The Creative Habit Read online

  Other artists see the world as if it is one inch from their nose. The novelist Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe books like Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye are classics of American hardboiled detective fiction, was obsessed with detail. He works in extreme close-up, a succession of tight shots that practically put us inside the characters’ skulls. The plots of his stories are often incomprehensible—he believed that the only way to keep the reader from knowing whodunit was not to know yourself—but his eye for descriptive detail was razor-sharp. Here is the opening of his first full-length novel, The Big Sleep:

  It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. It was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

  Chandler kept lists of observed details from his life and from the people he knew: a necktie file, a shirt file, a list of overheard slang expressions, as well as character names, titles, and one-liners he intended to use sometime in the future. He wrote on half-sheets of paper, just twelve to fifteen lines per page, with a self-imposed quota that each sheet must contain what he called “a little bit of magic.” The “life” in his stories was in the details, whether his hero Marlowe was idling in his office or in the middle of a brutal confrontation. No long-distance musings on the state of the world. No middle-distance group shots. Just a steady stream of details, piling one on top of the other, until a character or scene takes shape and a vivid picture emerges. Up close was Chandler’s focal length. If some people like to wander through an art museum standing back from the paintings, taking in the effect the artist was trying to achieve, while others need a closer look because they’re interested in the details, then Chandler was the kind of museum-goer who pressed his nose up to the canvas to see how the artist applied his strokes. Obviously, all of us look at paintings from each of these vantage points, but we focus best at some specific spot along the spectrum.

  I don’t mean to get too caught up in observational focal length. It’s one facet out of many that makes up an artist’s creative identity. Yet once you see it, you begin to notice how it defines all the artists you admire. The sweeping themes of Mahler’s symphonies are the work of a composer with a wide vision. He sees grand architecture from a distance. Contrast that with a miniaturist like Satie, whose delicate compositions reveal a man in love with detail. (It’s only the giants like Bach, Cézanne, and Shakespeare who could work in many focal lengths.)

  But that’s the point. Each of us is hard-wired a certain way. And that hardwiring insinuates itself into our work. That’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s what the world expects from you. We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us. If you are by nature a loner, a crusader, an outsider, a jester, a romantic, a melancholic, or any one of a dozen personalities, that quality will shine through in your work.

  Robert Benchley wrote that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. I guess I’ve always been one who does.

  I have issues with ambiguity, preferring my distinctions to be black or white. I don’t like gray. That’s how I am. I recognize, of course, that some people do like gray. (I also recognize that I’m doing it again—dividing the world into two kinds of people.) Thus, I am always making these clear distinctions in my work, my daily routines, my colleagues, and my goals. Dancers are either acceptable (great) or not (everything less than great). Producers are either good or evil. Colleagues are either committed or missing in action. Critics are either my friends or enemies. The polar distinctions can go on forever.

  If one set of polarities defines my creative DNA, it is the way I find myself pulled between involvement and detachment.

  I shuttle back and forth from one extreme to the other, with no rest in between. And I apply it to everything.

  With my dancers, for example, I have an annoying need for proof of their allegiance to me and my projects. So I’m always running through a mental checklist to see if their work habits are as exacting as mine, searching with forensic intensity for evidence of their commitment. Do they show up on time for rehearsal? Are they warmed up? Does their energy flag when rehearsals break down or are they committed to pushing forward? Are they bringing ideas to the party or waiting for me to provide everything? These are my personal pop quizzes to gauge other people’s involvement. I don’t want them merely involved. I’m looking for insane commitment.

  I’m no less strict with myself. I’m always taking temperature readings of my commitment to a project and pushing myself to be more committed than anyone else. At its extreme, I put myself at the center of a piece, even as a dancer, trying on the roles.

  When I’ve learned all I can at the core of a piece, I pull back and become the Queen of Detachment. I move so far back that I become a surrogate for the audience. I see the work the way they will see it. New, fresh, objectively. In the theater, I frequently go to the back and watch the dancers rehearse. If I could watch from farther away, from outside the theater in the street, I would. That’s how much detachment I need from my work in order to understand it.

  This impulse comes naturally. I grew up in the foothills of San Bernardino, where there was no community to speak of, no neighbors and playmates. I watched movies in a drive-in theater from a distance. I was even distanced from my twin brothers and my sister, who were all younger than I. They lived at one end of our house, I lived at the other so I could be free to maintain my rigorous practice schedule alone. You could even say I was detached from my world by my schedule. That’s why detachment is part of my DNA. I was born with it, and it was continually drummed into me thereafter.

  Was it there from the start? Who’s to say, but my mother told me that at birth I was a noisy, ill-mannered baby in the hospital. The only way the nurses could shut me up was to put me out in the hallway by myself where I could see everything going on around me. I quieted down instantly. Even then, I didn’t want to be on the inside, crowded with other people. I wanted to be on the outside, watching.

  For the longest time, I thought this dichotomy of involvement versus detachment was merely a template for my work habits. Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say. This was the yin and yang of my work life: Dive in. Step back. Dive in. Step back.

  It was how I saw the world—like being nearsighted rather than having 20/20 vision. I was stuck with it.

  And then one day, reading Carl Kerenyi’s Dionysos, I discovered a broader context for these divisions. Involvement and detachment explained how I worked, but they didn’t explain why I produced the work I did. It had always irked me that my dances shied away from telling a story, and when I tried my hand at a narrative-driven dance, the result was weak or unfocused. Why was that? Why was I better at one than the other? An answer came from the ancient Greeks, who had two words, zoe and bios, to distinguish the two competing natures I felt within myself.

  Zoe and bios both mean life in Greek, but they are not synonymous. Zoe, wrote Kerenyi, refers to “life in general, without characterization.” Bios characterizes a specific life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another. Bios is the Greek root for “biography,” zoe for “zoology.”

  I cannot overstate what a profound distinction this was. Suddenly, two states of experience were made plain to me.

  Zoe is like seeing Earth from space. You get the sense of life on the rotating globe, but without a sense of the individual lives being lived on the planet. Bios involves swooping down
from space from the perch of a high-powered spy satellite, closing in on the scene, and seeing the details. Bios distinguishes between one life and another. Zoe refers to the aggregate.

  Bios accommodates the notion of death, that each life has a beginning, middle, and end, that each life contains a story. Zoe, wrote Kerenyi, “does not admit of the experience of its own destruction: it is experienced without end, as infinite life.”

  The difference between zoe and bios is like the difference between sacred and profane. Sacred art is zoe-driven; profane art stems from bios.

  I realize that these are just words. But they articulated a distinction that made my entire creative output clearer. Applying it to two of my choreographic heroes, Robbins and George Balanchine, I could appreciate in a new way the difference between these two men.

  Balanchine was the essence of zoe. Most of his ballets are beautiful plotless structures that mirror the music rather than interpret it. They do not need language to explain themselves, nor do they try to tell a story. Their content is the essence of life, not the details of living. Balanchine’s steps and gestures are not specific—for example, a man miming the act of pulling out an imaginary chair for a woman or, more tritely, putting hands to heart to express love. People think his dances are abstract at first—where’s the story? what’s the plot? But their zoe qualities reveal themselves with powerful results. Balanchine’s gestures and steps pluck chords in us that we cannot easily name. Yet they resonate. They seem familiar. That’s the genius of Balanchine. In his movement he created a grammar that expressed congruencies between the natural world and our emotional world. Three women unbundle their long hair at the end of Serenade and we feel something, without attaching a name to it, because there is a common structure between the dancers’ gestures and some gesture we remember that moved us.

  Robbins, on the other hand, was pure bios—and brilliant at it. When he created a dance, he was always accumulating details about the roles—from what the characters would wear to whom they were sleeping with—and out of these details of life he would construct an engaging narrative. This is why he had such a crowd-pleasing career in the theater. (This is a giant gift. Mike Nichols tells a story about getting the musical Annie ready for Broadway. A scene that was supposed to be funny was failing to get laughs, no matter what Nichols tried. He asked Robbins to watch the scene with his practiced eye. Afterward, Nichols asked him how to fix the scene. Robbins surveyed the stage and pointed to a white towel hanging at the back of the set. “That towel should be yellow,” he said. “That’s it?” thought Nichols. “That makes the scene work?” But he made the change and the scene got a laugh every night thereafter.)

  As a man of bios, a master of details, he could tell a story that had, as a subtext, what Balanchine made a text of—namely, life.

  One approach was not more valid than the other. The two men simply entered their work through different doors.

  But I could see that everything I did was a duel between the warring impulses of bios and zoe in me. On the one hand, there was my ability to create dances about a life force. On the other, there was my occasional urge to break away from this and create dances that tell a specific story. The first kind of dances came naturally to me, the latter required more of an effort. In my heart I am a woman more of zoe than of bios.

  I suspect many people never get a handle on their creative identity this way. They take their urges, their biases, their work habits for granted. But a little self-knowledge goes a long way. If you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the “story” that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak (which prevents a lot of false starts), and how you see the world and function in it.

  Take the following questionnaire. If even one answer tells you something new about yourself, you’re one step closer to understanding your creative DNA. There are no right or wrong answers here. The exercise is intended for your eyes only, which means no cheating, no answers to impress other people. It’s supposed to be an honest self-appraisal of what matters to you. Anything less is a distortion. I include it here and urge you to answer quickly, instinctively. Don’t dawdle.

  (To get you started, I give you my answers on chapter 3.)

  Your Creative Autobiography

  1. What is the first creative moment you remember?

  2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it?

  3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had?

  4. What made it great in your mind?

  5. What is the dumbest idea?

  6. What made it stupid?

  7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea?

  8. What is your creative ambition?

  9. What are the obstacles to this ambition?

  10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition?

  11. How do you begin your day?

  12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat?

  13. Describe your first successful creative act.

  14. Describe your second successful creative act.

  15. Compare them.

  16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play?

  17. Which artists do you admire most?

  18. Why are they your role models?

  19. What do you and your role models have in common?

  20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you?

  21. Who is your muse?

  22. Define muse.

  23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond?

  24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond?

  25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond?

  26. When you work, do you love the process or the result?

  27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp?

  28. What is your ideal creative activity?

  29. What is your greatest fear?

  30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening?

  31. Which of your answers would you most like to change?

  32. What is your idea of mastery?

  33. What is your greatest dream?

  I devised this questionnaire because it forces us to go back to our origins, our earliest memories, our first causes. We change through life, but we cannot deny our sources, and this test is one way to recall those roots.

  The better you know yourself, the more you will know when you are playing to your strengths and when you are sticking your neck out. Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet you do it anyway because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.

  I’ve always admired the playwright Neil Simon. In economic terms and mass acceptance, he’s probably the most successful playwright of the twentieth century. He wrote beautifully constructed parlor comedies that provided a laugh every twenty seconds. That was his gift, and it was a rare talent. I’m sure there are snobs who tried to dismiss Neil Simon as a joke mechanic producing a hit a year. I don’t see it that way. I look over his enormous output—three dozen plays, a dozen original screenplays—and see a paragon of habitual creativity. More to the point, I see a writer constantly stretching. He pushed his talent more than most people appreciate. He didn’t go against his nature and try to write dramas like Eugene O’Neill—he was too smart for that—but he was always injecting into his plays dark elements and serious themes that tested his abilities and made his audience stretch, too. Where his strengths for comedy could cover his experiments, his stretches, he knew he could go for it. There is a large gap in time and ambition between Barefoot in the Park in 1961 and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lost in Yonkers in 1990. But both plays are recognizably Neil Simon. He had a good sense of who he was a
nd how far he could venture beyond his comfort zone.

  Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.