Untorturing the Artist

Changing how we think about writing

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

It’s almost the end of the year, the time where I get sentimental and motivated. Guilty and grateful. It’s a time marker. And while I tend to be on the non-traditional end of things in general, New Years has always been special to me.

I have to admit, I have never spent it wildly. No drunken kisses, no dance parties. I’ve never even watched the ball drop in New York City. As a kid, I can only remember one time that my mom stayed awake for it. That was 2000, and we were waiting to watch all the lights in the world go out.

I spend most of my midnights on New Years alone. It isn’t sad for me. It’s sacred. I journal, take account of the things I am most thankful for in the year. I take accountability for the areas where I am not living the way I want to. I get practical, write down little habits that I want to include in my day. And I also shoot for the stars with goals like, climb a mountain, or publish a novel.

Last year, my goal was to start this newsletter. My first unpublished post was written on January 1st. Then I sat on it until August. Thinking. Deliberating. Backing out. Recommitting. When I saw that I was over halfway through the year and still hadn’t made a move, I finally published the damn thing.

This year has been big personally. It’s the year I really committed to writing everyday. I pointed my compass and marched on, and while I still get nervous putting these newsletters out, and admittedly I’ve only gotten rejections for the stories I’ve submitted to magazines, each step of it has been validating. Especially the rejections. Who would have thought? After all, it means I’m writing.

Moments like this, holidays and birthdays and seasons, remind me morbidly of death. The impermanence and passing of a whole year, gone to the cosmos never to return again. In theory I know every second is that way. All of it is in motion, changing. We are never exactly the same.

That is one reason that I decided to pick up the pen and finally write. I’m not old. I’ve got plenty of time. At least statistically. But that can be an illusion. I’ll do it when my kids are older. When I’m less tired. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. It’s a foolish way to live, when really all we have is the moment. Right now.

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In honor of all my end of year musings, I bring you one of the gems I found on writing this year. It moved me greatly. It also made me realize how often I have given up on creative pursuits. How important it is to take this act seriously.

Early this year, I read The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. If you haven’t and you like books on writing, you should. He tackles the subject of the Muse, creative pursuits, and most importantly, the blocks to those pursuits that he universally refers to as Resistance.

His take on creating is a spiritual one. He himself prays before he writes each day, reciting the invocation of the Muse in Homer’s Odyssey.

O, Divine Poesy,

Goddess, daughter of Zeus,

sustain for me this song …

To some it might sound strange. Superstitious. I have listened to interviews with him, and from the way he talks, he believes in a real being that brings inspiration to humans.

I’m the conduit.

I’m the human voice.

But the source lies elsewhere.

I can’t compel the work to appear.

I can’t make the goddess deliver.

I can’t bribe her, or coerce her, or grovel before her, or make her any pledges or promises that will induce her to do what I wish.

I can only invoke her.

- Steven Pressfield, from his blog here.

You don’t have to buy into the Muse as an entity. Even if you don’t believe, the thought exercise is useful. To think of inspiration as being outside of yourself rather than in.

Stephen King has another way of thinking about writing that mirrors this. The idea that the stories he writes don’t come from his own brain. He is a radio antennae. If he shows up and listens in, he can catch the wave.

Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.

-Stephen King

There’s something that can happen to creative people. There’s even a term for it: the tortured artist. You can picture someone writhing in pain, struggling to get the work to portray a vision in their head, to bring it to life in just the right way. And you always fall short. There isn’t one writer worth their salt who doesn’t know the agony of trying to say something, and being unable to really do it.

Maybe that’s because we believe it’s us doing the saying. Or we want to please, to appear brilliant, to have the applause of fellow writers. It’s not like you can totally escape that. After all, we’re humans with egos. We want success and validation. But when we come to the page, we can’t do our best work if we are pleasing everyone else. Trying to live up to even our own expectations. Intuition has to take over at some point.

Ray Bradbury said it another way. Above his typewriter was a sign with two words: Don’t Think. The purpose was to get himself out of the way of his stories. To make him write without questioning, wondering if what he was writing was any good. He famously directed writers to stop intellectualizing their work.

Here, in an address at the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Press Association held in Park City, Utah:

To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill. Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

and:

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. You cannot intellectualize creativity. You can think about something before or after — but not during.

Then there is this one. My personal favorite from a 1980 interview with “People” magazine, and a quote I use to chastise myself when I’m getting in my own head.

Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

He relegated thinking to after the act of writing. Not during it. As a chronic over analyzer, someone who wants to perfectly predict the outcome of every decision, I think he’s right. I can not think of one time my persistent over-thinking has ever actually led to something in any part of my life. Creatively I know it never has. At some point, your hand has to start writing words on a page.

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So how do we approach writing?

It doesn’t have to be a prayer. Admittedly I’m not interested in praying to a Muse. Not because I don’t believe in them (which I mostly don’t), but because I live with irrational fears in my head, like what if I pray to one, and one actually shows up, and what if I get a bad one? An evil Muse who takes over my life and forces me to work endlessly, writing without eating or drinking until I die? After all, with all the fucked up stories that play out in my head, that would be my luck, wouldn’t it? And I would have to write to all of you and beg you not to make my mistake. Not to play with the gods.

(I guess those types of thoughts are why I write horror. My what-ifs don’t include happy endings.)

But regardless of how you approach it, it’s vital to sit and start. Not to waste hours on end in front of the computer, detailing every twist and turn of the story until you’re overwhelmed and you delete the whole damned thing and swear the task off altogether. For too long creative people have idolized that way of living. Maybe even believed it necessary. But I can’t think of a time that it’s helped me tell a damn story.

Magic may not be your thing. The muse concept might turn you off. If it does, don’t use it. The important thing is to realize that creativity is magic. The stories I write come to me partially formed. Maybe I connected a bunch of ideas subconsciously that finally coalesce into a character in a bad situation. Sometimes I get a starting line, a quick image, a nervous feeling in my gut. If that’s what the muse is, a bunch of chemical reactions in my brain, it works out the same in the end.

Either way we have to show up. Stop thinking. Do the work. Write.