They say that the healthy man wants a million things, the unhealthy man wants only one. The thing I want most in the world right now is creative finesse, by which I mean finesse with my own creative process.
I’ve slept about 3 hours at the time of this writing. That’s not a lot of sleep. I woke up with a dream of my teeth falling out. Some people get that dream a lot. I think it’s only the second time I remember having this dream. And it felt satisfying, in a way. I was glad to be rid of my oppressive fuckin’ teeth, crowding my skull, taking up space, getting in the way of everything.
I had 3 coffees and a Red Bull yesterday. Not a great sign. Stimulants are a sign I’m trying to prop myself up. When things are going great, sometimes the idea itself is the stimulant. Sometimes I’ve leapt out of bed to pursue an idea that wouldn’t let me rest until it was done. I haven’t felt that way in a while. My ideas haven’t let me rest, but it feels like they’re taunting me, testing me, mocking me. But is it really the ideas? Or is it my ego? It’s probably my ego. The cliche that likely applies here is that it’s my demand for control that’s keeping me up. Is it so unreasonable though, to ask for a little control, over my own life? Ah, young man, but is it control over your own life you seek? Or power and influence and the adoration of others? Alright, fine, I’ll admit to having desired all of those things. I’ll probably desire them again, too. But in the meantime if I have to choose between the treasure and my sanity, I choose my sanity. And this is the part where I find that my sanity was the real treasure all along, right? Right?
A while ago I wrote I Don’t Wanna, which was about not wanting to publish anything…
I suppose this might be a counterpoint to that: But I Gotta. I gotta publish something. And here I pause to ask myself: do I REALLY gotta? Well, I gotta publish the way some people say they gotta breakup with their partner or quit their jobs. I gotta publish something because it’s ruining my sleep.
I don’t like being too dramatic but I feel like I haven’t slept well for a year. And the primary thing in the way is this creative struggle.
I know there are diagnostic questions to ask. I help other people with this all the time. Why not just publish some simple stupid bullshit? Yes, I am going to, this is it. Could you try addressing this problem by reframing it entirely? Ie, is it really a publishing problem? Could you do something else that will give you the gift of sleep? Maybe, but I think it is exceedingly unlikely.
I was rereading a bit of Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art and was struck by a story of how he had been feeling miserable for 10 days, not doing the dishes, until he pulled out his typewriter and wrote for 2 hours. He threw that output straight in the wastepaper basket and nevertheless his mood lifted. I want that for myself right now.
I felt a version of it yesterday. I woke up at 7am, quite fresh, and I wrote for hours. At the time it seemed great, but as I continued throughout the day, it started to fragment. I don’t particularly mind fragmented writing if it’s resonant. (I have a whole separate thing to write about working with fragments.) But strangely, resonance for me is a fleeting, shimmering thing. What seems resonant for me one day can be totally dull the next, if I don’t manage to capture the full essence of what was compelling about an idea.
Gotta let the idea drive. Dave and Jerry are right about that. So what’s the idea here? The idea is that I should be able to buy myself some time, some sanity, some rest, from going meta and writing about my creative process- which is a thing that, a few months ago, I didn’t want to do. because it’s particularly navel-gazey? I’ve never particularly liked that expression. It just felt “too soon” at the time, it felt like I had “more important” things to write about… no, I wouldn’t stand by that claim. It’s not that something is more or less important. I guess I just wanted to be careful not to spend too much time writing about writing. I do have loads of things I want to write about, and have attempted to write about, shabbily contained in a vast junkyard of misshapen eldritch horrors.
I believe that it is important to respect the self-logic of one’s creative process. And that’s what I mean by creative finesse. The phrase “self-logic” comes from a translator’s note that I’ve been referencing for years….
Sometimes I wake up and I want to do X. Sometimes I wake up and I want to do Y. Sometimes halfway through doing X or Y, I want to do Z. A part of me hears that and feels compelled to blurt out, “I know that sounds chaotic, disordered, ill-disciplined!” And you know what, I am indeed all of those things. And sometimes I do need discipline to rein things in. But I have also fallen into the trap of overthinking my work, such that I neglect to feel my work. And when my work has no feeling, it doesn’t work. It’s just a bunch of the wrong words, piled up like a major traffic accident clogging up a highway.
I find it necessary to pause and ask myself what am I really doing here. In every sense- here in this document, here on my phone, here pacing my house at 6 in the morning, here in my creative journey, here in my substack. I have a vision for Voltaic Verses. I remind myself that I have a choice. I can abandon that dream. There is no shame or dishonor in that. I can return it to the roiling store of ideas, and perhaps revisit it when its time comes, years or decades from now. Perhaps then it will return in some completely different form, maybe not even as a work itself, but as the torment of some character in a work of fiction. I could do something else instead.
I sit with it that possibility a while. I feel a No. I will be making a breakthrough here, sooner or later. I feel it in my body. The whole thing is like a kung fu movie kicking my ass.
The point of this post is to describe things. Maybe the point of all of Voltaic Verses is to describe things, but I shouldn’t go that far that quickly. The reason Voltaic is taking so long os that I am trying to do many different things with it all flag once. That’s a complicated and difficult business. I have most certainly bitten off more than I can chew. But that too is part of the self-logic of my creative process. I don’t like to work on problems that I don’t feel challenged by. I probably ought to learn to pick slightly less overwhelming challenges, but it’s tricky because anything seems equally possible when you’re dreaming. But hopefully this is something my future self will figure out.
What are all the things I’m trying to do? I have a bunch of good prompts and titles I’m sitting on, and I’d like to do them justice. I’d like to describe things.
(What would my past self want to know? Sometimes people say things like “oh I wouldn’t say anything to my past self” which is charming. But I remember my young self. He was always eager to hear from older versions of himself, and he would certainly have questions for me. And I’d have questions for him too.)
Describe things. I want to be helpful to people but I also don’t. I suppose right now I want to be helpful to myself. I can’t help other people if I’m in the state that I’m currently in- disoriented, overwhelmed, exhausted. I’m looking for clarity. I’m looking for resonance. What is clear? What resonates? Sometimes I love hearing feedback from people, sometimes I don’t wanna hear it- because I’m trying to respect the self-logic of my creative process. The most important thing about creativity, if I know anything at all, is that you have to find the joy in it. Even if you’re feeling like absolute shit. I’m not in a great place right now while I write this, but it is far from the worst place I’ve been emotionally, psychologically. There is some joy in knowing that, even if it’s not exactly the most ecstatic of joys. There is comfort in the knowledge that I’ve been through worse and that I have within me the tools, the skills, the spirit required to survive. I’ve survived this far and I intend to survive for quite a bit longer.
I can talk about the specifics of my creative process. It usually starts with a thought, or a feeling, or a question. There’s something I want to work through, or make sense of. Sometimes the question is clear, distinct- especially when it arises in conversation with someone. Sometimes it’s murky, which is more challenging- here often I’ve come to think that it’s best to talk it out, to find a “people-shaped” framing of the idea. Sometimes I have a concept, or a frame, a point of view, a suspicion, a belief, and I have to sit with it for a long time for it to reveal why it’s compelling to me. I do believe in navigating by interestingness, which involves asking a lot of questions. Why this? What’s compelling about this? Often that’s helpful, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I just have to blindly experiment with throwing out words in an associative way to see what sticks. I mainly rely on experience here- I have a moderately long history of working with words and ideas, and when it’s going well, I don’t have to consciously intervene. I almost just sit back and let my fingers do the work. I only need to witness it. More recently I’ve also sometimes done this with speech, recording videos of myself talking through a problem or a challenge. It can be a whole body experience, similar in spirit to what is described in Gendlin’s Focusing. I feel through the words and their associated meanings. Sometimes if I’m stuck and self-aware enough to notice that I need help, I might reference some material. I do have a vast library of material in my memory of all the things that have ever moved me.
Most of what I’ve described here is the early stage of my creative process, the genesis. It can be anarchic, free-form, improvisational. Whatever comes up, anything goes. Sometimes I have specific references I want to use. With my substack, I have a collection of images that I’ve stored that I’d like to use as header images, because they fit the vibe of what I’m going for. Sometimes I have ideas for posts that reference existing media. I have a draft titled “luck-maxxing” that opens with Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. Another is titled “Get your motor runnin’”, based on Steppenwolf’s Born To Be Wild. I have a whole playlist of songs that I think I might plausibly reference. Then there’s movies and games. It’s a lot of material, I could spend days just walking through them, touching everything, going off on tangential explorations. All of that tends to feel somewhat silly, but as I write this I know in my heart that that’s where the actual work is done. By the time I put words on a page, I’m already drawing from years of exploration. People have remarked at my ability to synthesize seemingly disparate things. My wife pointed out with amusement that in an old post about fashion, I wrote about the Pope, the Queen, Singapore Airlines stewardesses, Aishwarya Rai. That’s how I like to roll.
A tricky thing to navigate is that sometimes what seems like a good idea, doesn’t have a lot of resonance past the premise, at least not in at the moment. If it’s not working, I know I ought to shelve it and try something else. But I’m not as good as I’d like to be at shelving ideas. I seem to prefer to work with all of my drafts and notes in a big pile in my psychological workspace. I’m not sure if deleting things would bring much relief– but I do know that I have a flinching aversion to deleting things, because I did a big purge many years ago and I still regret it.
I know that one of the things I want to do is write about culture. I want to write histories. I’m tired of writing about the same old things. I’m sure I’ll be interested in them again someday, but a big theme of my current relearning, rediscovery…