a kick up the ass?

The wonderful Oliver Burkeman wrote a column in the Guardian two weeks ago about a new book on creativity called Do The Work (his column was originally entitled 'Do we need a kick up the ass'? but has changed online to 'Macho Creativity Advice'). 

The author of the book, Steven Pressfield, is apparently a former US Marine (he wrote an earlier book called The War Of Art) and his advice is that we need a kick up the ass: "get to the end as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with a pitchfork". 'The inner critic?', asks Burkeman, "His ass is not permitted in the building".

Burkeman goes on to discuss how Pressfield suggests that resistance can be proof that you're on the right track, which Burkeman basically agrees with, in the sense that ' (surely...) work that matters is always going to feel difficult'. But he questions whether it's useful to view creative work as a battle.

The one obvious truth about resistance that Pressfield seems to have missed is that if you go searching for it, armed to the teeth and looking for a fight, you'll certainly find it. Or, to drop the military imagery: convince yourself that your work is extremely important, that your life depends on it, is a way to generate fear, not conquer it.

He then argues convincingly that  it may be easier to outwit resistance by simple and dullish approaches such as making yourself stick to a writing schedule. This, he suggests, 'makes creativity non-intimidating, and thus makes creativity actually happen.'

It seems to me that both of these approaches might work. When you're through a block of some kind, you can look back and say to yourself, look, I only needed to get on and do it, it was so simple, really.... Retrospectively, kicking resistance's ass seems like a doable thing. Equally, setting yourself a simple schedule and sticking to it, once you're doing it, might also seem like a relatively straightforward answer (to the problem of not working).

The success of the first, though, might depend on how you respond to being harsh with yourself. Do you obey yourself, or find some way to  sidestep your own bullying? Perhaps you're sick of disciplining yourself, making yourself 'get on', or at least telling yourself that you should. Maybe there's enough compromising and carrying out of duties already, and your creativity is in fact wearily resisting your attempts to push it into the mould made by your moralising and 'should'ing. Given that it's probably trying to break you out of the box you've spent years creating for yourself, it makes sense that it isn't going to respond to your usual haranguing.

The second approach, being simple and systematic, doing a bit of something in a relatively structured way every day, can work very well. For a while. But I'm beginning to think that if you don't get into some of the deeper layers of your resistance, it's always going to resurface again soon enough. Take what happened to me this summer. My painting seemed to have broken through, to have gained momentum and to be beginning to take shape without me fussing and worrying and not doing. Then I lost my workspace for a month. And by the end of that month, everything had dried up again. No matter how much I told myself that I could just go with the flow, that not everything could be controlled, that I could work as well in other spaces and on a smaller scale....the loss of that carefully constructed environment, within which something fragile had started to emerge, stopped  that subtle emergence dead in its tracks.

The problem with both bullying and scheduling seems to me to be that both are dealing with a kind of surface behaviour or attitude. 'Get on, twitface!'. 'Sit down now, do as you planned!'. However much my mind says to my being as a whole that it really is quite simple, deeper parts of myself often don't seem to agree. By definition, those deeper parts (as Meg Rosoff was discussing) are things that my mind cannot see, and they are well used to sidestepping my will and intentions.

Let's take the idea of 'the critic' as an oversimplified shorthand for some of these deeper/hidden aspects. I knew all about my critic, in principle, before I did the Authentic Artist workshop. But I was quite unable to see how pervasive she was, or to recognise her subtleties. I'm so used to myself that her blocking actions are as comfortable as old shoes. And whether I shout at myself or try to impose rigid structures onto my time, until I learn how to see what is hidden from me, for every one time I think I've caught her in action, there will be twenty that I was quite unaware of.

This is one of the reasons that the workshop was so transformational. As long as I'm only talking to myself, I can't see a damn thing. When I tried to do my work in front of others, though, well... A thousand hidden children came tumbling out onto the floor, some crying, some laughing, some whooping, some covered in shame. Then I started to see some of what was stopping me from working. How I had been treating myself, and all those children, for so many years.

In this context, the simple idea of 'respond to whatever comes into my channel without pause or comment' emerged within me as a guiding idea which could begin to move me forward. It's not important because, as an idea, it's any more profound than 'kick yourself up the ass' or 'sit down to write now'. It's important because it surfaced within me from layers and layers and layers that I had been unable to see on my own. It means something to me, and means nothing outside of that. 

Perhaps that's the problem with all these books and attempts to make general comments about creativity and blocks. There's no way out except by finding your own inner worm, and feeling and watching as that worm begins to chomp its way through things you had no idea were living down there...