Sunday, August 1, 2021

I talked to two friends recently. Without airing dirty laundry, both don't feel like writing. And, to air dirty laundry, the list of creatives I talk to who don't feel like being creative is staggeringly high. If the percentage of artists, writers, and musicians who didn't want to "art, write, or music" was mirrored in every field, we likely wouldn't have hospitals, or department stores, or like, anything we too-often take for granted.

Actually, that's not true. Let me fix it.

If the number of creatives whose unwillingness preventing them from producing creative work was mirrored, then we wouldn't have all those things we take for granted.

But that's a rather dry way to look at things. Unfair. Inhumane. People aren't cattle that drive themselves. You can't just decide to rule yourself--the rebel in you would stage a revolt against the tyrannical unfairness that you impose on yourself.

**

"You never listen to me and you work me like a slave, so 'no!' We will not be writing no matter how much we force or guilt ourselves. In fact, your insistence on using will power to force me into being productive is toxic and rude. We will instead tune in to our favorite Twitch streamer and distract ourselves with porn. Down with the Autocracy!"--

--in the most literal sense, too. "Autocracy". The Governance of "auto-", or, of "oneself".

Sincerely,

--the "you" that you force to do stuff when "you" decide that "you" aren't being productive enough.

**

We are remarkably out of our own control. We do little of what we tell ourselves to do. We do more of what we tell ourselves not to do. And we do even more of what we actually have relinquished control of than anything else.

This is troubling for people who want to "make progress" because if we aren't behind the wheel, we can't tell ourselves where to go.

We're like kids at the Nintendo Switch display at Best Buy, thumbing the controllers and watching the beautiful scenery on the fancy UHD monitor, only to realize that the "game" we were playing was a trailer, that the controller wasn't plugged in, and that the experience we thought we had a hand in producing was put together months in advance by a team of professionals at some office thousands of miles away.

Try to feel motivated after that. Try feeling that sense of progress, then. It just doesn't happen.

So we use our will power to become tyrants and force ourselves to produce something that passes as creative productivity, then we rebel against ourselves by feeling unmotivated. It's as if the part of me that can use will power is at odds with the other part of me that wants freedom, exploration, creativity, and leisure.

(I promise, I'm only a little schizophrenic--no more than anyone else. You can ask the other five Saints that live in my head. They all agree with me.

So.

How do you progress even when you don't feel progress?

That's, actually, the good news: we aren't in control of everything, and things just sort of work out in the end.

Some ancient biological motivations coded into my genetics is able to functions whether or not I write, or produce, or create. I blink and breathe and passively perceive the world around me without giving myself permission. Like playing a clicker game, once you get the "auto-clicker", you just sort of watch the numbers go up and use those numbers to invest in better auto-clickers--and cute cosmetics, like clickers that look like penguins.

Likewise, I'm a creative person. Sometimes, ideas come to me that I didn't give permission to come to me. Stephen King calls this phenomena "the boys in the basement"--the subconscious mind working beside, and in spite of, the conscious mind. This process happens automatically, like when we imagine horrible things happening to people who cut us off in traffic, or when a line of a song sticks in our head, or that one time a year you get a story idea that just needs to be written down.

If you aren't a creative, perhaps you sometimes get a business intuition that just works. Perhaps you're a programmer and pattern recognition just "tells you" where something is wrong. Maybe you're so damned good with people that you can "read" them.

(I like writing these sorts of people because it's foreign and magical how some humans seem to "know" me without ever having talked to me. To them, it's unconscious intuition just like, to me, other things are unconscious intuition).

Some stuff is automatic--but not like magic or divine automation. More like blinking and breathing, which are functions of the mind that are regulated somewhere that is thoroughly physical and complexly biological, but no less invisible and incalculable to those of us who are trapped inside a single consciousness.

Which, by the way, isn't unlike a god, exactly--or a spirit, or muse, or ghost. What else does one call a process we can't observe but can still experience? How the hell can our conscious both forget and then remember something--like there are parts of us that are, at times, inaccessible? How can we be blind to some significant part of our own brilliance? And then, how can we miraculously have our eyes opened to it again? Who is it doing the opening and the closing? It ain't us, that's for sure. If it were, we could will our remembrance and never have our memories or instincts "jogged" by outside forces.

Instead, it's as if there are files on our computers that are only accessible if special conditions are met, conditions we can only guess at.

That's a pretty cool story idea, actually: a computer or phone with apps or programs only accessible when the person to whom they belong is unconscious. What if they are cool apps that make us smarter? What if there were a friend or robot or assistant that we could have control the apps?

What if the app could make boobies bigger? BAM! Look out for THAT quickie, lol.

Thanks invisible, incalculable creative subconscious!

Anyway. . .

I think progress is automatic. It just happens. It's a natural process that escapes our conscious mind. None of us can will it, like we can't will an apple to grow any faster. We also can't really calculate it, just like how we can't exactly tell when an apple has achieved its appropriate size for picking.

Except, replace "apple" with "creative knowledge" or "skill".

And to our consciousness, whose main resource is "will power" with which we force ourselves to do things, the idea of something that is neither measurable nor controllable is scary. It's also worthless--because if you don't know the function of something, it's pragmatically useless to you.

And there's no point in allocating resources to it. No reason to feel a motivation toward it.

No point in "feeling motivated" since progress isn't in our control.

I'll close where I began: in a conversation with these two friends.

The second friend actually decided to write anyway, in spite of not feeling like it or having a good idea. They ended up writing a decent chunk of a story and learning what direction they wanted to take it in. This is a prime example of us not being conscious of how much we know. We're often far more creative and resourceful than we can estimate. Sometimes, just committing to the action is most important, because when the question stops being "should I write?" and starts being "what will I write?", the ideas start to pop up out of necessity.

The first, however, is still struggling. And I don't want this journal to sound like I blame them. If anything, their reaction is deeply, thoroughly, uncomfortably human. It's the struggle that sits next to me as I write this, the one that waits for me to finish, that lodges itself between the last punctuation of this journal and the next capital letter of my next story and expands, both tall and wide, until I can't see what happens next.

It's not just theirs. It's everyone's. And if you've never created or if you've been creating for years, the struggle of acting on blind-ass faith and finding a way to write even with nothing to say is not only difficult but frowned upon and discouraged.

There are enough people online that say too much when they have nothing to contribute. Fear of becoming one of them is valid.

But it is also toxic. It's lethal.

And perhaps the offer of a manicured, curated gallery full of only the things you wanted to write in exactly the format you'd like them is worth it to some, but my experience has been the contrary:

That art is messy and full of the unexpected and something about that is beautiful, even as it disgusts and evokes anxiety in me. My gallery is full of my explorations of what creativity meant to me, which means, like any relationship, it has its fuck-ups and triumphs.

Creativity is an act of faith--not to a god, but to a process. I don't worry that the next breath won't come. It just does. It's always right there. Likewise, I don't worry so much where the story ideas will come from because, as I'm writing one that I'm not all that jazzed about, another inevitably pops up.

Writing without an idea is a prayer, but I've always found the prayer answered--for me. Whatever your "writing" is--business, communication, coding, gaming, finance, cleaning, culinary, design--I encourage you to act on faith.

And here's the tl;dr:

Bad news: We aren't always able to have a sense of progress.

Badder news: We don't know how we managed to get to such a state.

Good-ish news: Not knowing how we manage to do things while doing them is, like, ninety-percent of human endeavors.

See you guys next week,

Saint