Of course things aren’t quite that simple; the irony was presumably intended, but it got me to thinking: what if they were? What if it really weren’t that complicated? What if it could be? What if, just possibly, for some people, some of the time – what if it really were that easy?
The Genius and the Tortured Artist
Of course, this is in part what the myth of the Creative Genius is based on – the idea that there are people with Special Talents who simply do not have to work at it. The river of original and striking thoughts is always flowing by their door. They spend their lives idly lounging, and once in a while offhandedly turning out a finished, polished masterpiece. Any idea becomes brilliant once they pour on some of their Special Sauce.
Now I will not deny that there are people with remarkable talents, but I’ve been around enough of them to know that the idea that they don’t have to work at it is preposterous. If they are at all serious about making the most of their gifts, they work like crazy at it.
Let’s take an extreme example: Mozart. The popular imagination has it that in brief interludes between gallivanting around being chirpy and mad, he whipped off stacks of exquisite music as easily as breathing. This image does not stand up to much scrutiny. Mozart wrote his 25th symphony (the opening music from the film Amadeus) at age 17; unbelievably talented, yes, but also driven. He was able to sustain a workload that defies comprehension for about 36 years before it killed him.
Which brings us to the second great popular myth about creativity: the Tortured Artist. He lives in squalor or at the very least chaos, pulling out his hair and rending his clothes searching for the elusive key which will unlock the door, release the flood. His life is mostly pain, but will all be worth it in the end when his genius is finally revealed – usually, tragically, posthumously – after he has died a pauper, never recognized in his lifetime but celebrated down through the ages.
The trouble is, of course, that like all good myths these are based to some extent on fact; there is some truth to them. Not much, but at least a grain. Things do come easily to some people, and others do struggle and suffer. Furthermore, like all good stories, they appeal to us because they engage our emotions, our dreams of effortless mastery, our pathos for the waste of unfulfilled possibility, our desire to feel something passionately enough to sacrifice everything for it.
Are We Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill?
I have noticed a trend of late that posits our creative demons as monsters to be confronted, dragons to be slain. We must don our armor and ride forth to do battle with them as warriors. Face the enemy, slay the beast. And I think that merits a closer look, because I am not sure it is helping us out as much as is perhaps intended.
Now, I do feel there is something to the ‘Warrior Spirit’ idea – staring down and overcoming our ‘resistance’ (to use Steven Pressfield‘s excellent term), all the myriad distractions and excuses that keep us from realizing our creative potential… but I also have to ask myself sometimes if perhaps we’re not making a bit too much of it, for drama’s sake.
Are we not giving our fears and anxieties even more power over us when we envision them as fearful and terrible monsters? What if instead we imagine them small and weak and helpless? Better still, what if we simply ignore them? Tune them out, and create something amazing right under their noses?
I’m going to go a bit further. What if it’s really not such a big deal, this creativity thing? What if everyone has it – different flavors and strengths of it, to be sure, but still – what if it’s not special, and we who seek after it are not unusual or inherently remarkable?
What if this whole mythology of the tortured artist, the demons and monsters that stand in her path, the hero’s journey she must undertake to confront and slay them, is mostly self-aggrandizing – to make ourselves seem braver, stronger, and our work more dangerous, more significant? What if creativity is really not a Herculean labor, nor the preserve of certified geniuses, but rather the natural state of humankind?
It’s Only Creativity
There is a saxophonist in the town I used to live in, the father of a drummer friend and a kind of elder statesman of the jazz community there. He’s a wonderful player, one of the most elegant, relaxed and tasteful musicians I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Let’s call him Al, since that’s his name.
Al has a saying which he likes to unfurl at rehearsal, backstage, or whenever anyone seems nervous or too tightly wound:
Hey man, it’s only music, don’t freak out. No-one’s going to lose an arm…
In other words, if you screw something up, what’s the worst that will happen? Will you be immediately fired and driven from the stage? Not unless you’re working for James Brown. Will the entire audience get up, en masse, and walk out in disgust to smear your name all over town? Very unlikely.
Will they really throw things at you and point and laugh? Are they all sitting out there poised and just waiting to hear you make that first mistake so they can feel superior to you? Again, no, unless you’re sitting an audition for Juilliard, and then you’d better be prepared for it.
No, they’re here because they want to have a good time, they want to enjoy the show, they’ve paid to get in or bothered to show up, they’re invested in it. They are, in short, on your side. The only thing you can do to really screw up is to wreck their good time by not having one yourself.
There is really no great danger in making mistakes – but there is danger in being afraid to make them: if we are terrified to put a foot wrong, we may be too scared to begin.
I believe this is true of all creative endeavor. People generally want to enjoy art, dance, poetry; they wouldn’t bother with it otherwise. They don’t really want to pick it apart finding things to hate – and if they do, there’s not much we can do but pity them. Most people actually want you to succeed, they want you to entertain and uplift them. We could choose to feel overwhelmed by the pressure of this, but why not instead experience it as support, as encouragement?
Make Fun, Not War
Perhaps this approach is not for everyone. Some people do not seem to be in the art game for fun or enjoyment, and while I think this is sad I accept it and accept their goals and their process as being different, but not less valuable than my own.
However, if you’re like me and would like to have a less antagonistic, more relaxed and affectionate relationship with your creative demons, try something different with them next time. Rather than visualizing them as immense and terrifying, and then striding out to fight them to the death… try having some fun with them – imagine them in pink tutus or big purple bunny suits. Instead of a warrior, try being playful, like a child.
Then, while they’re distracted, get into something and let creativity happen. It isn’t all that difficult, if we get out of the way and stop making it harder for ourselves.
And remember: it’s only music (art/poetry/dance/sculpture/design/whatever you live to create)… no-one’s going to lose an arm.
Over to You
Have you ever been trapped by the myth of the Genius or the Tortured Artist? How did you escape?
Do you agree that having fun is conducive to creativity?
What difference does it make when you visualise your creative demons dancing around in pink tutus?
About the Author: tobias tinker is a musician and composer best known for his haunting score to the online Motion Comic Epic ‘Broken Saints’. This and his other music, including the ‘continuum’ solo piano series, can be found at Aeos Records. He writes about creativity and fearlessness on his own blog, Cliffjump!
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« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »Hey bro, awesome post! I've thought a lot about these things at various times, and one of my favourite reflections on the subject - which echoes some of the same things you talked about here - comes from a neat little filmed conversation between Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (it's part of Lanois's movie "Here Is What Is"). There's a youtube clip of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We1Cvs44i-Q
Since I saw this, every once and a while I take great pleasure in saying to myself "I'M an unpromising beginning! I could start something!"
Oh Fun and Play and above all Passion are definitely the most important ingredients for creativity.
It's when you want to make money with creativity when it all starts to go haywire. Because then the sillyness, the innocence of it all disappears and things have to serious, grown-up, believable.
I have two small children and they teach me creativity everyday. They ALWAYS ask WHY or WHY NOT. They always challenge assumptions. They always want to understand EVERYTHING.
Curiosity never killed creativity :-)
Hey again folks. Thanks for all your thoughts and reactions, I know it's a long piece so I'm very pleased that people are finding it worth getting through - if it inspires some conversation, so much the better, but hopefully it will also inspire you to go off and get your playful/creative on as well.
@Jessica - good point, trust is huge - and as others point out as well, expecting too much of ourselves can be really debilitating. My crazy creative cousin Brooke has just done a little video piece about the quest for 'perfection' which is worth a look!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIAnFCKgBBk
@Katie - thanks for posting that Brian Eno bit - definitely great, and starting something, even if we believe it is 'unpromising', is way better than not starting anything because we're waiting for 'inspiration' - or even something 'promising'.
@Mimi - small children are an amazing source of creativity lessons, I catalogued a few of them in my 'toddler creativity' piece, linked in the article - have a look!
http://cliffjump.net/toddler-creativity/
Disclaimer: I'm Tobias' Dad.
One of the most brilliant scientists I ever met, Ivar Giaever, a theoretical physicist, once told me "The time I spend writing papers is work, not physics. The physics happens when I am not working." This may have been galling to people who thought Ivar was just goofing around, but on the other hand they didn't get a Nobel prize, did they? (1973).
My current "work", if you can dignify it with the term, is coming up with a weekly essay for a newspaper Op-Ed page. They don't pay my meagre wage because I have ideas (which I do), but because I spend time and energy producing something other people will read. In the writing field we also have the example of Trollope, who worked as a bureaucrat 8 to 5 six days a week, then came home and spent two hours every night writing novels.
The point is, we don't ever see the creative process in another person, we just see its outcome. I suspect 'creativity' is a word we have made up to describe a very broad spectrum of internal actions.
Haha! Result - a son and Dad first! Brilliant Sir! Logically, you had a direct creative role in your son's existence and he is certainly a credit to you! ; )
You need to send me one of those spray bottles, stat! =)
Excellent post, T - you covered everything with intelligence, insight, and a sprinkle of humour - beautifully 'You'. (though I suspect somewhat Effortless...being one of those creative geniuses, and all ;))
So excited to see your thoughts inspiring so many others!!!
BB
OK this is turning into a family blog party... Brooke is my cousin (I'll try to snag you a spray bottle!), my sister's up there somewhere too, and it wouldn't surprise me if a brother or two made an appearance - I have a pretty great family that way.
I'm actually glad to see someone from the sciences chime in (my father's main career, before he retired and took up writing a quirky and rather remarkable small-town newspaper column, was in medical biochemistry)... and here's why: too many people equate 'creativity' exclusively with professional artistic endeavour of some sort. And even though that is in fact my own reference point I am interested in getting beyond it and, moreover, in what can be learned if 'creative' people from different worlds - art, science, business, politics, whatever - share their viewpoints, insights and understanding.
This has definitely been part of my development, growing up as a musician in a family full of scientists, with a window onto that world which is so much more 'creative' than I think non-scientists often assume. I also think this kind of dialog is particularly relevant here at Lateral Action! So if there are more of you 'creative scientists' out there with something to say about all this, bring it on!
As expected (but not scripted), one of Tobias' scientist brothers chimes in. I read this blog last night but was too clumsy on the iThingy to type a reply. So here I am – during “work time” -- posting a reply. Actually, I am busy writing reference letters and research proposals and annual reports, something which is currently identifying itself to me as pure “work”. But it isn’t always that way. I’ll explain.
I like the developing theme here that work is often the necessary encapsulation and dissemination of true creativity. It often is in science, where there is a lot of formal slogging needed to make your ideas heard and understood. That might be seen as the opposite of some performing arts: I am picturing the jazz musician on stage, full of exuberating pleasure in the improvisation of a new delivery. But occasionally I have had fun delivering a scientific talk about something that I am passionate about to a receptive audience, when the delivery borders on creativity. Other times, just as in the performing arts, it’s just something to deliver and get over with.
My creative time most often happens on the days that I run to work. I have a 7km running route through fields and woods to get there. Invariably, I have a sequence: enter woods, say to self “wow, am I ever lucky”, remember something I have to do that day (or maybe something I don’t have to do), slip into free thought about how to do it, arrive to work euphoric, maybe act on the ideas, then get bogged down in details and “work”. It would be easy to think that the only fun and creative time is the running and thinking, or other occasional times in between the doing. But the run also serves as a reminder of how lucky I am to have such a varied job, and that memory comes back during the day sometimes when I can insert little moments of “hey, this is fun” into the tasks. My biggest enemy is being too busy, because that feeling can completely squash fun and creativity. So having those little “hey, this is fun” moments are incredibly important to me, as, I suspect, they are to artists and everybody else. The work is never gone, but they us down enough to make the work matter.
Back to work….
Oops, the last line should read "The work is never gone, but they (the creative and "this is fun" moments) SLOW us down enough to make the work matter."
And I just had another relevant thought: Here is how government scientists in Canada are evaluated: We write a document about ourselves every year, and every several years (at our choosing) we can write a really big document about ourselves in hopes that a committee of other scientists will promote us to the “next level” (meaning we can suck up more taxpayers money ;-). But here’s the point: the four key headings in our evaluation of ourselves are:
1) INNOVATION (five brand new things we invented or made happen – read “CREATIVITY”)
2) IMPACT (i.e. the result of the innovations)
3) RECOGNITION (evidence that scientists and other people actually care)
4) PRODUCTIVITY (evidence of other tangible outputs – mostly publications)
Passing the Innovation and Impact criteria is absolutely essential. Sadly, I just sat on a committee where we had to decline many promotions of good scientists because of their inability to explain how their work was innovative (or what their creative role was) or what the impact was.
If artists and others were lucky enough to be able to submit a document asking for a public salary, what would it look like? It might be harder to separate these four items, but I bet they would be there. What would your promotion document look like?
told you... ;^)
@Nick - I guess it would look like a grant application!...
Alternately, readers who are students or practitioners of marketing (gasp! the dreaded Black Art!) would say, it might look like a good sales page, with clearly defined USP (Unique Selling Point - that's your Innovation), benefits (as opposed to features, that's your Impact), Social Proof (Recognition / Productivity)...
Interesting. See?
OK, anyone else (even people who aren't closely related to me) want to get in on the fun?