Digging, Or The Importance of Creative Throughput
If you asked a group of people who know me what my average week was like, they’d probably list:
40+ hours at the writing job
25+ hours at the recording studio
Up to 20 hours on other creative projects
A couple of nights of going out
An afternoon or two in the sun (or rain)
Lots of cooking
This schedule doesn’t afford me the kind of hit-the-bars-every-night-with-friends luxuries that I sometimes wish I had time for. It makes spontaneity in things such as travel, concerts, and even dinner a challenge, both because there is often something scheduled in the way, or simply due to the overarching feeling that there must be something scheduled in the way, and if it’s not on the schedule, I must have forgotten.
What it does afford me is a LOT of creative throughput. Most days from 9:30am to midnight or later, I’m working on *something*. Some days the work is really engaging, some days it can be boring and pedestrian, but it keeps the habit of always pushing out ideas, always thinking and creating and shaping, in motion.
I’ve previously mentioned Anne Lamont’s Bird By Bird, a book on writing and creating in general that I’ve found inspiring lately. There’s a section in there that talks about the cruciality of writing “Shi**y first drafts”. Everyone’s scared to put pen to paper, because what if it sucks? Well, she poses that it has to. If you write 6 pages of trash but find a glimmer of something you love in a paragraph on page 4, then you’ve got things started. You’ve got the seed of something good, and you wouldn’t have created it if you hadn’t given yourself the chance to start up the ol’ motor and get creating. The crappy stuff that acted as a ramp to the good? Toss it without guilt. It was a tool, and nobody ever had to see it.
Creativity seems to be seen as some intangible thing that some people have, and others don’t. Genetic, finite, something that is born, not made. I’ve had many friends tell me “I’m not creative like that”, and been compelled to shoot sparks out of my nose and drone in monotone “DOES NOT COMPUTE“. The difference between you, the “not-creative” and people who seem to always have something new springing forth from them? They do their thing. It might be painful, especially at first. It might be frustrating. You might throw out the first 20 things you make, hate them, hate yourself, and curse the day anybody encouraged you to try.
But at least you’re starting.
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