The Creative Habit Read online

  Multitasking: In an accelerated, overachieving world, we all take pride in our ability to do two or more things at the same time: working on vacation; using an elegant dinner to hammer out a business deal; reading while we’re groaning on the StairMaster. The irony of multitasking is that it’s exhausting; when you’re doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You’re also cheating yourself because you’re not doing anything excellently. You’re compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Eliot, you’re “distracted from distractions by distractions.”

  It’s a challenge to cut out multitasking because we all get a frisson of satisfaction from being able to keep several balls in the air at once. But one week without multitasking is worth it; the increased focus and awareness are their own rewards.

  Numbers: More than anything, I can live without numbers—the ones on clocks, dials, meters, bathroom scales, bills, contracts, tax forms, bank statements, and royalty reports. For one week I tell myself to “stop counting.” I don’t look at anything with a number in it. This is not that great a hardship; it means mostly that I don’t have to deal with grinding business details. The goal is to give the left side of the brain—the hemisphere that does the counting—a rest and let the more intuitive right hemisphere come to the fore.

  Background Music: I know there are artists who like music in the background when they work; they use the music to block out everything else. They’re not listening to it; it’s there as a form of companionship. I don’t need a soundtrack to accompany my life. Music in the background nibbles away at your awareness. It’s comforting, perhaps, but who said tapping into your awareness was supposed to be comfortable? And who knows how much of your brainpower and intuition the Muzak is draining? When I listen to music, I don’t multitask; I simply listen. Part of it is my job: I listen to music to see if I can dance to it. But another part is simple courtesy to the composer. I listen with the same intensity the composer exerted to string the notes together. I’d expect the same from anyone watching my work. I certainly wouldn’t approve if someone read a book while my dancers were performing.

  I don’t recommend living without distractions as a permanent lifestyle for anyone. It’s too monastic. But anyone can do it for a week, and the payoff will surprise you.

  It’s a simple equation: Subtracting your dependence on some of the things you take for granted increases your independence. It’s liberating, forcing you to rely on your own ability rather than your customary crutches.

  There’s an American tradition of giving things up to foster self-reliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of the world who sought solitude and simplicity. Henry David Thoreau turned his back on the distractions of life in society in pursuit of a better and clearer life, and found a rich vein of inspiration and invention in the Massachusetts woods. Emily Dickinson lived as quiet and constricted a life as one can imagine, and channeled her energies directly into her poetry. All three sought lives apart from the hubbub of the city’s commerce—and they didn’t even have to cope with the roar of the car, the drone of the radio, the blur of television, or the information surfeit of the Internet.

  The act of giving something up does not merely clear time and mental space to focus you. It’s a ritual, too, an offering where you sacrifice a portion of your life to the metaphoric gods of creation. Instead of goats or cattle, we’re sacrificing television or music or numbers—and what is a sacrifice but a ritual?

  When you have selected the environment that works for you, developed the start-up ritual that impels you forward every day, faced down your fears, and put your distractions in their proper place, you have cleared the first hurdle. You have begun to prepare to begin.

  exercises

  1 Where’s Your “Pencil”?

  In his lovely essay “Why Write?,” the novelist Paul Auster tells a story about growing up as an eight-year-old in New York City and being obsessed with baseball, particularly the New York Giants. The only thing he remembers about attending his first major league baseball game at the Polo Grounds with his parents and friends is that he saw his idol, Willie Mays, outside the players’ locker room after the game. The young Auster screwed up his courage and approached the great centerfielder. “Mr. Mays,” he said, “could I please have your autograph?”

  “Sure, kid, sure,” the obliging Mays replied. “You got a pencil?”

  Auster didn’t have a pencil on him, neither did his father or his mother or anyone else in his group.

  Mays waited patiently, but when it became obvious that no one present had anything to write with, he shrugged and said, “Sorry, kid. Ain’t got no pencil, can’t give no autograph.”

  From that day on, Auster made it a habit to never leave the house without a pencil in his pocket. “It’s not that I had any particular plans for that pencil,” Auster writes, “but I didn’t want to be unprepared. I had been caught empty-handed once, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. If nothing else, the years have taught me this: If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it. As I like to tell my children, that’s how I became a writer.”

  What is your pencil? What is the one tool that feeds your creativity and is so essential that without it you feel naked and unprepared?

  A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to “come back with a face.” Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook. Not only does the exercise warm up his descriptive powers, but studying the crags, lines, and bumps of a stranger’s face forces him to imagine that individual’s life. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, the writer attaches a complete biography to the face, and then a name, and then a narrative. Before he knows it, he has the ingredients for a full-fledged story.

  I know cartoonists who always carry pen and pad to sketch what they see, photographers who always have a camera in their pockets, composers who carry Dictaphones to capture a snatch of vagabond melody that pops into their heads. They are always prepared.

  Pick your “pencil” and don’t leave home without it.

  2 Build Up Your Tolerance for Solitude

  Some people are autophobic. They’re afraid to be alone. The thought of going into a room to work all by themselves pains them in a way that is, at first, paralyzing within the room, and then keeps them from entering the room altogether.

  It’s not the solitude that slays a creative person. It’s all that solitude without a purpose. You’re alone, you’re suffering, and you don’t have a good reason for putting yourself through that misery. To build up your tolerance for solitude, you need a goal.

  Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. Do this for one minute. (Anyone can handle one minute of daydreaming.) Work up to ten minutes a day of this mindless mental wandering. Then start paying attention to your thoughts to see if a word or goal materializes. If it doesn’t, extend the exercise to eleven minutes, then twelve, then thirteen…until you find the length of time you need to ensure that something interesting will come to mind. The Gaelic phrase for this state of mind is “quietness without loneliness.”

  Note that this activity is the exact opposite of meditation. You are not trying to empty your mind, not trying to sit restfully without conscious thoughts. You’re seeking thoughts from the unconscious, and trying to tease them forward until you can latch onto them. An idea will sneak into your brain. Get engaged with that idea, play with it, push it around—you’ve acquired a goal to underpin this solitary activity. You’re not alone anymore; your goal, your idea, is your companion.

  Consider fishing, also a solitary activity. You have the gear and the equipment. You have the flies in the tackle box. You have the boat and the trip you have to take on the water t
o where the fish are biting. You have the casting over and over again, and the interior musings about how long it’s going to take you to get a bite on the line. And you’re doing this all by yourself for hours! What elevates it, what keeps it from turning into frightening drudgery, of course, is that you have a goal. You want to catch fish.

  It’s the same with daydreaming creatively—minus the tackle box, the boat, and the fish. You’re never lonely when your mind is engaged.

  Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that. Think of five things that you like to do all by yourself. It could be a hot bath, a walk up a favorite hill, that quiet moment of sinking into a chair with coffee when the kids have left for school. Refer back to the list whenever the aloneness of the creative process seems too much for you. The pleasant memories will remind you that alone and lonely are not the same thing.

  Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.

  3 Face Your Fears

  It’s not only Nature that abhors a vacuum; fear of empty space affects everyone in every creative situation. Where there was nothing, there will be something that has come from within you. That’s a scary proposition. Putting a name to your fears helps cut them down to size.

  When you sat in that brainstorming session at work, why didn’t you speak up? When that idea for a story flitted through your mind, why didn’t you seize it and pursue it? After you started drawing in that sketchbook, why did you stop?

  I’ve told you my five big fears. Here are a few that might be yours:

  I’m not sure how to do it: A problem, obviously, but we’re not talking about constructing the Brooklyn Bridge. If you try and it doesn’t work, you’ll try a different way next time. Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.

  People will think less of me: Not people who matter. Your friends will still love you, your children will still call you “mommy,” your dog will still go for walks with you.

  It may take too much time: Yes, it may, but putting it off isn’t going to make it happen faster. The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good.” If it’s something you want to do, make the time.

  It will cost money: Are your creative efforts worth it to you? Is it something you really want to do? If so, make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?

  It’s self-indulgent: So? How often do you indulge yourself? Why shouldn’t you? You won’t be of much value to others if you don’t learn to value yourself and your efforts.

  These are some of the best, most paralyzing fears. If you examine your concerns closely, you should be able to identify and break down the ones that are holding you back. Don’t run away from them or ignore them; write them down and save the page. There’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.

  4 Give Me One Week Without

  People go on diets all the time. If they don’t like their weight, they stop eating certain foods. If their spending is out of control, they lock away their credit cards. If they need quiet time at home, they take the phone off the hook. These are all diets of one kind or another. Why not do the same for your creative health? Take a week off from clutter and distractions, such as these:

  Mirrors: Go a week without looking in the mirror. See what happens to your sense of self. Instead of relying on the image you see reflected in a glass, find your identity in other ways. This forces you to stop looking at yourself so much and start focusing on others. You’ll be forced to think more about what you do, and less about how you look. There’s a difference between how you see yourself and how you think others see you; you might get confirmation back or you might be surprised. Either way, it’s a discovery process. It’s also a great technique for heightening your sense of curiosity. I guarantee that after a week without mirrors, you’ll be dying to see yourself again. It could be a very interesting reintroduction. You might meet someone totally new.

  Clocks: Put away your wristwatch. Shield your eyes from clocks. Stop relying on timepieces to gauge the passing of time. If you’re engaged in what you’re doing, time doesn’t matter. It passes swiftly without notice. If you’re not engaged, the clock will only depress you more. It tells you what you already know: You’re in a rut and things aren’t working. You don’t need that negativity.

  Newspapers: Stop reading newspapers and magazines for a week. I don’t recommend this as a permanent diet; it eventually breeds ignorance. But one week won’t do much damage. It’s like going on vacation to a remote island, cut off from the usual media clutter. You may have done that already in your life. What have you lost? More important, what have you gained?

  Speaking: I know a soprano who nearly ravaged her beautiful voice during a run of difficult opera performances. The cure was three weeks without speaking while her vocal cords recuperated. She enjoyed the self-imposed silence so much, she now has a no-speaking ritual for one week every year. It’s not only a rest for her chief artistic muscle—her voice—it’s also a stark reminder of the difference between what’s worth saying and what isn’t. It’s the perfect editor for the creative soul.

  Once you’ve done without these four, it’s easy to come up with other distractions that invade your creative life without enhancing it. The telephone. The computer. The coffee shop. The car. The television (!). You get the idea. There are a lot of distractions out there—and you can live without them. At least for a little while.

  Chapter 3

  your creative DNA

  In my early years

  in New York City, I studied with the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Merce had a corner studio on the second floor at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, with windows on two sides. During breaks in classes, I watched a lot of traffic out of those windows, and I observed that the traffic patterns were just like Merce’s dances—both appear random and chaotic, but they’re not. It occurred to me that Merce often looked out of those windows, too. I’m sure the street pattern was consoling to him, reinforcing his discordant view of the world. His dances are all about chaos and dysfunction. That’s his creative DNA. He’s very comfortable with chaos and plays with it in all his work. My hunch is that he came to chaos before he came to that studio, but I can’t help wondering if maybe he selected the place because of the chaos outside the windows.

  Of course, when I looked out those windows, I didn’t see the patterns the way Merce did, and I certainly didn’t find solace in their discordance. I didn’t “get it” the way he did. I wasn’t hard-wired that way. It wasn’t part of my creative DNA.

  I believe that we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them. I’m not Watson and Crick; I can’t prove this. But perhaps you also suspect it when you try to understand why you’re a photographer, not a writer, or why you always insert a happy ending into your story, or why all your canvases gather the most interesting material at the edges, not the center. In many ways, that’s why art historians and literature professors and critics of all kinds have jobs: to pinpoint the artist’s DNA and explain to the rest of us whether the artist is being true to it in his or her work. I call it DNA; you may think of it as your creative hard-wiring or personality.

  When I apply a critic’s temperament to myself, to see if I’m being true to my DNA, I often think in terms of focal length, like that of a camera lens. All of us find comfort in seeing the world either from a great distance, at arm’s length, or in close-up. We don’t consciously make that choice. Our DNA does, and we generally don’t waver from it. Rare is the painter who is equally adept at miniatures and epic series, or the writer who is at home in bo
th historical sagas and finely observed short stories.

  The photographer Ansel Adams, whose black-and-white panoramas of the unspoiled American West became the established notion of how to “see” nature (and, no small feat, helped spawn the environmental movement in the United States), is an example of an artist who was compelled to view the world from a great distance. He found solace in lugging his heavy camera on long treks into the wilderness or to a mountaintop so he could have the widest view of land and sky. Earth and heaven in their most expansive form was how Adams saw the world. It was his signature, an expression of his creative temperature. It was his DNA.

  Focal length doesn’t only apply to photographers. It applies to any artist.

  The choreographer Jerome Robbins, whom I have worked with and admire, tended to see the world from a middle distance. The sweeping vision was not for him. Robbins’s point of view was right there on the stage. Others besides me have noted how often Robbins had his dancers watch someone else dance. Think of his very first ballet, Fancy Free. Boys watch girls. Girls then watch boys. And upstage, the bartender watches everything as if he were Robbins’s surrogate. His is the point of view from which the ballet’s story is told. Robbins is both observing and observed, safely, at a middle distance.

  It helps to know that Robbins grew up wanting to be a puppeteer, and I think this way of seeing the world—controlling events from behind the scenes or above, but not so distant that you cannot maintain contact with the action on stage—pervades almost everything he created. I doubt it was something he chose consciously, but in terms of creative DNA, it was a dominant strand in his work. Check out the film of West Side Story, which Robbins choreographed and co-directed. The story line is famously adapted from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—in other words, it’s not his own. Yet even with a borrowed plot, you still see Robbins’s impulses coming to the fore, imprinting themselves on the drama and the dancing. Nearly every group scene involves performers being observed. Jets watch Sharks, Sharks watch Jets, girls watch boys, boys watch girls. This is not how Shakespeare did it. But it is Robbins’s worldview.