The Creative Habit Read online

  A ritual, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, is “a prescribed order of performing religious or other devotional service.” All that applies to my morning ritual. Thinking of it as a ritual has a transforming effect on the activity.

  Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this? By the time I give the taxi driver directions, it’s too late to wonder why I’m going to the gym and not snoozing under the warm covers of my bed. The cab is moving. I’m committed. Like it or not, I’m going to the gym.

  The ritual erases the question of whether or not I like it. It’s also a friendly reminder that I’m doing the right thing. (I’ve done it before. It was good. I’ll do it again.)

  We all have rituals in our day, whether we’re aware of them or not.

  A friend, a hard-boiled pragmatist with not a spiritual bone in his body, practices yoga in the morning in his home to overcome back pain. He starts each session by lighting a candle. He doesn’t need the candle to do his poses (although the mild glow and the faint scent have a tonic effect, he says), but the ceremonial act of lighting this votive candle transforms yoga into a sanctifying ritual. It means he’s taking the session seriously, and that for the next ninety minutes he is committed to practicing yoga. Candle. Click. Yoga. An automatic three-step call-and-response mechanism that anchors his morning. When he’s done, he blows out the candle and goes on with the rest of his day.

  An executive I know begins each day with a twenty-minute meeting with her assistant. It’s a simple organizational tool, but turning it into a daily ceremony for two people intensifies the bond between them and gives their day a predictable, repeatable kick-start. They don’t have to think about what to do when they arrive at the office. They already know it’s their twenty-minute ritual.

  Dancers are totally governed by ritual. It begins with class from 10:00 A.M. to noon every day, where they stretch and warm up their muscles and put their bodies through the classic dance positions. They do this daily, without fail, because all dancers working in class know that their efforts at strengthening the muscles will armor them against injury in rehearsal or performance. What makes it a ritual is that they do it without questioning the need.

  As with all sacred rites, the beginning of class is beautiful to watch. The dancers may straggle in and mill about, but they eventually assume, with frighteningly formal rigor, their customary place at the barre or on the floor. If a principal dancer walks in, they automatically shift places to give the star the center spot facing the mirror. Of such beliefs and traditions are rituals made. It’s like going to church. We rarely question why we go to church, and we don’t expect concrete answers when we do. We just know it feeds our spirit somehow, and so we do it.

  A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they begin their creative day.

  The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some lick that got him started.

  I know a chef who begins each day in the meticulously tended urban garden that dominates the tiny terrace of his Brooklyn home. He is obsessed with fresh ingredients, particularly herbs, spices, and flowers. Spending the first minutes of the day among his plants is his ideal creative environment for thinking about new flavor combinations and dishes. He putters about, feeling connected to nature, and this gets him going. Once he picks a vegetable or herb, he can’t let it sit there. He has to head off to the restaurant and start cooking.

  A painter I know can’t do anything in her studio without propulsive music pounding out of the speakers. Turning it on turns on a switch inside her. The beat gets her into a groove. It’s the metronome for her creative life.

  A writer friend can only write outside. He can’t stand the thought of being chained indoors to his word processor while a “great day” is unfolding outside. He fears he’s missing something stirring in the air. So he lives in Southern California and carries his coffee mug out to work in the warmth of an open porch in his backyard. Mystically, he now believes he is missing nothing.

  In the end, there is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that’s habit-forming.

  All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they impel you to get started. Whether it’s the act of carrying a hot coffee mug to an outdoor porch, or the rock ’n’ roll that gets a painter revved up to splash color on a canvas, or the stillness of an herb garden that puts a chef in a culinary trance, moving inside each of these routines gives you no choice but to do something. It’s Pavlovian: follow the routine, get a creative payoff.

  Athletes know the power of a triggering ritual. A pro golfer may walk along the fairway chatting with his caddie, his playing partner, a friendly official or scorekeeper, but when he stands behind the ball and takes a deep breath, he has signaled to himself that it’s time to concentrate. A basketball player comes to the free-throw line, touches his socks, his shorts, receives the ball, bounces it exactly three times, and then he is ready to rise and shoot, exactly as he’s done a hundred times a day in practice. By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.

  It worked for Beethoven, too, as these sketches, rendered between 1820 and 1825 by J. D. Böhm, show. Although he was not physically fit, Beethoven would start each day with the same ritual: a morning walk during which he would scribble into a pocket sketchbook the first rough notes of whatever musical idea inevitably entered his head. Having done that, having limbered up his mind and transported himself into his version of a trance zone during the walk, he would return to his room and get to work.

  As for me, my preferred working state is thermal—I need heat—and my preferred ritual is getting warm. That’s why I start my day at the gym. I am in perpetual pursuit of body warmth. It can never be too hot for me. Even in the middle of sweltering August, when the rest of New York is half frozen in the comforts of air-conditioning, I have all the windows and doors of my apartment wide open as if to say, “Hello, heat!” I loathe air-conditioning. I like skin that is just about to break out in glistening sweat.

  There’s also a psychological component to heat: It calls up the warmth of the hearth and home. In a word, it says “mother,” which is all about feeling safe and secure. A warm, secure dancer can work without fear. In that state of physical and psychic warmth, dancers touch their moments of greatest physical potential. They’re not afraid to try new movements. They can trust their bodies, and that’s when magic happens. When they’re not warm, dancers are afraid—afraid of injury, afraid of looking bad to others, afraid they’re falling short of the inner bar they set for themselves. That’s a rotten state to be in.

  There’s a practical reason for this, of course. Unlike other art forms, dance is all about physical movement and exertion. Even in my sixties, I need to keep my muscles in a state of readiness to pursue my craft, so that when I demonstrate a step in rehearsal I can actually execute it with some amplitude and grace and not hurt myself. Every athlete knows this: warm up before playing or you’ll pull a muscle. If I am warm, I feel I can do anything.

  My morning workout ritual is the most basic form of self-reliance; it reminds
me that, when all else fails, I can at least depend on myself. It’s my algebra of self-reliance: I depend on my body in order to work, and I am more productive if my body is strong. My daily workout is a part of my preparation for work.

  This, more than anything else, is what rituals of preparation give us: They arm us with confidence and self-reliance. The talent agent Sam Cohn tells a story about an entertainment lawyer named Burton Meyer who taught him a great lesson through a daily ritual. Cohn was working at CBS at the time, and Meyer thought he was working too hard for CBS and not enjoying himself enough. “You’re overcommitted,” he told Cohn. “You know, I practice law for fun. I don’t have to do this. And I’ll tell you how that came about. Ever since I was a young lawyer, each day I would come back from lunch and I would close my office door, I would sit in my chair, and for one hour I would quietly ruminate on one question. And the question was this: Burt, what’s in it for you?”

  A ritual of asking “What’s in it for me?” might not provide the most open-minded philosophy of life, but it will keep you focused on your goals. Taken to extremes, it’s an unattractive way of seeing the world, but it does place your motivation right smack in front of you.

  When I walk into the white room I am alone, but I am alone with my:

  body ambition ideas passions needs memories goals prejudices distractions fears

  These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I’m going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I’ve learned to channel my experiences into them.

  The last two—distractions and fears—are the dangerous ones. They’re the habitual demons that invade the launch of every project. No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you’ve begun. When I feel that sense of dread, I try to make it as specific as possible. Let me tell you my five big fears:

  1. People will laugh at me.

  2. Someone has done it before.

  3. I have nothing to say.

  4. I will upset someone I love.

  5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind.

  These are mighty demons, but they’re hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they’ll shut down my impulses (“No, you can’t do that”) and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout.

  1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet, and they’re not going to start now. (Some others have. London’s Evening Standard from 1966: “Three girls, one of them named Twyla Tharp, appeared at the Albert Hall last evening and threatened to do the same tonight.” So what? Thirty-seven years later I’m still here.)

  2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.

  3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. Plus, you’re panicking too soon. If the dancers don’t walk out on you, chances are the audience won’t either.

  4. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord. See the curtain call. See the people standing up. Hear the crowd roaring.

  5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-century architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.” But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

  In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.

  It’s a little more extreme than counting sheep, but it’s far more effective for me.

  This is a head game, of course. What ritual isn’t? Maybe it’s a little pathetic that after all this time I need this sort of pep talk to deal with my demons, but the unknown is a fearful place, and anything new is a step into the unknown. That fear is why ancient cultures created rituals in the first place. They lived in constant fear of other tribes, of predatory animals, of nature and the weather, all of which they believed were controlled by one or many awesome and awful deities. They hoped to gain control over their food supply, their herds, their fertility, their safety—their fears—by appeasing the gods with rituals. They would kill a certain kind of animal, and bleed it in a special way, and stack it on a fire, and toss some more animals into the flame, and offer the blood in a gold flask to the heavens—because doing so would guarantee a healthy crop or victory in battle. Rituals seduced the primitive tribes into believing they could control the uncontrollable.

  Centuries later, the ancient rituals seem silly (unless, of course, you believe in them). But are they that much different from all the rituals, big and small, that we employ to get through the day? I remember being a very ritualistic kid. I think most kids are. Eager to gain some control over their lives, they concoct games and rites to add sense and form to their world. The dolls have to sit a certain way on the bed. The socks go on their feet before the pants. The walk to school has to be on the north side of the street; the walk back home has to retrace the steps perfectly. When I said my prayers as a child, I was convinced that I had to say so many words during the exhale and so many words on the inhale, or something bad would happen. Weird, right? Not really. Though less brutal, it’s not that far removed from slaughtering a cow and offering it to an unseen god to ensure rain.

  I know a writer who looks for something to clean around the house when the words aren’t coming out. As he sits in front of his computer, feeling stale and stalled, everything around him looks grimy and caked with dust. So he grabs a rag and a spray bottle of Fantastik and gets to work on the crud. When everything is clean and shiny, he sits back down at the screen and the words invariably flow.

  He has a sophisticated explanation for why this ritual works, involving neural pathways and emotions and identity and self-worth. The job of a writer, he says, is simple: You write what’s in your head. But it becomes an emotional challenge when you can’t corral the words into coherent thoughts. Suddenly you doubt yourself. As you wallow in self-doubt, you turn away from the computer screen and see dirt that you hadn’t noticed before (certainly not when the work was going well and you didn’t need to turn away from the screen); the dirt becomes inextricably linked with the self-doubt, and wiping away the grime cathartically wipes away the self-doubt. The emotional crisis is solved. Let the writing begin.

  Personally, I think the key to his cleaning ritual is the fact that he gets up and moves. Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don’t appreciate. But I give some credence to his cute metaphorical link between dirt and doubt. It might be mumbo jumbo, but mystery and mumbo jumbo are a big part of ritual, too. And if it works, why question it.

  I know a businessman who has a ritual of unfolding a dollar bill at the start of each deal and staring at it in silence for a moment, because there on the bill, opposite the Great Seal with the bald eagle and the overly ripe E Pluribus Unum, above the mysteriously cropped pyramid with the floating eye, is the motto Annuit coeptis: “Providence has favored our undertakings.” To some, this might seem superstitious, but a superstition is nothing more than a ritual repeated religiously. The habit, and the faith invested in it, converts it into an act that provides comfort and strength. Every business deal is an act of courage and faith to this executive, and the motto on the dollar bill is his blessing.

  The mechanism by which we convert the chemistry of pessimism into optimism is still uncharted. But we do know how debilitating
negativity can be and, likewise, how productive optimism is. I am no stranger to pessimism and fear. They can descend on me at night, during those 3:00 A.M. sessions when I can’t sleep and I’m consumed by my litany of “issues.” My mind flits from the major issues of how to cope with everything I want to do, to the minor housekeeping details of going to a manicurist to repair my splitting fingernails. At times like this, priorities go astray; a trifle, such as my nails, can leap into the foreground of my fears. I swoon deeper and deeper into a fog of self-doubt and confusion. But rituals help me clear the fog.

  The other obstacle to good work, as harmful as one’s fears, is distractions.

  I know there are people who can assimilate a lot of incoming data from all angles—from newspapers and magazines, movies, television, music, friends, the Internet—and turn it into something wonderful. They thrive on a multitude of stimuli, the more complicated the better. I’m not hard-wired that way. When I commit to a project, I don’t expand my contact with the world; I try to cut it off. I want to place myself in a bubble of monomaniacal absorption where I’m fully invested in the task at hand.

  As a result, I find I’m often subtracting things from my life rather than adding them. I’ve turned that into a ritual as well. I list the biggest distractions in my life and make a pact with myself to do without them for a week. Here are some perennially tempting distractions that I cut out:

  Movies: This is painful, because I love films and cutting them out costs me something. My parents owned a drive-in movie theater in San Bernardino, California, and I spent a huge part of my childhood working there watching movies. But when I’m absorbed by a project, unless I’m looking at a film to learn something specific, I don’t go to movie theaters and I don’t rent videos. If I started watching movies for pleasure, I’d become addicted. I’d watch all day and never get anything done.