NOTE: This is a continuation and conclusion of a previous post. See “Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1)” for the contextual lead-in to what follows.
The myth of constant creative output
It’s common for those of us who are driven to pursue work in the creative arts to have in mind an ideal goal that we’re aiming for. Along with hopes of having our efforts recognized by an appreciative audience, probably one of the most common desires is to achieve a state of regular, and even constant, creative flow.
The reasons for this are obvious. As a matter of phenomenological fact, writing or other creative work can make you high. Even those writers (and there are plenty of them/us) for whom the actual act of writing is sometimes or always a matter of sheer drudgery have experienced those moments of deep satisfaction when everything comes together, the stars align, the chi flows, and it’s as if the universe is doing the work through you. It’s only natural to wish that it could always be this flowing, this fulfilling, this easy.
Natural — but dangerous and unrealistic. A number of unexamined assumptions lie behind the myth of perpetual creative production, and it’s hard to judge which is the more pernicious and damaging to deep and authentic creativity. The basic problem is that a person in this state is judging himself or herself according to an artificial, external, and impracticable standard.
As described in part one of this post, the creative process involves a gestation or incubation period during which the work sinks into the unconscious mind. While this is going on, a person may feel that he or she has lost the creative thread entirely, since consciously, nothing’s happening. That’s why this is also known as the “fallow period” in the process; the term is drawn from the age-old agricultural practice of letting fields lie unplanted (fallow) for a time before planting new crops, in order to allow time for essential nutrients in the soil to be replenished. A fallow field looks barren. Fallowness by definition entails a period of inactivity.
What we have to do in our creative work is not just accept that this is the case, but accept that its specifics will differ for each of us. Not everybody can be a Charles Dickens or a Stephen King, producing a gargantuan body of work at a rapid pace (although King, notably, speaks openly about the fallow period in his own creative process). Nor does everybody have to be Harper Lee, spending three years writing a single novel and then never writing anything else to speak of.
But Dickens and King do have to be themselves, and that means prolificity. And Lee does have to be herself, and that means being the modern archetype of the “one-book author.” As Central Michigan University literature professor Jeffrey Weinstock said about Lee and others like her, “Sometimes a great author has just one singular idea and when they have expressed that idea, they are done. They have nothing else to put out there” (“Mockingbird author steps out of the shadows,” Guardian, February 5, 2006).
And as Lee herself said in 2007 when she was invited to speak to the audience at a ceremony inducting new members into the Alabama Academy of Honor, “Well, it’s better to be silent than to be a fool” (“Author has her say,” The Boston Globe, August 21, 2007).
To avoid being a fool, you have to learn to speak when your demon muse gives you something to say, and to remain silent when it holds back, no matter how fast or slow its schedule. As indicated by the examples below, for some people this can mean something drastically less than the rosy ideal of a constant output.
Finding your natural creative condition
In his 1982 interview for the Paris Review, Philip Larkin discussed a fascinating fact about his authorial pace as a poet:
INTERVIEWER: Your poetry volumes have appeared at the rate of one per decade. From what you say, though, is it unlikely we’ll have another around 1984? Did you really only complete about three poems in any given year?
LARKIN: It’s unlikely I shall write any more poems, but when I did, yes, I did write slowly. I was looking at “The Whitsun Weddings” just the other day, and found that I began it sometime in the summer of 1957. After three pages, I dropped it for another poem that in fact was finished but never published. I picked it up again, in March 1958, and worked on it till October, when it was finished. But when I look at the diary I was keeping at the time, I see that the kind of incident it describes happened in July 1955! So in all, it took over three years. Of course, that’s an exception. But I did write slowly, partly because you’re finding out what to say as well as how to say it, and that takes time.
Commenting on this in On Writer’s Block, Victoria Nelson observes that “In [Larkin's] and other such cases, that negative space around the three poems per year looms large in retrospect. Blaming oneself for low productivity, however — an activity Larkin himself engaged in only in private — is punishment for a crime that did not exist until it was named. An uneven artistic output, for many, is a natural condition of creativity.”
I urge you to meditate on this point for a moment before moving on. For some of us — including me, and perhaps including you — an uneven artistic output is a natural condition of creativity. For some, a perpetually minimal output might be a natural condition of creativity. If this describes you, then beating yourself up over it won’t help. In fact, it will only hurt, because the only way to achieve what you’re meant to achieve and become who you’re meant to become in your creative work is to do what we’ve talked about in other posts: first divine the deep nature, desires, and tendencies of your daimon, your inner partner, the holder of the patterns of meaning that explain how your life has unfolded, and then consciously embrace these by intentionally aligning yourself with them. If this reveals that you’re one of those authors with an uneven output, or even one of those whose task is to express Weinstock’s “one singular idea,” after which you’re finished, then so be it.
On the other hand, you may find that your natural condition is to be prolific. For writers, the far end of this condition on the spectrum of productivity may be seen in hypergraphia, the medical condition in which one is possessed by an overpowering urge to write. (And yes, the opposite condition, inability to write — i.e., writer’s block — has a medical name as well: hypographia.) Neurologist and Harvard professor Alice Flaherty, who has firsthand knowledge of hypergraphia, explicitly examines the condition’s literary, humanistic, and neurological aspects in connection with the age-old experience of muse-like inspiration in her fascinating 2004 book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. She points out that although the concept of the muse fell out of favor in modern creativity studies for a long time, some psychologists have returned to studying it in recent years, and their work suggests that “The muse is more than a poetic device” — that it is in fact “an attempt to say what inspiration actually feels like, about the way it seems to come from the outside air just as the air you breathe does during respiratory inspiration.”
You have to learn to speak when your demon muse gives you something to say, and to remain silent when it holds back, no matter how fast or slow its schedule.
Observing that some writers want to deny the existence of inspiration and/or the possibility that they have ever experienced it themselves, she comments that although it is certainly their prerogative to proceed based solely on the ideal of personal effort, “It is my proposition. . . that such sensations of flow or inspiration or the muse — however irrational they may be — are so highly motivating that they drive people to do their best work.”
She also draws a major piece of advice from her studies of writer’s block, both as a neurological phenomenon and as something described by writers themselves: “Perhaps the most crucial implication is not to keep yourself from writing when not inspired, but to be ruthless about writing whenever inspiration hits.” In other words, when the creative spirit speaks, you should listen and act, at all costs. This means that if you happen to be paired with a particularly prolific inner genius, then a major part of your life’s discipline will involve keeping up with it.
The bottom line is that you simply can’t know your own creative rhythm — occasional, erratic, or prolific — until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge.
Toll booths, radio aërials, and the blessing of silence
As you go about learning your daemon’s tempo, you may find it consoling and encouraging to know that you’re not alone. Every writer and artist has had to figure out his or her native rhythm, and even those who downplay the role of inspiration and recommend more of a “nose to the grindstone” approach have recognized the necessity of receptivity and careful awareness.
A notable example is novelist Joe Hill, who in a 2010 interview for Torontoist (“Joe Hill: The Man Who Wouldn’t Be King,” March 22) scorns reliance on inspiration and extolled the virtues of hard work:
The definition of an unpublished writer is a dude who only writes when he feels inspired. Writing is a job — you punch the clock like anyone else. I go six hours a day on weekdays, and if I’m on deadline for something, I’ll usually sit down and do a little more in the evening. And I write two to three hours a day on the weekends, just to keep my hand in. If I don’t feel like it or I’m not in the mood, I do it anyway.
But then he immediately follows this by offering an interesting metaphor that neatly summarizes the relationship between working and waiting by emphasizing the independent and elusive nature of the mental material that’s captured through all of this hard work: “I tell myself I’m a guy who works in a toll booth. Ideas are the cars that pass through. Sometimes there’s no traffic, but I still have to sit in that toll booth in case someone turns up.”
With this image, Hill recalls the poet Amy Lowell’s comparison, in her classic essay “The Process of Making Poetry,” of poets to radio antennas. There is, she says, something fundamentally mysterious about the making of poetry, which involves a sui generis psychic state that is entirely different from normal consciousness. “Let us admit at once,” she says, “that the poet is something like a radio aërial — he is capable of receiving messages on waves of some sort; but he is more than an aërial, for he is capable of transmuting these messages into those patterns of words we call poems.”
She describes the source of these messages — “the subconscious mind” — as a “temperamental ally” that will sometimes “strike work at some critical point,” after which “Not another word is to be got out of him.” She says that whenever this occurs, it signals the decisive transition point between relying on inspiration and exerting active effort: “Here is where the conscious training of the poet comes in, for he must fill in what the subconscious has left, and fill it in as much in the key of the rest as possible.” She also says the consistency of the subconscious mind is what enabled her to continue writing on a given poem in a consistent way even after long interruptions, since sometimes she could enter a semi-trance state in which she was acutely aware of her subconscious mind, and was able to write directly out of the ideas and feelings it presented. But this only worked when an idea was ripe for the writing, since “no power will induce it [i.e., the trance] if the subconscious is not ready; hence the sterile periods known to all poets.”
You simply can’t know your own creative rhythm until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius.
If you take only one thought away from all of these observations, let it be this: That you should learn your own daemon’s rhythm, and should embrace those sterile periods when they come over you, for they are when the “soil” of your inner creative field is being replenished. Or, to switch to the incubation metaphor, they’re when unborn ideas are being formed in the silent womb of your unconscious mind. You’re a toll booth operator waiting for cars. You’re a radio antenna waiting for a signal. You’re a farmer waiting for seeds to sprout. You’re a midwife waiting for a child to be born. There’s a natural rhythm to the process, and it’s entirely your rhythm, and whether it’s fast or slow, erratic or regular, your job is to find it and second its motion — and, crucially, to be alert, ready, and willing to do your work when the inspiration arrives.
“Silence,” writes Nelson, “is often as blessed a condition as its opposite. Writing/not writing represents a natural alternation of states, an instinctive rhythm that lies at the heart of the creative process. . . . This rhythm, moreover, takes a unique shape from artist to artist. For every writer who is a relentlessly systematic worker, another is not. For every writer who allows a month of silence to fall between works, another allows a year.”
Dreams and nightmares
As mentioned in part one of this post, H.P. Lovecraft claimed in a letter to his friend Frank Long that he never actively tried to write a story, but instead waited until he was gripped by the feeling that it had to be written. I quoted that line not only because of its relevance to the subject at hand but because of the relevance of Lovecraft himself to our overall endeavor here. For Lovecraft’s case is a particularly useful one for illustrating this blog’s supervening focus on creativity as something that we can personify and relate to as an autonomous force within the psyche.
H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft, as we know, possessed or was possessed by an astonishingly vivid dream life. This was central to his life as a writer, since he drew many of the characters, settings, place names, and entire plots of his stories directly from these nocturnal visions. He wrote his apocalyptic prose poem “Nyarlathotep,” for example, after a fantastically vivid and horrifying nightmare in which not only the title word but the entire story was given to him virtually intact. The piece in its finished form is essentially a dream transcript, and its powerful oneiric quality is surely due to the fact that he leapt out of bed and wrote most of it before he was fully awake. “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” describing a nocturnal descent into a tomb, had a similar origin. The bat-winged “Night Gaunts” of his dreamland stories came directly from his boyhood nightmares. And so on.
In commenting on the fact that these “compelling impulses” were communicated directly to Lovecraft by his dreams, the French literary scholar Maurice Lévy makes an interesting observation about its import for Lovecraft’s creativity: “When he tried to write by forcing himself, the result was flat and cold. He knew not how to compose a worthwhile tale except under the incitement of dream. He even carried this scruple to the point of wondering whether those works he wrote in this other state ought truly to be considered his own” (Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, 1988).
This last sentence refers to one of Lovecraft’s letters from 1919, in which he transcribed the dream that he soon developed into “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and speculated momentarily about the relationship of his dream life to his authorial one:
I wonder, though, if I have a right to claim authorship of things I dream? I hate to take credit, when I did not really think out the picture with my own conscious wits. Yet if I do not take credit, who’n Heaven will I give credit tuh? Coleridge claimed “Kubla Khan”, so I guess I’ll claim the thing an’ let it go at that.
– H.P. Lovecraft, letter to the Gallomo, December 11, 1919
You’ll note that in this brief passage he raised what are, for our present purposes, the two most important questions of all: Did he, and do we, have a right to claim ownership of the things we receive from dreams and inspiration, which feel like independent sources over which we have no control? And if we don’t take credit, then who will we give credit to?
This blog is an attempt to justify answering “No” to the first question while offering a definite and fruitful answer to the second.
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDIT:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomwatson/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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