While listening to a recent Radiolab podcast, Elizabeth Gilbert (Yes, of Eat, Pray, Love fame), spoke of a conversation she had with TomWaits (!!) when she was working as a journalist.
As an inspiring writer, Gilbert was curious about Waits’ creative process and asked him to reveal his creative regiment. His response; creativity sometimes just needs to be “bullied” a little.
[Tom Waits] spoke about the creative process, I think, more articulately than anyone I have ever heard. He was talking about how every song has a distinctive identity that it comes into the world with, and it needs to be taken in different ways. He said there are songs that you have to sneak up on like you’re hunting for a rare bird, and there are songs that come fully intact like a dream taken through a straw. There are songs that you find little bits of like pieces of gum you find underneath the desk, and you scrape them off and you put them together and you make something out of it.
And there are songs, he said, that need to be bullied. He said he’s been in the studio working on a song and the whole album is done and this one song won’t give itself over and — everyone’s gotten used to seeing him do things like this — he’ll march up and down the studio talking to the song, saying “The rest of the family is in the car! We’re all going on vacation! You coming along or not? You’ve got 10 minutes or else you’re getting left behind!”
Waits, according to Gilbert, had to come to learn that he could control his create muse. His epiphanic moment came, of all places, while driving through LA gridlock traffic.
A melody came to him and because he had no pen and paper and was of course, driving, there was no way for him to record his idea. At first, he became frustrated and angry, but then he looked to the sky and said to the muse;
“Excuse me. Can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist then I spend eight hours a day in the studio. You’re welcome to come and visit me when I’m sitting at my piano. Otherwise, leave me alone and go bother Leonard Cohen.”
What a genius approach. Leave it to Tom Waits to have the nerve tell his muse to please come back later.
Since learning of Waits’ approach (which reminds me of Lynch’s meditation approach that I discussed in a previous post here) I have been changing my own routine to take small steps to control my own inspiraion. My first step was to actually start giving myself time for ideas to be able to present themselves to me. I live a tad frantically (especially lately) and seem to fill up every second of everyday with a project of some sort. Business is the only schedule I seem to follow, so my first challenge is to make time for ideas to come out. Following Waits’ logic, of course, I have not been particularly inspired as of late, I have made no time for the ideas to come. Only the really stubborn, “outspoken” ideas would be able to have a voice over the last couple of months. The quiet ones have had no time to come forward.
I also reworked my creative space this week. My desk was always positioned in the middle of my room, facing an unfinished wall. I put it there not because it was the best spot but because it seemed to be the only place my desk fit. Well, gradually I stopped wanting to sit at the desk. It seemed I sat, did the edits I had to do and then get up as fast as possible. In all my other editing space I always looked out a window. From an editing point of view this is the worst idea ever (monitor glare), but I have always made it work (thanks Huey PRO monitor callibration). I used to spend hours editing: I would play around in Photoshop and when I got stuck I’d look out the window or at my plants. With the desk against the wall this wasn’t possible.
Since moving my desk and making my workspace more conducive to working, I have been wanting to sit at it! Who would have thought! Though I may not be able to bully my creativity just yet, the fact that I am sitting at my desk and experimenting with my photographs again is cause for celebration.
I am not sure I am even close to being able to tell my ideas where to go, but having an inspiring space and resolving to give my ideas time is a pretty good start.
And with the desk relocation Zee can hang out beside me while I work!
Anyone else have any suggestions or thoughts on their own creative process?
Chaos, Clocks and Watermelons: 