making

There’s a great quote that starts one of my favorite books about the artistic process – Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland – that goes like this:

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

– Gene Fowler

The book is a pretty straightforward and unsentimental view about art making. It talks about how much of your output will be ignored (“Virtually all artists spend some of their time – and some artists spend virtually all their time – producing work that no one much cares about”) and the various ways we set ourselves up for self-sabotage. What this book also says is that the only way to get better at making work is to make a lot of work. As they say, much of your output is there simply to “teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

I like the idea that when I make crap, it’s not just crap, but crap that builds a bridge towards something else that is not crap. Then at least the crap is useful. And I need that crap to feel useful. Why?

Because I live, work and create in a shame-based economy.

It might not seem like it from the outside, but if I’m really being truthful, most of what I do is to avoid the pain of looking like an idiot. That awesome rehearsal plan didn’t just spring happily from my mind. It took the spectral terror of being left with nothing substantive to say in front of the room to make it come into focus.

People have asked me why this writing project was something I wanted to make public. I might, if I’m being cagey, tell you that I sensed a lot of people were feeling the same way I was.

True. But not actually the truth.

I do appreciate the people who’ve responded to what I’ve written. And I love hearing from you all that these struggles are shared. But the real reason I am writing publically is to shame myself into getting my ass in gear to put words on (virtual) paper on a regular basis.

I do things like this when I know I need a kick in the ass. When I decided I had to leave my day job at NBOME, I wrote a post-it that I affixed to my computer with the date. I gave myself one year from that post it to get out of that job. And then I told everyone I knew about it.

Why? Because, like I said, I live work and create in a shame-based economy. I knew if I kept telling people about the post-it, people would remember to ask me about it. And when those people asked me about, that feeling that I might not get it together to find some other, more sanity inducing, way to make money would surface. I did get nervous that I would disappoint, and I figured out a way to make life happen without the work that was making me miserable. And 4 months before the post-it deadline I left.

If I know that someone will think less of me, if I think that someone will perceive me as failing, I work harder. It’s why I love structure and clear evaluative systems. It’s easy to know if you’re staying ahead of the curve if it’s clear what wrong looks like. I spent a lot of my education in high shame-potential situations. I committed to more than seemed possible. I tried things that I saw other people do a lot better than I did and then held myself to their standards. Once in a while I felt a little insane. I beat myself up about stuff a lot. I was also really productive and found myself doing things I never knew I was capable of.

You might say that this is unhealthy. You might be right. Heck for a really long time I felt a lot of shame about feeling so much shame. That’s how deep it goes.

So for a period of time after school I worked really hard to remove all the shame inducing motivators and gave myself huge swaths of freedom for my art to wander through. I stopped comparing myself to people who had more advantage or resource. I kept things a little closer to the chest so that stuff couldn’t be critiqued until I decided it was ready. I wanted to give my art room to blossom on it’s own, without that fear of failure looming over me.

And while I was in the middle of doing that I noticed something:

I wasn’t making or doing anything I cared about.

I had tried to force myself into a place where I acted as if I didn’t need to care or listen to that niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach when I didn’t do anything creative for a few days. I had convinced myself that the ambition and failure terror weren’t linked. And I was semi-successful for a little while. Until I looked at what a life without one of my biggest motivators actually left me. And that was something I wasn’t really all that excited about.

And then I started to feel bad about that.

Oh, old friends embarrassment and remorse, you’re back! How I missed you so.

I’ve come to terms with regret and shame as ways that I learn from my past mistakes. Just as the impulse to jump too deep into the pleasure pool can get one’s life off track, so similarly can overwhelming feelings of mortification cause one to block their creative selves. But no one sane advocates for the removal of all of life’s pleasures. So maybe we can leave a little room for the negative emotions, so long as they help us get where we’re going.

Thinking about this I recall a thing that I always tell my students when they first start working on their voice. I say that there is no such thing as a “bad” voice, only voices that do what you need them to, and voices that don’t. The voices they have were developed from a style and set of communication patterns that helped them, at some point, achieve something.

High pitched and squeaky? Maybe it helps you to sound small and cute.

Low and monotone? Perhaps you need to show the people around you that you have emotional control.

The point, as I tell them, is that these patterns emerge when doing these things a lot offers some kind of reward. It’s efficient. And there’s nothing wrong with a sound if it’s doing what you need it to. The pattern only becomes a problem, only gets called a bad habit, when you decide you want something and the voice you have gets in the way of doing that. When the natural voice you have developed is something you can no longer control the way you want to. Flexibility is the key.

Whether it works for you is what actually matters.

“Ugly” voices aren’t bad if they’re useful. I think “ugly” feelings can be viewed the same way. Some of my best work has come to me when I have felt my worst. Which is different than saying that I need to feel at my worst to get anything done. For as long as I can remember, shame has been a strong motivator. Sometimes towards good things and sometimes not.

So the question isn’t, “Can I remove shame from my life entirely?” because from what I’ve lived so far, the answer will be no. Instead:

How do I use and shape the natural impulses I can’t always control towards a healthy and productive life?

There’s another saying in the Art and Fear book that I really love:

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

– Stephen DeStaebler

I write this blog knowing that other eyes will see it.

Because I want to be culpable.

Because I want to be exposed.

Because I want to increase the pain of not working.

It’s already worked, clearly, because I’m still here.

Can I admit something?

When I was in middle and high school I used to want to cry when I saw Country Time Lemonade commercials. Little Debbie sometimes also got to me.

There was a long time when I couldn’t really articulate why. But every time that farmhouse with the grandfather and little kid sitting on the porch staring off into the sunset came on, I’d start to well up. They’d stare out into the sunset drinking from that frosty yellow glass and I’d start to get this panicky feeling like I was losing something. This anxiety would rise from my stomach into the back of my throat until I could actually taste the lump like acid.

Those commercials are intended to elicit a false nostalgia to make one wistful. Ostensibly we could catch a glimpse of the former simpler time by buying some over-sweet juice mix. I saw that purpose behind the scene played out. I knew what they were doing with that lens fuzziness and sad music. Still, it just made me sad. Really really sad.

If you asked me why I was upset I would say, “It’s Sunday afternoon. That commercial just makes me think of Sunday afternoon.”

I don’t know that anyone in the commercials explicitly says that the long angle sunlight porch sitting is taking place on Sunday, but in my heart I knew it must be true. It just felt like a Sunday, knowing that this moment couldn’t last, that everything was about to change. And not simply any Sunday – end of the summer Sunday, Sunday just before school starts.

This is what Country Time was doing: Making me face the end of potentiality. To confront the idea of perfection with the reality of what actually is.

If you’re thinking, “What are you talking about?” let me put it this way:

Friday afternoon has always been a symbol of everything in life that is possible. On Friday afternoon in high school, one could feel the tangible finish of a long week’s work. One had earned the right for mystery and intrigue of the weekend. Friday night held the possibility of infinity potential energy. In those intervening days before Monday morning, I might create an amazing piece of artwork, I might get far ahead on my studies, I might go on an adventure with friends that I would never forget. I dreamed about Fridays because I loved the idea of standing at the precipice. It was the blank canvas about to be brushed with the very first stroke of paint.

On Friday evening ANYTHING was possible and in a strange way, imagining all that potential it almost seemed like ALL of them might be achievable. I didn’t really even need to do any thing, I just liked the idea that I could.

Sunday is the opposite of Friday. Friday is the promise of perfection. Sunday is always a let down. Sunday is the time when you look back at the weekend and compare what has happened to what might have been. It’s a bit of an impossible demand on Sunday to live up to all those Friday maybes, but I did it nonetheless. It was a rare Sunday afternoon that I took stock of the rehearsal, family outing, or friend hang out that I’d taken part in and found it to be as big and full as the mirage that Friday had dangled in front of me.

Sunday afternoon is especially desperate. Unlike the evening when one has finally acquiesced to buckling down and working on through to next Friday, Sunday afternoon one can’t quite let go of the weekend. It is like the last ravioli in what was once a beautifully full bowl of delicious pasta. There’s so little left of what you once had, and once you take this last bite, it’s all over. Sunday afternoon still leaves me staring at a pile of work left undone, knowing that it must be finished in the next few hours, and resenting it for jailing the last remaining freedom that the weekend holds.

That Country Time commercial made me cry because I felt that is said this: Life ahead is a promise of infinite potential. Life lived is an unsatisfying catalogue of the actual work that one has gotten down and done. It made me confront my mortality. It made me feel small. It made me imagine that I could do many things, but I couldn’t do all of them, and I probably would do many of them imperfectly.

As a product of German and Scandinavian heritage, one thing that both of my ancestors share is a drive to work hard and be productive. There are few aspects of a Midwestern upbringing that I can specifically point to as an obvious influence on my art making, but this one I know:

I need to feel like I’m making progress.

I need to believe that hard work will make me better.

I want to have done a job to the best of my ability. I want to feel that I have made good use of my time and that I’ve been productive. In friendship, in artistic work, in love, I want to be moving forward. And to move forward with progress one needs to believe their best work is still in front of them.

But is it? Is the best yet to come? Or am I sitting on a porch with grandpa?

I know that sounds melodramatic. But I do think that my most radical notions, my most openness to truly new ways of thinking feel like they are harder to hold onto as I age. I fight it. Hard. I consider and weigh these questions often and to me it is the way I make sure I am still doing the hard work. But some days it just feels like the potential energy of my earliest questions about theater are slowly dissipating with time. It feels like I need another height to lift it up to.

It feels like I need another Friday.

Is that a new art form entirely? Is it throwing away most of what I know about how I do things? Is it picking up a new canvas so that I have to start over?

I don’t know. But I want it.

I want it badly.

Owning It

Potential Energy