Creative Block

Some Notes on Dealing With Writing, Painting, Poetry and Photography Block:
I’ve written about my schedule before: Most mornings I’m up before six. Reading, writing, or out shooting photographs just before sunrise. My early morning schedule is a small, deliberate ritual, and I mention it because it’s the same principle I use with patients who come to me who are “ stuck.” I’m a neuropsychologist and deal mostly with legal cases, but other people show up at my door through the grapevine. That might mean, for these people, there is nothing much happening, and they are often depressed and feeling hopeless. Sometimes, added on to that, they have that dreaded disorder “writer’s block.” Understand, they are not just writers; they might be photographers, or painters, performers, comics; in general, they are people who’ve stopped making the things. I’ve even seen two clowns who worked with a rather famous circus. Sometimes it’s a recent issue for them, sometimes it’s been going on for years, maybe off and on.

I’ve got a light case of painter’s block myself, or had it until recently, for a long time. That’s how I originally got into photography. I used to work ½ time as a psychologist. ½ time as an artist. But the art ½ of me, which went very well for over a decade as a painter and printmaker, started to just come apart. My gallery closed, three private dealers who sold my work retired…and the worst of all things, my paintings started to just fail on me. I bought a nice Canon camera to take photos of my new paintings, and when I saw them through the lens….I just gessoed over them all. I thought I’d just start over. The gessoed canvases are still in storage. And nothing much came to me for a long, long time. But the camera I bought, first I took street photo-like images, then urban landscape…Then I started reading photo theory books, and I just connected to the camera. But until recently I still just couldn’t paint. So, there has been a problem with painting for a good ten or maybe fifteen years. I was making some small “zines” of my photos and thought I’d put together a 20-page zine of my drawings, and seeing all the work together clarified a lot to me. And changing how I painted also helped. Thinking about my paintings and drawings also moved me forward in my photographic work. But I think moving on with the paintings was really guided through my newly developed daily schedule. Every morning, getting up, going to McDonald’s, sitting at a table by the window, and reading a short story, then writing, and then walking home. Then last week something happened that made me want to share my “habits” with you. And hear about yours.

I was listening to The Art Angle podcast, hosted by Ben Davis. Davis was talking about a book I see in almost every bookstore, and ignored. Davis, a Marxist art critic I admire a great deal, was talking with the author of The Artist’s Way. I listened to her description of her “Three Page” technique, comparing it to what I do and teach others to do, and I thought this might be a good time and place to share my thoughts about “writers-painters-poetry block” along with the gathered thoughts of two others on this topic. And if you need it, I suggest you get these books and practice the method(s). The good news is that this problem rarely needs a clinical diagnosis. Instead, it needs a habit, one you commit to, a way to proceed each day. And sometimes, people need a witness (therapist or another artist- which is cheaper), or you might even start a “ writers-painters-poetry” group yourself. Apparently, you can find these groups everywhere.

After reading this, you can listen to the podcast with Ben Davis I listened to. He’s a fantastic critic, and does a great job explaining stuff you ought to know about if you want to be an artist. I listen to this podcast every week. The link is below.

So here are the basics: Starting with three different ways of getting the creative juices going: Morning Reading and Writing (me), Morning Pages, the basic idea in The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron), and Taking an Initial Step, the idea of low-commitment, high-energy action ( Twyla Tharp).

Like Cameron and Tharp, who I’ll describe below, I’ve developed a morning routine. Most mornings I’m up before six. If the weather cooperates, I might go out to shoot photos before sunrise, the light still flat and blue, few people around. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, I go directly to McDonald’s instead, and put in my noise-cancelling earbuds before I’ve even sat down, so I don’t have to hear the other customers, or the music they play in those places, which I’ve come to think of as brain-injuring, draining away IQ points one at a time. Either way, by the time I sit down with a book, I’ve already made the day’s first decision, which is to not let it start with noise.

Then I read. Usually Chekov, a single short story, sometimes two. Some are just a couple of pages long. None take more than 5 -10 minutes to read. I make a very short outline of it afterward; I pay close attention to how differently each story starts, often nothing like how I would have started writing. There may be a stray detail, a piece of dialogue with no attached context, a character already in mid-argument before we know who they are. I do this very matter-of-factly, “X says Y.” And then I do the same thing with the ending: I write one line, and try to fill in exactly what happened, not what it meant, just what happened. I’m trying to drum the shape of these things into my head, not so I can reproduce Chekhov, nobody can, but so the range of ways a story is allowed to begin and end gets wider in my own mind than it would if I only ever wrote the way I already write.

Some mornings I switch authors. I’ve recently read Updike’s The Maple Stories, the ones about Richard and Joan, their marriage, their slow drift apart. It’s strange to do the ending-line exercise with those, because you don’t fully feel it until you look at the publication history, that Updike wrote the first one, about a young couple in Greenwich Village, in 1956, and kept coming back to the same two people for the better part of two decades before they were finally collected together in one book, with one more story added years after that, decades later, about the same couple as grandparents. Read straight through, it feels like one continuous act of attention. It wasn’t. It was written in pieces, over a stretch of time longer than most marriages actually last. There are long breaks in the stories. Sometimes you notice them, sometimes you don’t. That’s a useful thing to sit with before nine in the morning: that continuity on the page doesn’t require continuity in the writing of it.

After the reading, and writing my three or four line outline, one of two things happens. Either I take the earbuds back out, look around, and write a descriptive paragraph about someone near me, describing in detail whoever happens to be there, not their whole life, just what’s actually visible, the way they’re holding a coffee cup, the state of their shoes. Not an interpretation yet. Just what was there. Then the day starts for real. Maybe you can see how this writing relates to taking photos? Sometimes, as an alternative, I walk around a couple blocks and the get my Egg McMuffin and diet Coke, and write everything I can remember about that short walk. That, I find, is a powerful focusing technique. Again, directly related to photography.

The Creative Habit. Twyla Tharp is worth putting next to Cameron, mostly for the contrast. I saw her company dance in the early seventies, long before either of us had any idea her name would end up filed on a shelf next to books about spiritual electricity, because there’s nothing in her own account of her process that reaches for anything mystical at all. Her version of the morning ritual isn’t the workout. It’s the cab. Up at five thirty, into her clothes, out the door, and the ritual is finished the moment she tells the driver where to go, not two hours later at the gym once she’s actually sweating. She likes to emphasize keeping the commitments small, doable. The commitment gets made in one small, almost thoughtless gesture, before the rest of her is awake enough to argue with it, which is close enough to my own earbuds going in before I’ve even ordered my diet Coke, that I have to assume this particular trick, binding yourself before you can object, gets discovered independently by anyone who manages to keep a practice going for years rather than weeks.

As I’ve already described, she also keeps a box for every project, plain cardboard or plastic, and into it goes anything that seems to belong there while she’s working, notes, photographs, objects, nothing sorted yet, nothing judged, just gathered until the box itself starts to suggest what it’s for. That’s the same instinct behind my outlines and my walk-home paragraphs, and my own boxes, material collected before you know what you’re going to do with it, on the theory that you can’t mine a page that was never written down.

The exercise of hers I keep coming back to, though, is smaller and stranger than either of those. At one point she asks the reader to pick a new name, an actual exercise: what would you choose, what would you want it to say about you, and her claim is that a well-chosen name can turn into its own kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It sounds like a strange thing to ask a grown adult to do until you’ve sat across from as many stalled artists as I have. Then it makes complete sense, because the obstacle in the room is rarely a missing skill. It’s an old name someone is still wearing. I picked Seamus, my name, but in Irish.

She wrote a separate book about this too, The Collaborative Habit, because she didn’t think any of it held up as a purely private practice; that a habit tested only against yourself stays smaller than one that gets handed to somebody else and comes back changed by them. Which is exactly the part I recognize.

What I keep coming back to, though, is how much all of this maps onto what I actually do for a living. I see a fair number of artists in my practice, photographers, painters, writers, performers, and what brings most of them in isn’t a mystery in the clinical sense. They’re stuck. They’ve stopped making the thing they used to make, and they’ve usually stopped for long enough that stopping itself has become the identity: I’m the person who used to paint, rather than I paint. What they need, more often than not, isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a small, specific assignment, and somebody to read it back to. That second part turns out to matter more than people expect. You can hand someone the exact same daily exercise Cameron hands a reader in her books, or the exact same drill I do with Chekhov, and it works differently once there’s another person on the other end of it. Now the truth is, left alone with an assignment, most people either abandon it in a week or do it so privately it never turns into anything. Read aloud to someone who’s paying real attention, the same daily pages start to become material, actual raw stock a writer or a photographer can go back and pull from later. So for some, finding a group to participate in, or a therapist or a good friend, can push you just a bit when you need it.

So that’s the answer to how I know a good process. Not by whether it looks disciplined, or spiritual, or whatever word you want to use. By whether it produces material somebody else can eventually mine, and sometimes for some people whether the person doing it has someone to read it to. Cameron figured out one version of this process thirty years ago, and it’s still working for people. Tharp wrote out hers about 25 years ago. I built a version of it for myself out of Chekhov and a walk, half by instinct. And most days, in my office, sitting across from someone who hasn’t made anything in a year, the actual work isn’t convincing them to be creative again. It’s handing them something small enough to do tomorrow morning, and telling them I’ll be there to hear about how it went.

References:

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992)

The Magic of ‘The Artist’s Way’ - Artnet News

Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories - Wikipedia

The Maples Stories by John Updike - Penguin Random House

Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Simon & Schuster, 2003)

Twyla Tharp, The Collaborative Habit (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

How to Be Motivated Every Day: Lessons Learned from Twyla Tharp - James Clear

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