I Read Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”.
I can’t remember the exact quote anymore because it was 20 years ago, but something that a friend said to me once about the things I was writing at the time went something like this: “I think you can work on letting things breathe a little bit more. It always seems like you’re going for this huge finishing punch with every line, which can be a little exhausting. When it lands it’s great, but sometimes it just feels like it goes on and on with these heavy blows and it just becomes enough.”
Creative feedback, especially when it discusses a style or an approach is so daunting. Creation and creativity come in its own language, in my opinion, just like you are born with your own speaking (singing) voice, you are born with an innate reception to rhythm or flow (for dancing or playing music), you are born with your own capacity for language (writing, debating), you are born with your own sense of visual composure (drawing, painting, filmmaking). All creatives across every design and style and medium are gifted with a way that they receive transmissions, translate the data and then synthesize that essence into a new entity. When any of those pathways becomes successful to them, one of the first things that they/we/I do is gild that procedure into their “style” or their “process”. And any idea that they have, they immediately try to recreate whatever circumstance or scenario helped them create something successfully with one piece, believing that this will be the case with the second, third, lifetime of pieces beyond it.
Rubin, in this book, tells you in so many words: “Nah, man. Chill out.”
While reading this book, I related with so many of the little idioms and pieces of advice and observations he made. So much of what he spoke about pertained to relaxing the mental muscles, opening the creative mind, allowing flux, allowing change, and treating The Piece as its own natural, organic and almost spiritual entity which you are going to enter into an agreement with. It is his belief that when a creative notion is being formed, we are meant to allow it to stretch its legs, scream its song, paint its landscape through us, instead of us trying to harness it, tame it, break it, and make it our own. What we are meant to do as creators is receive the transmission and gracefully manifest what that creative seed wants to be without trying to force it too much to be something that it isn’t.
I love this advice. There’s something so liberating about it.
For years, I have worked on two or three different stories, each of them running their own separate labyrinth, their own separate gauntlet, exercising and working out in their own separate Rocky IV montages to become the biggest and strongest and best idea that it can possibly be. And within all of this work, while mangling all of these ideas, and taking all of these notes and listing all of these entries and journaling about all of these stories, they are locked away, bleak and black and dark and never becoming anything. They are ideas that I’m playing with, personalities that I’m crushing, existences that I’m banishing. Whether I am actively running those hamster wheels or not… they are nothing. They are zero. They are silence. Rubin would reprimand me for this. One of his biggest beliefs is that you have to make way for new creative pieces by releasing the ones that you have in the chamber. Take whatever idea you have as far as you can organically take it, let it bloom, let it blossom, nurture it, and see that it has the right energy, and then put it out into the world. If you get into a routine of making enough things regularly, of tuning in to the energies and the ideas around you, you will get better at finding clearer signals. You will give life to so many ideas that are swirling around you in the ether. You will be able to see art become more than just seeds, but instead become entire fields.
I tend to not want to go to How To Create Things books, mostly because I have this sense that every writer (or musician or dancer or architect) is going to those same books, following the same Laws, following the same Steps to Excellence, and thinking that IF ONLY they could find the right way to create, then their work of genius would come. It’s not their own fault that they haven’t made the thing they’ve yearned to make. It’s their circumstance, it’s their lack of time, it’s their job, it’s their environment, it’s their inability to get back to what made them creative in the first place. These are all myths. This is the first book that I’ve read in a long time that really inspired me in the way that it was meant to. I think a lot of books like this are written with the intention of giving a brief and loose set of guidelines for the next creator to be able to create a routine that works for them. It becomes the Employee Handbook for acolytes of said creator, something like “if you follow these X# of short steps, you TOO will create the work of your dreams. You will be the creator that you knew lived inside you for so long.”
Again. Rubin, in this book, tells you in so many words: “Nah, man. Chill out.”
I encourage you to read this book and I DO recommend it! In a lot of ways, it gave me the insight to listen to what’s INSIDE me and what’s OUTSIDE to be picked up and to allow things to be. He encourages play. He encourages mistakes. There is no structure, there is no Path to Creation. Trust that it’s inside you. Trust the work. Trust the signal, trust the inner voice. Lots of little underlines and circles went throughout this book, lots of little reminders that won’t stir me into action, but instead will right my mind. I don’t expect to be the next incredible author, but I do expect myself to be able to make great things from the small seeds I find. I think this book could help anyone looking to reduce the stress of knowing that they have something beautiful inside of them screaming to get out and have only been waiting for a way to release it.
