The Creative Habit

Text in black are quotes; text in green are my notes. I sometimes write in Spanish.

• There’s a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other. #

• Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on. #

• I often think of myself as water flowing into a rock. The water eventually finds its way out the other side, but in between it seeks out every hole and channel in the rock. It keeps trickling forward, gathering force until it bursts out on the other side as a raging torrent. #

• If there’s a lesson here it’s: get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. #

• There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work. #

• Gathering chaos into a satisfying order is a daunting challenge. You have to train for this struggle. #

• You can give yourself the same kind of challenge whatever medium you work in: paint only in shades of green; write a story without using the verb “to be”; film a ten-minute scene nonstop with one camera. Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way, which is the prime goal of scratching. #

• Transforming your ideas rarely goes according to plan. This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts. #

• The key words here are “prepared” and “lucky.” They’re inseparable. You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident. #

• Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources. #

• “Why do I have to obey the rules?” “Why can’t I be different?” “Why can’t I do it my way?” These are the impulses that guide all creative people whether they admit it or not. Every act of creation is also an act of destruction or abandonment. Something has to be cast aside to make way for the new. #

• I know writers who say they take little pleasure in writing but they love having written. #

• You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that’s a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you. #

• The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things. #

• Take away a skill, a vital one. Would you still be able to create? How would you overcome the loss? How would you compensate? What skill would come to the fore to rescue your work? #

• A rut can be the consequence of a bad idea. You shouldn’t have started the project in the first place. #

• A rut can be the end product of bad timing. For some reason you are out of sync with the world. You can have the brightest vision with the most mind-blowing idea, but if the world isn’t ready for it you can spin your wheels for years. #

• A rut can form because of bad luck or circumstances conspiring against you. #

• More often than not, I’ve found, a rut is the consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don’t take into account how you or the world has changed. It’s like your mother serving you the same breakfast you loved as a child. You push the meal away half-eaten and she says, “But you always loved Cocoa Puffs and pork sausage.” That was then, this is now. #

• You may be humming along with your novel, writing every day, and then twelve months later you find you have four hundred pages that do not make sense. You have to make a habit of reviewing your efforts along the way, seeing where you’ve been and where you are to make sure you’re still heading in the right direction, if any. #

• I’ll go backstage and come back with a found object. The last time I did this I returned with a wooden stool. Then I gave the audience a challenge: You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are also forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses. The most interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a consistent order to the quality of ideas. You’d think the sixtieth idea would be the most lame, but for my purposes, which are to trigger leaps of imagination, it’s often the opposite. #

• Ernest Hemingway had the nifty trick of always calling it a day at a point when he knew what came next. He built himself a bridge to the next day. #

• Jerome Robbins liked to say that you do your best work after your biggest disasters. #

• Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski banned his teams from calling themselves the “defending national champions,” because he felt this made them think defensively. Also, he argued that you only defend something that can be taken away from you, and your past successes will always be yours no matter what.) #

• (Remember the centenarian who when asked about the best part of living such a long life replied, “No more peer pressure.”) #