Creativity: Daily Practice, or Fevered State?
I just came across the poem, "So You Want to be a Writer?" by Charles Bukowski - I love the urgency of this language:"unless it comes out ofI also love how the poem ends:
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it."
"when it is truly time,The intensity of the experience he's describing reminds me of his Beat buddy, Kerouac, who famously wrote:
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was."
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."And yet, as much as this intensity appeals to me - as much as it speaks to me, on some visceral level - I have to reject the notion that there's no point writing (let alone living) unless it's at this highest of pitches.
Writing is a practice: you show up on the page, every day, and are thankful for whatever comes. When I was younger, I only wrote when I was in a very particular inspired state - and I still treasure those moments. But I don't wait for them to appear, like magic - I call for them, every time I put pen to paper.
It's less dramatic, or romantic, but I believe it's the truth.
...and you?
posted by Amanda @ 8:59 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Love this post. The poem reminds me of how I feel about acting.
And I concur, there is a point to writing and performing even if you're not doing so at the pinnacle of achievement.
In some ways, I wish I was still in school. As an English major, I wrote all the time. I haven't done that for years, but I remember those magic moments of everything suddenly becoming very clear. Then the ideas poured out of my brain through my fingers and onto the page.
So interesting - I obviously perform too,and love it...and need it. But for me, this language is all about writing...
I think it's hubristic to declare "Writing is..." or insist "there is no other way". Hubris can produce damned good writing, but in reality, what a thing "is" is really very different for one than for another. Kerouac. Jane Austen. Which was the writer?
Then again, who knows, maybe Jane was mad and burned like fabulous roman candles. But is Amy Tan less of a writer than Anias Nin? Or Tolkien less than Kerouac?
Writing - in its artistic, rather than its utilitarian, form - is, like all art, a creature. It's creator forms it, and it "is" the child of its parent, whether a roman candle or wisp of smoke, or a deep-rooted tree. And, it can be all those things from a single person at various points in the person's life.
I think.
I don't know that Kerouac (whom I'm not a fan of) and Bukowski were saying that writers need to live hyper-intensively. I think they were trying to speak to the passion that writers and artists should bring to their work
I think writing is a practice certainly, but there is something else there, some mixture that makes a great writer someone who speaks across time versus someone who writes well but is forgotten. Maybe that "something" is a feverish persistence, or quiet dedication.
I love this piece on Jonah Lehrer's SEED blog (huge fan) about "Deliberate Practice." Turns out, cognitively speaking, one isn't born a great artist; they work it, for a long time. 10,000 hours to be precise - http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/07/deliberate_practice.php
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