Unblocking the creative artist

Today, as for the past many days, I have been correcting my book manuscript. My editor (I have an editor!... Eeeeek! And WOOHOOO!) has suggested many changes. I’ve been sitting here, starting each day with mantras and positivity and excitement; each day has pretty much descended into boredom, resentment and rage, me wanting to throw a heavy tome at someone’s head. (I hate some of the changes I’ve been asked to do, which seem pointless and are taking ages; and I hate, already in advance, the unseen judge who will write a review of my academic book – formerly The Thesis – and will probably slag it off, the way academics do: ‘I was not convinced by’, ‘It is not clear why the author has chosen’, and so on.)

When I am not editing/ weeping/ snarling quietly/ slamming doors and storming off, I dip in and out of a lovely book I’ve been reading – which is called ‘The Artist’s Way', by Julia Cameron. (I love this book.  It’s like carrying around a kind friend in your bag pocket. I discovered it only a couple of weeks ago. Like all the other great books, it has of course been around for years, and I am only now discovering it – annoying, but perhaps now is when I need it most.)

This morning (buoyed by a positive pep talk by a guru friend the night before, who said nice things and reminded me to be positive, and suggested that I start my day with a positive visualization of exactly how great I will feel when my book is finished), I opened my Kindle to have a glance at ‘The Artist’s Way’. The page which presented itself to my astonished eyes bore the sub-heading: ‘Blasting Through Blocks’.

‘In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear). […] Any buried barriers must be aired before the work can proceed. The same holds true for any buried payoffs for not working. They are, instead, recognizable artistic defences against what is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a hostile environment.’

This is what ‘The Artist’s Way’ recommends for ‘Blasting through Blocks’.

-       1. Write down any resentments to do with this project (these might be, say, I resent the fact that I’m being asked to do extra work I’m not getting paid for; I resent this editor, she just nitpicks; I resent the fact that I can’t write whatever I want, but everything I write is policed by some academics…)

-       2. Write down your fears (for example, I’m afraid this work will be rubbish; I’m afraid they won’t like it; I’m afraid the reviewers will pick on all the things I did wrong, and not praise any of the good things that I worked so hard on; I’m afraid that, if I write something by myself and it hasn’t been checked by clever friends and supervisors, then it’s not good enough… I’m afraid that I’m not good enough…)

-       3. Have you written them all down? Any secret anger or resentment or fear? Write it down now. (reread resentments and fears; sure I can think of some more…)

-       4. What do I gain by not doing this piece of work? What's the payoff for not working? (mine might be: if I don't do this piece of work, I can go for coffee, piss about, do yoga, play guitar. Write to a friend. Be happy, be free. Do something creative. If I don't write it, no-one will be able to hate it. If I don't do it, no-one will ever need to know it was a bit rubbish... [But then, surely it's better to have a slightly rubbish book out, than have an imaginary perfect book in my head that no one can read?...])

-       5. Make a pact with the ‘Creator’, which goes like this: ‘Okay, Creative Force. You take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity’.

And now I’m writing…

Happy New Year!

Oh, and I'm stealing Neil Gaiman's amazing words to wish all of you the best for this year! "May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself."

Job* Versus The PhD**

Having a 9-to-5 job is better than doing a PhD because:

- Having a job seems a bit better for your mental health. As someone who until recently was a semi-employed freelancer type, I can confirm that having a job has significantly decreased the amount of time available to me in which I can obsess about stuff, think bad thoughts, and let the said bad thoughts spin round and round in my brain until they seem to take on a life of their own. (You know that thing where you find yourself obsessively preoccupied with the annoying thing which a friend/ sibling/ co-worker did, about three years ago?... That one. It doesn’t happen so much now that I work in an office and have colleagues to talk to, and other people’s work to do.)

- You get to have Colleagues. Someone comes up to you and offers to make you tea. Someone else looks you up and down and compliments your choice of outfit. (In my office, I also have a colleague who comes by my desk on certain days of the week and asks ‘[Cloud Nine], are you coming to Mindfulness today?’ – just to make sure I don’t miss out. I LOVE IT.) (By the way, I understand that not every office has 'Mindfulness' in it, but that's another story.)

- When you have a 9-to-5 job, you get weekends. And you get evenings. You get to go home when your working day has finished, and you get to forget all about it until the next morning. Once the clock hits 5 pm on a Friday, you get a vast expanse of time stretching out ahead of you, time during which you can do whatever you want – get drunk, do yoga, potter around in your pyjamas. Two whole days. And then you go back to work again.

- Earning money is amazing. After the arid, cash-strapped days of post-PhD, to get something resembling a regular salary is wonderful. (Of course, most of it went on Christmas presents, a mountain of chocolate, and overpriced lamb, but hey. It’s Christmas!)

- Your boss says things like ‘By the way, don’t feel like you should stay in the office after hours. Make sure you go home on time!’ … Amazing, unheard-of luxury. Is this how the other half live?... Pack up your handbag and just walk out at 5 on the dot?... What, no marking to take home or anything?...

- No need to be in charge of planning own time/ feel intense guilt at complete inability to plan own time. When you have a 9-to-5, you get given several tasks to do – say, you might get three things which you need to accomplish. And you’re sitting there and you’re like, ‘wow, look at that. I’ve done my three things. And now it is 4:30. Just time for a cup of tea and then I’m going home!’…

Whereas if you’re doing a PhD, and you manage to do three things during the day, you’re like ‘Oh, NO. Where has the day gone?... I’ve only achieved three things!... But I meant to also go for a run, and a swim, and finish my chapter, and start that small business, and sign up for some volunteering, and [there follows a list of all the things you might have done with your flexi-time day, had you been somehow more organized]’.

- Having a 9-to-5 job is humbling. You know those swings of grandiosity and worthlessness you’ve been experiencing as an academic?... Those ‘I get to say “I’m doing a PhD!” or “Oh, I’m a lecturer” whenever someone asks me what I do; that feels good’ – followed by ‘I am the most useless human being on this planet. I can’t even finish my PhD…’ Those things still come back to haunt you. Presumably one reason why you did a PhD was to try and get somewhere in life. Taking a 9-to-5, as opposed to an academic job, may feel like dropping out. You’ll have those ‘What the hell am I doing with my life?... Why am I doing this rubbish job?...’- type thoughts. It’s OK to feel this way. In fact, I have a feeling that it’s even good for you, this idea that you can take a not-very-glamorous job and still be you. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it feels good to take a job and realise that your career doesn’t need to define you.

Occasionally, you sense of worthlessness will overwhelm you (as will the unglamorous nature of your 9-to-5), and you will see an advert for an academic job, freak out, and feel compelled to apply. You will spend many evenings painstakingly drafting the application (instead of enjoying the free evenings that are rightfully yours), then panic again and work flat out when you find that you got invited to the interview. You will not get the job (because they had someone 'better'...) and will wonder why you bothered wasting all that time, instead of just enjoying everything your new lifestyle has to offer. It's OK to freak out, and miss academia, and panic-apply for academic jobs. It will remind you why you decided to opt for Plan B in the first place. (To see how filling your time with a shit thing helps you appreciate the thing you've already got, cf. my earlier post 'Get a Goat'...)

It’s official: there are lots of reasons why having a job is better for you than doing a PhD.

Is less good, however, because:

- ... How I miss a good nap in the middle of the afternoon.

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*(Definition of ‘Job’: office, colleagues, someone makes you tea, people chat to you. Spend your day doing things that other people have decided are a good idea. Have to come in every day whether you feel like it or not. Go home at 5 pm.)

**(Definition of ‘PhD’: work from home, plan own time; oh, and have to actually write a PhD at some point. Can drink as much tea as you want, eat poached eggs in your pyjamas and have naps mid-afternoon. Brain kicks into gear about 4:30 pm ahead of deadline the next morning. Existential angst and panic aplenty.)

Working Woman

Cloud Nine has got a job – again. Yes – two years and several adventures on from the PhD, I have actually found something resembling one of those nine-to-fives that I’ve been hankering after. Something that’s (hopefully, please, please please) quite a bit less horrible than the Grotty Job.

The only trouble is: I can’t sleep. Ever since I laid down my little head on Sunday night, ready to drift off for a good night’s sleep before the First Day On The Job, I have tossed and turned and I can’t sleep. On that night before my first day, I woke up at four. Today I woke up at 2. (That’s a lot of lying awake.) There was nothing for it but to do what any normal person would do, and get up and write on my little blog.  (Maybe, if I just tire myself out a little bit, I’ll get a bit of a nap – between 6 and 7?...)

I must confess that I thought this was finished, you know. The sleepless nights of the crazy last-months-of-PhD, or that awful night before the viva. The brain that won’t shut down. The tossing and turning, the knot in the stomach. (Ironic, really, since the main thing I didn’t like about the Grotty Job was that awful knot-in-the-stomach feeling every time I had to go in. And now I have found myself a Nice Job, and it’s like my body hasn’t understood yet that it is nice. My body has a mind of its own, and it’s preparing the fight-or-flight response. Or is my brain telling me that it considers this job to be grotty, too?...)

This and other wonderful secrets of the working world I am able to consider while siting in my living room in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning.

And now back to bed.

Something Isn't Working

Was inspired, today, when I came across this guy's blog article, called 'Seven Things I Did to Reboot My Life'.

He writes

'I had this epiphany at the beginning of September: This thing that I’m doing? This series of choices I make every day? It isn’t working. I don’t like the way I feel, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the things I’m doing. Things need to change.'

To be honest, I've been feeling a little bit that way. Pretty much since the PhD. Something isn't working, and something needs to change.

I'm off to plan my own personal life reboot.

http://wilwheaton.net/2015/10/seven-things-i-did-to-reboot-my-life/

Success

Recently, I came across an article by absolute genius and inspiration Matthew Weiner, the creator of ‘Mad Men’, in which he gives some very unusual advice about the nature of success.

I say ‘unusual’ because it isn’t often that a highly commercially-successful artist opens up about what a failure he felt he was, for a long time, all the way up until that first ‘success’. About just how long it is possible to be a ‘failure’ before you finally ‘make it.’

He is talking about ‘artists’, but he is also talking about writers – and that’s what we PhD students are. (And anyway, as you will know from a previous post, I would definitely file ‘writer of a PhD thesis’ under ‘Artist/ Bard’. And anyway, I think this advice applies to literally ANYONE.)

‘Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It’s called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don’t get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it’s easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone’s head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can’t do it like they thought it was done.’

Matthew Weiner is highlighting the gap between the initial idea and the finished product – and suggests that, because that gap is never visible in the finished thing, we tend to look at the works of people we admire and think ‘He/she just did that easily and all in one go. I’m trying to do something similar and it’s not working. Why is mine not working?...’

(It’s interesting, because I bet if anyone met me today, they would perhaps think ‘What a successful young person, what a nice life, and what a wonderful, creative job she has!’… Maybe they would think 'She has it easy.' And I think, if only you knew…)

And so I love it when Weiner says

‘An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes.’

'Hiding the brushstrokes' is something I think we academics do because it doesn't seem the 'done thing' to admit how awful you feel about yourself when you're trying (and failing) to write some PhD. (Can you imagine going to a job interview and cheerfully admitting to all the procrastinating you do every day?... Can you imagine the silence that would follow - broken only by the dropping of jaws and the flutter of raised eyebrows?...) (I can.)

So it is not necessarily that we hide our brushstrokes because we have pretensions to greatness and don't wish to be seen as anything less than 'gods'. We sometimes hide our brushstrokes because we assume that to even have those is somehow wrong; because we can't see anyone else's, and therefore think that our own imperfections are correspondingly huge. And because, in this competitive world, we want someone to hire us one day.

Furthermore, we've been taught to think that success will come if we just keep at it and give it enough time. But how much is enough time? And what to do when you just keep hitting dead ends? How much is enough?

This bit of Weiner’s article sounds familiar:

‘Upon graduation, I set up meetings everywhere in the hopes of getting a job. In three months I got nothing. I couldn’t even get a meeting with an agent.’

‘I got very bitter, seeing people I didn’t think deserved it succeed. It was a dark time. Show business looked so impenetrable that I eventually stopped writing. I began watching TV all day and lying about it. My mother would call me to drive my brother-in-law to the airport. That’s the kind of crap I was doing instead of being a writer. I felt like the most useless, worthless person in the world.’

You know that thing where you’re an academic, you’ve been earning rubbish money for years, and you’re approaching thirty/ you’re already over that hill, and you haven’t really started earning ‘proper money’ yet?... Of his first writing job, Weiner says,

‘It was my first paying job in show business and I was 30.’

He describes how he went on to write Mad Men and how it was a long, hard slog to get his own script accepted by a production company.

‘Mad Men had been bouncing around town for about four years and nobody wants something that has been rejected by everybody.

But then along came AMC. They were trying to make a splash and wanted to do something new. They were also interested in making a show they wanted to watch, which is really the secret of success in everything artistic. They basically said, "We love this thing and want to do it."’

And I love the next bit of the article, which is so true, and so useful to remember:

‘The greatest regret I have is that, early in my career, I showed myself such cruelty for not having accomplished anything significant. I spent so much time trying to write, but was paralyzed by how behind I felt. Many years later I realized that if I had written only a couple of pages a day, I would’ve written 500 pages at the end of a year (and that’s not even working weekends). Any contribution you make on a daily basis is fantastic. I still happen to write almost everything at once, but I now cut myself slack on all of the thinking and procrastination time I use. I know that it’s all part of my creative process.’

He doesn’t know that his advice is being read by struggling PhD students (and the odd struggling writer/artist…). Nor does he know that reading his article felt like pieces of a puzzle were falling into place in my head. Success doesn’t necessarily arrive gift-wrapped and handed to you in the first year after your graduation. Every single thing you touch does not immediately turn to gold. It’s OK to do a first draft of any project very, very badly, and it’s OK feel a bit crap if you haven’t yet achieved the thing you want to get finished – but don’t wallow in the crap feeling for too long. Be nice to yourself, and tell yourself nice things. And then get back to work.

In the words of my second supervisor,

‘Keep at it.’

And another thing: don’t hide the brushstrokes. Don’t feel like you are failing because the struggle is real and it is visible. Talk about it. Write about it. By talking about it, you set other people free to feel OK about their own wobbly path to ‘success’.

'It doesn't need to be perfect - it just needs to be done'

recently, i accomplished a small life dream: I sent an article to a website, and they published it.

I had sent them several things, including two articles that I had spent a lot of time on, one which had been in my head for about two years and which was therefore nicely developed, and a topical article which i dashed off quickly, in the middle of the night, and sent to them as an afterthought - and without editing it much. 

the one they chose to publish was that last one. the unedited one. the one written in a hurry. the one that wasn't lovingly polished and caressed and shaped and loved. 

...aaaargh!

Of course, now that the article is out there, i am torn between two things: I want to tell the world it is out there, and I want to email the editor and tell her to put in a thousand changes and corrections. because, as luck would have it, i have NOW thought of a thousand ways to improve it. 'Oooh, I could have put this… Ooooh, I could have added that… But I completely forgot to include my hilarious joke about Hitler and the nuclear bunker!'

There are two lessons to be gotten out of this, and the first one is: 

1) Always leave a week between writing something and hitting 'Publish'/ sending it to your supervisor, if you care about it reflecting your best work - because ideas will come to you, and you WILL be able to make it better. (if you don't care about it reflecting your best work, but you have something to say and want to get it out there immediately, then just hit 'Publish).

Which brings me to the next bit of advice and that is:

2) The fact that they chose the one that was the least polished/ edited/ loved, and yet they thought it was perfectly fine anyway, reinforces what we all know to be the First Law of PhD:

'It doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to be done'

(Anonymous)