The Pragmatic Hybrid

A few months ago I watched a documentary about Bruce Springsteen, called “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

It’s a deep look at his creative process. In it, he talks about how he came to terms with the reality of his weaknesses as an artist, and admitting that he had them.

He describes his despair at not being able to do his work – wanting to pick a fight with someone who could end him, so his battle would stop. His maturity as an artist finally arrived when accepted the fact of his limitations, and learned to work with the possibilities available to him inside these limits.

It struck a huge gonnnng with me, because it caught me at a moment when I was struggling to write, and not getting anywhere, and feeling only despair.

It was the most creative frustration I’ve felt, ever.

The night before, unable to sleep, I cried and tossed and wondered if I would ever be able to get out of my own way and do the writing that redeems my day.

So when I heard Bruce talk about facing up his limits and learning to function within them, it landed like an instruction tailor-made for me, a message about my path out of the pit.

But his words weren’t entirely good news.

Bruce’s story made me realize that if he has weaknesses as an artist, then I sure as hell must have some too.

And the sad realization that followed on this one was that if the weaknesses are in me, and not solely in my circumstances, then they would never be transcended by arranging my time differently, or by reorganizing my physical accoutrements.

Without realizing it, I was looking for a magic bullet – a mood shift, a change of perspective, a perfect, mythical arrangement of silence and unscheduled days that would make it possible for me to slip effortlessly into the creative trance.

For circumstances to arrange themselves ideally so that I didn’t have to struggle.

To arrive at some plane – spontaneously, by magic – where I had transcended the terror of starting, and it was effortless.

For me, it’s not completely about time. Because I have had the experience of clearing a day to work on the novel, and still fretting and hemming and not have much to show for it at the end.

It’s more about calming myself enough to sit down and start. This is the main barrier – the fear and anxiety that rise up like a wave when I even think about moseying over to my writing space.

Eric Maisel calls it starting anxiety, and says that it’s a major thing to learn to manage if we’re going to make our art.

He teaches that it’s not easy, or solved forever, but that it can be managed.

Maybe this weakness, this fear of inadequacy, never goes away. Maybe we just learn to coexist peacefully, to function in spite of it, the same way one learns to live with a chronic health condition – it may always be around, so the highest goal is to learn to live with it.

To learn grace and yielding and bending, instead of resisting and breaking.

Maybe the best we can do is to learn to calm the anxiety and enter the creative trance, even in the presence of our weaknesses. To admit to being powerless in the face of something bigger.

(And it’s worth learning to manage your creative anxiety, because what’s the alternative? Like Sarah says, you’ll just get cranky if you don’t make your art. So, might as well figure out how to make it.)

This conversation with yourself, the reminding yourself that you’re a weak, limited human, is, paradoxically, empowering. Humility in the face of something you don’t understand and can’t control is quite a practical viewpoint, it turns out. 

I wanted a way to arrive in this place of humility, to learn how to invoke powers greater than mine.

So I devised a ritual.

I started doing this as a silent meditation that happens inside my head, or by writing it out in my journal.

It’s an invocation of the writing, which already exists somewhere, and that I am inviting to come through me. A ritual to smallify the clamoring of my ego, and to shift me into the proper spiritual attitude, which is one of receptivity and opening and not fretting about future greatness.

After creating this technique, I realized that I had made a tool to help with something kajillions of us need. Not just writers, but creators of all kinds, because starting anxiety is something we all deal with.

So, I am doing this up as a recorded meditation.

My plan is to offer a short recording that you can quickly listen to when you feel that starting anxiety surge – a ritual to invoke grounding and safety, to be your entry point into your writing practice and help you manage your starting anxiety and slip into the creative trance.

I’m making a proper version now, and will be offering it in a few weeks. (There will be an exclusive discount for people on my list, which you can sign up for here.)

To make it as good and specific for y’all as I can, I want to know: what stops you from getting started?

What does your starting anxiety whisper in your ear? If you will share your experience with this in the comments, I will appreciate it mightily.

Comment Fu

This space is like a Quaker meeting that is happening in my living room. Honored guests, please speak as you are moved to.  And let’s be awesome to each other, because graciousness among friends is why we hang out together.

I was reading an essay I wrote a while back, to polish it up for a residency application.

It was published in a literary journal, and is going into an anthology that’s coming out this year, so I knew – theoretically, at least – that it couldn’t suck too hard.

But I was avoiding it. Dreading, dreading, dreading going back and reading it again, for fear that I would be mortified at what I found.

When I summoned up the nerve, I was blown away.

I wrote that?! I’m a writer, dammit!

It was coherent. Besides making sense, it was beautiful – deep and subtle and polished, with gleaming images and varied, dancing sentences. It was work I could be proud to present to any committee or panel, knowing it was an example of the best I was capable of at that moment.

The thing is, I didn’t remember what I did to get it to this state of being, and I had no idea how to go about replicating the process. And I had some doubts that I would be able to do it again.

So I held my own hand and walked myself through remembering its genesis.

The germ of it was hatched in a coffee shop on Flatbush Avenue, during a writing date with a friend.

An early, overly-abstract version got workshopped in my writing group, to mixed reviews.

Then it (and I) made a big leap forward when I read about essay construction, and how it’s good to ground an essay in scene – a particular time and place, with actual events happening in present time. So I revised, adding a place and people and relevant happenings.

At some point, it started to hang together. During this stage, I printed out and marked up about a bajillion drafts with blue pen, moving sections around and sharpening meaning and cutting evidence of my reflexive ticks.

I fiddled with paragraphs and sections and fretted over the order of the telling, over what to flesh out and what to leave well enough alone, until I finally arrived at something satisfying.

The components that were important:

• staying with the piece over time
• the support of a group (like the Hybrid Writers Circle)
• educating myself about the technical stuff
• being willing to revise radically

This excavation of the process reminded me (again) that the finished product did not spring fully formed from my brain. It was a long time in the making, with many attempts and iterations, with new learning informing the process all the while.

Even after it was done and published, and I was fairly happy with how it turned out, I could still look at it and find things to tweak.

All of this to say: you can’t stand at the beginning of the process and see the shape of the end.

If you’re nurturing a subconscious hope that now that you’ve done it the hard way once, you’ve learned your lessons and can just skip directly to the satisfactory version (like I secretly hope every time): Sorry. Doesn’t work that way.

The only help for it is to commit, and dive.

Michael Nobbs says this about steadfastness of commitment:

“By remaining steadfast to an idea or a creative discipline you’ll go on a journey that will open up possibilities and opportunities far beyond what you can see when you take your first few steps. Conversely, if all you ever do is take lots of first steps you will never experience any depth or richness in your creative pursuits.”

This is the goal.

Depth, and richness. Finished works with luster and layers.

Remember how you did it before. It took something: steadfastness, commitment. Chances are the next important project will take something too.

That’s just how good work gets done.

P.S. – I want to remember to tell you that I have an in-person session of the Hybrid Writers Circle starting in March.

If you’re in the NYC area and looking for a safe, supportive workshop to write and grow in, check it out! And if you have any questions, please ask.

Comment Fu

This space is like a Quaker meeting that is happening in my living room. Honored guests, please speak as you are moved to. And let’s be awesome to each other, because graciousness among friends is why we hang out together.

I’m pretty sure I was born to be a writer (as much as it’s possible to be born to be anything – meaning that within the giant shimmering matrix of Possibility, this is where I most naturally tend to make meaning for myself).

Which does not mean that it’s effortless, or necessarily even pleasant. It’s still mostly hard.

There’s the constant grappling with my own inadequacy, with falling short of the quality I’m aiming for, with the perpetual, relentless need for practice. (Me to Myself: Whattya mean, I have to write again today? I wrote yesterday!) How there’s no improving without it. How I’ll never be as good as my favorite writers, how hard it is to do the work even when nothing good is coming out, even knowing that the only thing there is to do is the work. All the demons and monsters riding me, whispering cruel, unhelpful things in my ears.

My favorite description of the internal narrative comes from Anne Lamott. She says that when she’s writing, the radio station she hears in her head is KFKD (pronounced k-fucked). That it’s a constant stream about how she’s grand and awesome on one hand, and ridiculous to even bother on the other, and she has to turn the dial down a little if she can, calm down, and start working.

This rings so true for me. This is the key thing to getting into the work. To turn down the anxiety and fear dial enough to proceed. Some days are easier, some days are harder, but it’s always there to greet me, this creating anxiety. My way of doing this is with a particular meditation I devised to calm myself the eff down enough to begin.

I believe that it’s possible that there are some people who create in an effortless dream state. I’ve experienced this once, so I know that it’s theoretically possible. But it’s not the normal experience for most of us. I think most people who go on and on about the magic of creating are full of shit. They want you to see the glorious finished product, so there’s an impetus to not show too many of the gory details that went into its creation. Or it’s like giving birth, where they’re so in love with the result that they manage to obscure the pain and struggle, even from themselves.

It’s like throwing a certain kind of dinner party. When I host people, I want it to be lavish and sparkly, and for my house to look like it’s never seen a mess, and for every dish to be mouthwatering, and for me to look calm and fresh.

THIS IS AN ILLUSION.

An illusion created for the pleasure of my guests. It’s like theater in a way. I’m trying to create a particular kind of experience, so I don’t reveal too much of what went on behind the scenes to make it so.

Same with creative work. We see people’s finished good stuff. Which they probably slaved over, with all the attendant puking and wailing. But they prefer not to dwell on those unpleasant parts when presenting their work to its audience.

But shouldn’t it be easier than this?

There’s an idea that if something is really legitimately ours to do, that it will be easy. Effortless. That it will just flow, and this is how we’ll know for sure that it’s for us.

I think there’s more to it than that. In my experience, if something is really-truly for me, it will still be hard. Doing it will be fraught and difficult and a constant existential conversation with myself.

The indicator that something is for me is more about how well it feeds me. How do I feel when I’ve done it?

Writing redeems my day like nothing else.

This is one excellent argument for getting my writing done first. Because once it’s done, anything else I accomplish that day is a bonus.

I can contrast this with my career as a biologist. If I had stuck out my PhD in plant biology, and been in that career my whole sad life, I bet I still never would have felt like a Real Botanist. Because even though I have a natural facility for taxonomic thinking and those particular kinds of logic games, it was not otherwise fulfilling. I was always struggling to reconcile myself with the demands of that path.

On the other had, with writing, it felt different. It did take me some years to consider myself a writer. But this process was more about getting used to thinking of myself in this way, and kind of growing into it, and less about misfitting with the job description.

The writer-trajectory was similar to (though faster than) my trajectory to feeling like a real grown-up. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point, I stopped asking myself when I would be a real grown-up, because it seems I am. There’s no discomfort with the description anymore. I inhabit grown-upness fully. And it was a combination of experiences/skills/practice and self-knowledge gained/beliefs examined and discarded that led up to it.

My point: the ease of doing something is not the best indicator of its rightness for you. Neither is pleasure in the act of doing it.

A better indicator: does having done it make you feel your time was well-spent? Does doing it redeem your day?

Comment Fu

I’m curious to know what redeems your day like nothing else. How do you turn down Radio KFKD and get on with it?

This space is like a Quaker meeting that is happening in my living room. Honored guests, please speak as you are moved to. And let’s be awesome to each other, because graciousness among friends is why we hang out together.