rather than keep them at our sides, we spin on our toes trying to convince people that these movements are beautiful.

  Then there is the refinement of these skills, like physical intelligence, by which I mean an awareness of how your body moves in space. There are also good reflexes, which are genetic gifts in the form of fast-twitch muscle fibers that can also be enhanced. As a choreographer I particularly value a dancer’s ability to function well in a group. I look for dancers who can work independently and yet also pull together as a team. Partnering is a subset of this but maybe even more valuable for a dancer’s career; if you can’t partner, you’ll rarely find work. So is the willingness to take direction, a skill noticed mostly when absent.

  Dancers are also masters of illusion. In this category the paradigm is Fred Astaire. Ginger Rogers supposedly once asked him why he worked so hard; he replied, “To make it look easy.” He worked on everything. For example, Astaire had very large hands of which he was extremely self-conscious. He would work for hours in front of mirrors to see exactly what his hands were doing and how they looked. He constructed the illusion of a man who was completely at ease with his body and his movements, as if he were acting totally on impulse, and yet nothing was unscripted, unrehearsed, or out of his control.

  Political skill also stands out. The dance world is ruthless. What it takes to survive in a ballet company is very different from what it takes to survive as a gypsy dancer on Broadway. You need shrewd people instincts to handle both worlds and to know their differences.

  The final skill I simply list as forever the child. You could call it “the ability to not know” or “denial” or “naïveté.” It’s basically a sense of innocence. You do not know that failure can hurt, or even that you can fail. This brand of unknowingness lets you take incredible risks onstage without appearing to consider the consequences.

  These are the broad sweeping strokes of a dancer’s skill set. How would you assemble your own? What do you have, what do you need, and what can you do to develop the skills you don’t have?

  24 Play Twenty Questions

  Thoroughness, like discipline, is one of the most valuable skills. The patience to accumulate detail keeps you grounded and sharp.

  Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks are evidence of obsessive thoroughness. For example, Leonardo was fascinated by water. In one section of his notebooks he lists the various aspects of rivers and currents he intended to study:

  Of the different rates of speed of currents from the surface of the water to the bottom.

  Of the different cross slants between the surface and the bottom.

  Of the different currents on the surface of the waters.

  Of the different currents on the bed of the rivers.

  Of the different depths of the rivers.

  Of the different shapes of the hills covered by the waters.

  Of the different shapes of the hills uncovered by the waters.

  Where the water is swift at the bottom and not above.

  Where the water is slow at the bottom and swift above.

  Where it is slow below and above and swift in the middle.

  Where the water in the rivers stretches itself out and where it contracts. Where it bends and where it straightens itself.

  Where it penetrates evenly in the expanses of rivers and where unevenly. Where it is low in the middle and high at the sides.

  Where it is high in the middle and low at the sides.

  Where the current goes straight in the middle of the stream. Where the current winds, throwing itself on different sides.

  Of the different slants in the descents of the water.

  By the time Leonardo had considered all of these aspects, he understood rivers and was ready to make any creative use of their power and potential that might occur to him, whatever the context. Asking the question assigned him the task of finding the answer.

  Before you approach a topic, write down twenty things you want to know about it. Let’s say you’ve decided to paint a landscape. Here are twenty questions to consider:

  From what direction is the light coming?

  What is the elevation?

  What trees are native to the area?

  Where is the nearest source of water?

  What animals are likely to be in view?

  What season is it?

  What’s the weather?

  Are you looking down, across, or up?

  What crops are being cultivated, if any?

  Are there towns or villages or cities in view?

  Why are you there?

  What is attractive about the setting?

  Is the wind blowing?

  How much sky can you see?

  What’s behind you that might affect the view?

  What color predominates in your mind’s eye?

  How many shades of that color do you see in the region?

  Are other people a part of the image? Who?

  Are you imagining it today, or at some past or future time?

  What is the frame of the image?

  You may have a totally different set of questions. A portrait will lead to an entirely different set. So will a sculpture, a short story, a short film, a work based in movement.

  The asking of the questions, however, sets you the task of
learning as much as you can before you start putting paint to canvas, chisel to stone, finger to keyboard. And this questioning process doesn’t stop once you’ve begun. The more you know, the better you can imagine.

  25 Package Your Time

  Of all my skills, none is more important than the ability to organize my time. Like many people, I worry on every project that I won’t have enough time to do my best. I worry when I have to rely on other people’s timetables, that their priorities will collide with mine or, worse, that they don’t have any priorities at all, that they’re reckless with deadlines. The thought that I will run out of time on a project terrifies me. So I look at the calendar and try to work it all out.

  To some this is basic planning: Determine how much time you need versus how much time you have and plan accordingly. But one of the virtues of the creative life is supposed to be that it’s open-ended. There’s no deadline on a painting or a poem; it’s done when it’s done. To quote D. W. Harding, “The most important thing is not what the author or artist had in mind to begin with but at what point he decided to stop.”

  In the collaborative arts—film, theater, choreography among them—we don’t have that luxury. Even if there’s no set date for a ballet’s premiere, I still have to work around the dancers’ schedules (and the composer’s, and the set designer’s, and the lighting director’s, and the theater’s, too). I still have those dancers coming to the studio as scheduled expecting something wonderful from me. That responsibility weighs on me, and when it’s compounded by multiple projects it can be crushing.