Pep Talks for Writers
Copyright © 2017 by Grant Faulkner.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
ISBN 978-1-4521-6108-2 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-6171-6 (epub, mobi)
Design by Lizzie Vaughan.
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com
CONTENTS
Introduction: A Creative Manifesto
1 You Don’t Need Permission to Be a Creator
2 How Do You Create?
3 Finding Your Muse
4 Be a Beginner
5 Make Your Creativity into a Routine
6 Goal + Deadline = Magic
7 Embrace Constraints
8 The Art of Boredom
9 Getting Ideas: A Writing Rorschach Test
10 Building a Creative Community
11 An Artistic Apprenticeship
12 Getting Feedback
13 Channel Your Super Heroic Observational Powers
14 Cavort . . . Wander . . . Play
15 Using Your Life in Your Story
16 Overcoming Creativity Wounds
17 Make Your Inner Editor Work for You
18 Accept the Mess
19 Pull Yourself Out of the Comparison Trap
20 Put Your Life Struggles in Perspective
21 Treating Impostor Syndrome
22 Embrace Vulnerability
23 Fail Often . . . Fail Better
24 Creativity as an Act of Defiance
25 You Are What You Wear
26 Where You Work Matters
27 Artistic Thievery, or the Art of Remixing
28 Take a Story Field Trip
29 Looking through Your Character Kaleidoscope
30 On Finding Creative Flow
31 Say, “Yes, and . . .”: The Secrets of Improv
32 Think Fast to Outpace Writer’s Block
33 An Exercise in Extreme Writing
34 Sleep, Sleeplessness, and Creativity
35 Be Deluded . . . Be Grand
36 Nurturing Awe through Darkness, Solitude, and Silence
37 New Experiences = New Thoughts
38 The Magical Sprites of Creativity: Distractions
39 Trusting in The Absurd
40 Move Differently to Think Differently
41 Specialize (but Not Too Much)
42 The Art of Melancholy
43 Thank Your Muse
44 Writing with a Persona
45 Persisting through Rejection
46 Know Thyself
47 Make Irritants into a Symphony
48 Hold Things Lightly
49 Intuition versus Logic
50 Vanquishing Fear with Curiosity
51 Logging the Hours: Mastery Equals Perseverance
52 What Is “Success”?
In Review
INTRODUCTION: A CREATIVE MANIFESTO
Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? That’s the question this book sets out to answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.
That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.
It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)
The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”
It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).
No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.
We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe. Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.
Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means.
Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.” For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.
So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in yo
ur story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.
It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. In this book, we’ll explore 52 different approaches to being creative every day. Each pep talk will include ways for you to explore your creative notions and angles, because life and writing are really ongoing creative experiments. Some pep talks may sing out to where you are now, while others might become relevant later in your writing process. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.
We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.
If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.
1
YOU DON’T NEED PERMISSION TO BE A CREATOR
Each year, I talk to hundreds of people who have perfected a peculiar and disturbing art: the art of telling themselves why they can’t jump in and write the novel of their dreams.
“I’ve never taken any classes. I don’t have an MFA.”
“I have a lot of ideas for stories, but I’m not a real writer.”
Or, worst of all, they say, “I’m not a creative type.”
I call this the other syndrome—as in “other people do this, but not me.” We’ve all been there, right? We open up the pages of a magazine, and we read a profile of a magnificently cloaked and coiffed artistic being—a twirling scarf, moody eyes, locks of hair falling over a pensive brow. We read the witticisms and wisdom the celebrated artistic being dispenses while drinking a bottle of wine with a reporter one afternoon in a charming hamlet in Italy. The artistic being tells of creative challenges and victories achieved, and then drops in an anecdote or two about a conversation with a famous author, a good friend. There’s a joke about a movie deal that fell through, and then an aside about the one that won an Oscar. There’s talk about a recently published book, which called to them and gave them artistic fulfillment like no other book ever has.
And, as we sit in our house that is so very far from Italy, and we look across the kitchen, over the dishes on the counter, to the cheap bottle of wine from Safeway, and the phone rings with a call from a telemarketer, just as a bill slides off the stack of bills, we tell ourselves, “Other people are writers. Other people get the good fortune to have been born with a twirling scarf around their neck. Other people get to traipse through Italy to find a fantastic novel calling them. Other people get to be who they want to be—whether it’s through family connections, blessed luck, or natural talent. But that’s not me. That’s other people.”
And you know what, we’re right. The life of an artist is for others—because we just said so, and in saying so, we make it true.
But here’s the rub. Even after negating our creative potential, we’re bound to wake up the next day to a tickle of an idea dancing in a far corner of our mind, a memory that is trying to push a door open, a strange other world that is calling us. We wash those dishes, we pay that stack of bills, we drink that cheap bottle of wine, but we know there’s something else—we know there’s something more.
And there is something more. There’s the creative life. You don’t need a certificate for it; you don’t need to apply to do it; you don’t even need to ask permission to do it. You just have to claim it. You might not wear scarves in Italy, but you can make your own version of the artistic life, no matter where you live or what demands of life you face.
It’s not always easy, of course. There will be naysayers, those people who think it’s silly or trivial to be a “creative type,” those who think it’s audacious and pretentious for you to write a novel, those who think you can’t do it because you lack the qualifications. You’ve decided to escape the mire of your creative slough, and sometimes that threatens others. But you’re not embracing your creativity because it’s an easy path. You’re doing it because you have something to say. And no one gets to tell you that what you have to say doesn’t matter, because it matters to you.
The arts don’t belong to a chosen few. Quite the opposite: every one of us is chosen to be a creator by virtue of being human. If you’re not convinced of this, just step into any preschool and observe the unbridled creative energy of kids as they immerse themselves in finger painting, telling wild stories, banging on drums, and dancing just for the sake of dancing. They’re creative types because they breathe.
And you’re a writer because you write. There’s no other definition. Don’t fall into the common trap of hesitating to call yourself a writer if you haven’t published a book. It can easily happen. Agatha Christie said that even after she’d written ten books, she didn’t really consider herself a “bona fide author.” You earn your bona fides each time you pick up a pen and write your story. So start by telling yourself you’re a writer. Then tell the world. Don’t mumble it, be proud of it, because to be a writer takes moxie and verve.
Your task as a human being and as an artist is to find that maker within, to decide that you’re not “other,” you’re a creator. Honor the impetus that bids you to write—revere it, bow to it, hug it, bathe in it, nurture it. That impetus is what makes life meaningful. It’s what makes you, you.
TRY THIS
TAKE THE PLEDGE
First, tell yourself, “I am a creator.” Then tell someone else. Tell them you write. Tell them why writing is important to you. You don’t have to tell them your story. Just be proud to call yourself a writer. Practice asserting it.
2
HOW DO YOU CREATE?
Despite the plethora of how-to-write books that promise surefire recipes for writing success, there is no right way to write. The way a person creates is a mysterious thing, similar to a person’s favorite color. Why do some people like a certain color and not another one? Blue has been my favorite color for as long as I can imagine. Yet some people like red, others prefer periwinkle, and then there are those who like fulvous (a brownish yellow). Why? It just is. And it’s a good thing, right? We need the world to be painted a variety of colors. We need to walk through rooms with different hues, to feel life as a celebration of color in its many forms, to make life, well, colorful.
When I begin a story, I sit down with an itch of a story idea stirring in my mind, and I write a sentence, without too much thought, without any maps of logic, and then I write another sentence, and then another, one thing leading to the next, writing in pursuit of faint inklings and distant whispers, writing to discover, writing just to write. It’s as if I’m lost in a foreign city, and I’m trying to find my way home, but I can only follow hunches, scents in the air, touches of memory. I’ll eventually find my way home, or I believe I will, but I know I’ll take wrong turns and end up in places I might not know how to get out of. I know there will be moments I’m scared or frustrated or desperate, but I also know I’ll wander into magical places I couldn’t have possibly found in any guidebook.
It’s a fun way to write—to write as a quest. I get to walk through a dark forest and discover something new each time I write. No one tells me where to go. If I get a sudden and impulsive idea, then I can indulge that story line and explore all its tentacles and tributari
es. If I want to include a character’s diary entries to add a layer of characterization—yes, why not?
The downside to this approach is that I tend to explore my characters’ worlds and meander down their highways and byways more than I stitch everything together into a tight and suspenseful plot. I’m not especially adept at writing the kind of novel where everything is there for a well-considered reason, where one thing leads to the next and the dramatic trajectory is always rising with taut tension. In some ways, I tend to plot after the novel has been written.
So my constant question has been whether I should abandon my loosey-goosey ways and buckle down and outline my novel ahead of time. And not just with a sketchy outline, but a tightly orchestrated game plan. I wonder this when I begin every novel, and then I wonder it more and more as I proceed.
Here’s the thing, though. I have outlined stories and novels. While it’s fun for me to think through a narrative arc and plot it out, if I write with an outline—with so much of the story already formed in my brain—the joy and meaning of writing is diminished. With an outline, I write to determine, not to explore. Instead of walking through a foreign city without a map and looking all around to find my way, I look at the map more than I look at the world around me. For me, planning a novel—at least in any deep and meticulous way—violates the very spirit of why I write.
Now I’m not arrogant enough to assert that my way is the right way. I often question it myself—even now, I wonder if I don’t outline because of a character flaw or a lack of discipline. I deeply respect writers who use outlines, spreadsheets, Post-it notes, and white boards to delineate their stories. But I also know that every writer creates in a different and mysterious way, so I try not to chastise myself too much.
I often think of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin that addresses different creative types. The title is a reference to a phrase attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus who wrote, “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.” Berlin used this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences, and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea. I write like a fox. Others write like a hedgehog. And then others write like another animal, let’s say an anteater, and whatever defining characteristic an anteater has guides them to create their stories in their way.