To where you once belonged

I’ve spent a lot of this year writing, in an attempt to live more of the creative life that I want. I’ve been using Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way as a kind of spiritual aid for the past eleven weeks and the program wraps up with this week’s chapter. It’s an excellent program—I think she has a lot of extremely useful ways of helping people find their lost creativity. A lot of the book itself, though, has taken a back seat to the main practice it relies on, the Morning Pages. Every day, I’ve woken up early and written three long-hand pages about literally whatever my mind comes up with in the moment. The sensible advice and exercises in the book are useful, but the Morning Pages have even more power—I don’t see myself dropping the practice.

My simple revelation this year has been that, if I can get myself to the page, I can write. That knowledge alone has been a huge inspiration, once it was kicked off last spring by my writing of the draft of Bicentennial. After that experience, I saw that sitting down to write could happen just about any time, with a minimum of effort, as long as I would put in that minimal effort of opening the page in front of me. Since then I have struggled to write from time to time, but still managed to keep it up—but once I started The Artist’s Way, the struggle has been far less difficult. It has come to seem like what I do and I am excited to continue.

The Morning Pages work well for me because they are a discipline first, an expression second. Some days it’s hard to get through, some days it flows, but in either case it has the effect of tidying my mind for the day’s tasks. I’ve used the Pages as a diary, as a stream of consciousness dump, as a place to work out difficulties in the current story—and most importantly as a self pep talk. Like many creative people, I have doubts and anxieties that can sometimes be overwhelming. Even when I can manage, at times my self-talk—the negative internal voice that I call The Beast with Teeth—puts an end to any hope of creating. But the Morning Pages allow me to hear those voices and calmly refute them. To tell myself, every day, that everything is okay and I can simply do the work and don’t have to worry about all the questions. Simply having that “discussion” with myself in the Pages, if that’s what I need on a given day, goes so far toward eliminating the self-talk for the day that I don’t even think about it much.

The process has helped me get back to a place in my life I thought I might never see again—the kind of low-pressure, creative writing I did as a child, before it even occurred to me to ask whether it was “good.” But more than that—I get back to that place of creation, but as an adult who also has some perspective, experience and artistic sensibility. I’m much less likely to worry about quality and much more able to just create—I can worry about whether it’s good later, after second and third drafts, but now it’s almost a miracle that it’s on the page at all. And it feels great. Precarious, but great.

I finally read Stephen King’s On Writing. I had it on my shelf, but kept away from it because I worried that it would make me feel like I couldn’t do it. This is odd, because for nearly the last decade I’ve been reading King for the first time and its been that experience itself that made me feel like I could write, maybe. King writes the way I’ve always wanted to—in a wildly imaginative, but straightforward way, not in a realm of “I’ll never be like that” literature but in the realm of “this is what it looks like if you just get over yourself and write.” Not that I hope for his success. But reading him, more than any other author, has made it feel possible.

But, as I started writing again this year, I was worried that I’d read On Writing and that, instead of that feeling of possibility, King would reveal why it was, in fact, too difficult after all. I didn’t think that consciously, mind you. But I was maybe also worried I’d find out I’d been doing things wrong and hadn’t actually made progress. Then I read it and it validated most of the things I’ve already been doing on my own. By the time I read it, I didn’t need it—but I appreciated it. Hearing about his struggles—throughout his entire career—was bracing, both in terms of looking out for my personal crutches (drink and drugs, like SK) and simply acknowledging that the most important thing is to just do it, any which way I can.

Then, toward the end of the process with The Artist’s Way, I’ve recently watched Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, Get Back. For this film, Jackson took Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary footage, which became the 1970 movie Let It Be, and re-worked it into a nearly 8 hour, three-part series. It’s an epic sprawl of a documentary, which is a verite document of the Beatles’ whirlwind recording of the album that became Let It Be.

Is it too long? From a certain perspective, absolutely it is, in typical Peter Jackson style. There is a three hour version of this, that could probably also present what Jackson wanted to present, in much less detail, that would be wonderful for a general audience. This Get Back is for fans—and, as a big fan, a big, big fan who has sung and played Beatles songs for years and loves seeing them on screen and even has a son named Harrison, it’s exhilarating and, for long stretches, sublime. (The utter joy of the rooftop performance, their final public performance as a band, is transcendent after watching the struggle to get there.)

There’s a lot to say about the film, somewhere else perhaps; I just wanted to point to it as an incredibly inspiring film for people like me who are struggling to live a creative life. Each member of The Beatles was a very talented musician and brought something crucial to the group. Together, they were even greater than the sum of their parts. But they were also young men, who were human beings, who nurtured their talent from a very young age and then worked very hard to bring their art to fruition.

In the doc, we see Paul—in a clip that went immediately viral—conjure the song Get Back seemingly out of thin air during some down time in the studio. It’s staggering. But then we see him, and the other Beatles, develop the song together over many hours—the miracle of the conjuring is something to see, but it’s clearly shown to underscore that he didn’t have Get Back fully formed in seconds, because that’s not how creativity works. There’s this initial inspiration, a spark, and it may be a thing of beauty—but no one will ever know if you don’t do the work of making it real. We see this again and again in the film. At one point, Paul is frustrated at the group about another song—he thinks it should go a certain way, and they’re not sold on it. What’s funny is, we know the song and we know the way McCartney was doing it then was not the way the song would eventually go.

In other words, his frustration in that moment later yielded to someone else’s inspiration and that’s where the song really came from. Jackson leaves in the frustration, and the boredom, and the goofing around, to show us that you have to go through all of this to come out the other side. It’s a different view of the artistic process than we often see and almost sacrilegious in its swatting away of the cliches of the Great Man theory.

For me it was just more evidence that I’m on the right path—I’m doing the work. There’s no magic—maybe some talent—but mostly just the doing.