On Creativity April 17, 2011

I have been thinking a lot about creativity this week. It all started when I saw the documentary Bill Cunningham New York. Bill is the man behind the NY Times Style Section “On The Street” column which is where I knew him from. But really, he is much more: an international photographic celebrity who can spot trends like nobody else. And also he is the hardest working artist I have ever seen. He is completely devoted to his craft, riding his bike around Manhattan in a Parisian Street Cleaner’s smock and he lives entirely for and among his work–his apartment is floor to ceiling filing cabinets containing the negatives of every photo he’s ever snapped. What’s amazing about Bill is that despite the fact that there are those who think he is “the most important person in the world” (this is what’s said about him outside of a Paris fashion show) and he clearly knows that what he does is unique, that his eye is really perfect, he is also unassuming, humble and understated. He’s sacrificed everything for his work and literally cares only about capturing beauty on film.

The obsessiveness. The perfectionism. The sacrifice. And also the lack of judgement (of others, not of himself, of himself he is intensely judgemental) that he exhibits. These are things that I really admire. They are also qualities that I aspire to in myself that I can’t always quite achieve. The ability to say “No, I need to stay in and write today” the ability to keep going until the right thing happens instead of giving up or getting frustrated. I dream of being like that.

These topics have come up in various ways in other things I read this week as well. This interview with the fantastic writer and teacher Sigrid Nunez about her time working with Susan Sontag…where she talks about Susan’s voraciousness for everything…not just writing. She says “In those days Susan’s habit was to clear out big chunks of time and write around the clock, often taking Dexedrine. She didn’t have a daily routine. She wasn’t able to write every day; there were just too many other things she wanted to do besides write…She would have needed more than one life to do all the things she wanted to do, and was capable of doing.” In some ways Susan appears to be the other side of the spectrum from Bill…she wrote in so many mediums, so many genres, she was both novelist and cultural critic.” What is interesting about Sigrid’s commentary on this time, however, is that it was all too noisy for HER to get anything done. She needed silence. And Susan’s life deleted any space for Sigrid’s.

There’s also this piece from Dani Shapiro that Amanda sent me in which she talks about writing as a “courtship” of your demons rather than an “exorcism” of them. I think this is very important…novel writing is not “journaling” (a word that I DETEST). It is a craft. It is structure and thought and planning and building. It is not just feeling. It is not “real life” tricked out on the page.

As an antidote to all of this sunny positive creativity talk, however, is the essay by Jonathan Franzen in the most recent New Yorker, about solitude, Robinson Crusoe, an island called Masafuera, and David Foster Wallace. There is a sadness to this essay–about a desire for solitude that turns frightening, about a fear of mental illness, about a dangerous striving. Franzen writes, “Even though David laughed at my much  milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn’t even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and the solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his.”

What all of this tells me is that there is no recipe for creating your art. Nobody is the same. And really, if we were all sane, we would just buy shoes and makeup and forget about the nonsense that is art. And yet, for whatever reason, we are compelled. Some days I don’t feel compelled. But some days I do. And so, I will continue to toil. Doing what I need to do to create something. Right now it involves writing in a notebook and then transcribing into my computer (which is exhausting). Next week it might be different. Once, my friend Joel could only write in his shower. Sigrid Nunez needs complete silence and found living with Susan Sontag and her husband to be completely antithetical to being able to create her own work. I like people to be watching me so that I don’t have an excuse to mess around. No Facebook while you’re writing! 

I don’t really have a neat way to tie up this post, to comment on all the things I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know what I think about my own creativity…sometimes I think it is really important and sometimes I just want to decorate my apartment. But overall, I keep grinding away. I keep writing. There is something there that I am interested in. And I have a tiny hope that I will find it. Sometimes it takes a long time to come upon something that I feel passionate about, but, eventually it arrives. And then it is something I am devoted to.

So, those are my  mildly disjointed thoughts. I wanted to share them with you. Feel free to respond.

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