Back to basics

Cobwebs, creative demons, and relaxing into process

A room with a view

I had the great fortune of spending most of October in the Chicago area at an artist residency at Ragdale, where it was high Midwest autumnal charming. A regal Walnut tree changed colors right outside my window, dropping leaves with the wind as I grappled (and sometimes soared) over and through the page. My room—spacious, with windows looking out at the prairie beyond—had walls the color of spiced milk or clay. It was an exquisite cocoon for unfolding into the relative discomfort I so often experience with writing.

This isn’t to emphasize the residency experience as turbulent, because as a whole it was extraordinarily relaxing and restorative. But creative discomfort totally came rushing in at the front. After I’d brushed off the cobwebs from unfinished fragments I’ve generated over the past few years—the easy work of waking things up and scoping out what I have already written—the demons of doubt came out. There was that familiar fear that I am only making more of a mess the longer I work on this book. In the following days I got to relax into the work, coming into contact with the jagged edges of fear and feeling my way around them. I half joked it had been a long time since I’d gotten to get that frustrated with things, but I meant it. Sometimes I need enough space to let some dilemma come to a head and move past that peak.

(Side note: one of the very excellent things about Ragdale residencies is that you arrive and leave at the same time as the other residents in the cohort. Being around those artists was a joy for so many reasons. Hearing others talk about their own process there also helped to normalize the arc of discomfort and how hard it is or can be to settle into doing creative work.)

A lot of my writing dilemmas jut out at a conceptual level, rather than in the dirty details of sentences, paragraphs, and the units they accrue—the dilemma of “what am I actually even writing?” The book I’m working on is about my personal experiences growing up into anarchist and punk subculture, and negotiating (still) with the question of how to make a home in the world as it is. My own thinking about these things is heavily influenced by my younger brother’s schizophrenia and homelessness, though for a long time I’ve mistaken that thread as the centerpiece of my story. As I’ve realized how much I’m actually writing about myself, the scope of this book has expanded and contracted with time, as has my relationship with form and genre: how much thinking am I doing and how much story am I telling? Where does that story begin and what is its tone? How do I pivot from one part to the next?

The discomfort I settled into at Ragdale revolved around those familiar questions. I had days where I basically re-wrote the same paragraph over and over again as if a vehicle for resolving those higher-level questions, and also moments of clarity that let me write into something fresh. It was tempting to see that clarity as conceptual, like when I realized the topic of architecture makes a compelling lens through which to approach world-building in a piece I’ve been working on. That thread took me into some exciting places. But towards the end of the residency, I remembered—after erring too much on the side of analysis—that a mystery is not always a dilemma or problem that needs to be resolved before I can move forward creatively. Often it’s not figuring out where I’m going that lets me move forward, but letting go of the need for orientation. The reflex to take stock of where I’d been and where I was going and how all the parts could fit together tangled me up and worked against the impulse to create.

A small library right outside my room enabled my new interest in architecture.

I do this. I get myself into logjams with analysis and the urge to organize things. Discomfort with the messy unknown causes me to work against myself. I read the mess as further evidence that I’m not good at organizing things instead of trusting the eerie, intuitive process through which art is made (even art that is “thinky,” making a web of thought bound by intuitive and emotional junctures). It frustrates me that I can be like this, but I’m also glad I got to spend so much time with all my tendencies—the ones that help and the ones that hold me back. It meant that I came home with a sense of where to go next: not a map or an outline of the project, but the opportunity to collaborate with its mystery.

Right now I’m figuring out how to carve out and conjure up the time and space to be with the unknown. It takes me a little while to get out of “thinking” mode after I sit down—to restrain my analytical urge to understand what I’m doing or know where I’m going. That means I have to find more time in a day that conveniently fits into the random little pockets I’d previously found in my workweek and weekend. Rational thinking can help me figure out the time and place where I write, but tends to tie me up if it comes along as my “plus one” to those writing sessions. So the ritual of writing is also the ritual of easing out of that mode so I can play and operate beyond logic. This is the basic advice dispensed in the books about writing and creative self-help which I’ve known about or consulted for years (from Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit). Sometimes I find those kinds of books (not Elbow—namely the second two) frustrating in their prescriptive view of the creative process and bent towards hyperbole. But I’m grateful for the basic questions at their core: how do I get out of my own way so I can actually create? How do I stop trying to control the process and its outcome—or even just trying to understand what it even is—so I can instead actually go through it?

A selfie from yours truly in a very fancy bathroom at the Ragdale house.

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