Shine on 🎇
Making friends with your creative practice (no matter how long it's been since you hung out)
This letter is about the friction that surrounds creative practice for so many of us—the way we fight with ourselves around it and through it. I’m thinking in particular about times when you are far away from the routine you want, but also the tendency to “white knuckle” things.
To talk about consistency and disciplined habits in the context of creativity already invokes tension. The stability suggested by habit intersects with the uncertainty (and even foolishness) that we’re exposed to when writing, drawing, dancing, painting, or composing anything new. At least this is how I feel about making art: it forms an opening, sometimes an oceanic one, and the experience of standing at its edge or wading in one of its murkier zones doesn’t seem adequately facilitated or contained by notions of discipline. At the same time, it’s super frustrating to find yourself in a holding pattern of avoidance, not knowing how to make the time to engage with a kind of work you actually really care about and feel sort of empty without.
I’ve found discipline becomes very shiny and attractive in that liminal state, where I was stationed for a good chunk of last year. Discipline looks like the way out, and in some ways it can be. It helped me a lot to read books and hear people talk about habits and routines, and to then apply that guidance towards creating gentle, flexible, ADHD-friendly routines of my own. If I was to share just one “tip,” it would be to set the bar as low as possible for what counts as showing up, because touching the practice/project for even one minute (or 30 seconds) becomes an avenue for settling into it while overdoing it just strengthens the aversion. (These tiny slivers also can just be more realistic to your life situation—busy, no time, etc.)
I love practical tips and the optimistic problem-solving stance that they transmit. I could fill this letter with them, and then some. But I’m not really sure that this kind of advice has helped me resolve the conflict I had with myself around writing. Going through the motions of showing up—10 minutes or even less, no pressure to do anything specific—became a conduit for moving through deeper conflicts and learning to work with myself again. Or maybe that’s just my analysis after the fact—it’s always hard to draw the boundary between logistical/quotidian issues (my struggles with “time management” and organization) and existential friction, because there’s such feedback between them. But I think focusing on practical tips and time management solutions becomes this “recipe for success” we end up wielding against ourselves when it doesn’t work as expected—further proof of how hopeless we are, how we are running out of time, how we’re going to die before we ever make something worthy, and so on. And it turns out that working with that kind of shit—that tendency to fight ourselves—is actually really practical, too (and is definitely also its own kind of practice).
I don’t mean that working on or with the anxiety, storylines, and inner conflict needs to hold up creative work, like we should put it on pause to “fix” ourselves before considering what kind of practice/play would feel good in the present. Inner conflict and all, it is still a perfect time to look for a small window in a day or week to make some marks on a page or play a few notes, small as 1 or 5 or 15 minutes. I think what I mean—or part of what I mean—is that the arithmetic of how many days, weeks, months, or years it’s been since we last did that can feel so heavy and imposing that it gets us in a double-bind. The guilt or shame that comes up is so uncomfortable that it becomes an engine of avoidance. It can also feel like debt that’s impossible to pay off: “Since I haven’t achieved anything/made anything in X years, I don’t deserve to create anything today. I haven’t earned that opportunity.” It comes up for me around output and productivity—these snags of shame around not publishing things (not sending things out for publication) or finishing a full draft of this manuscript I’ve been working on for years. For me, the harsh and demanding thoughts/feelings that can come up around accomplishment and practice are inflected with the industrial work ethic and saddled with the baggage that comes with not feeling I intrinsically belong anywhere. It’s like constantly needing to renew my license or pay membership dues for a role I’ve taken on (i.e., artist/writer)—always needing to re-earn my place. Maybe it boils down to proving something.
I don’t know why, but that mandate to prove yourself can feel especially potent and tenderizing around art. That competition is mixed with wide open possibility, with doing something for its own sake (which is also unfamiliar territory for a lot of us). It makes a murky combo, anxiety-provoking in either direction: the anxiety of competition and the anxiety of connecting with yourself in a way that’s potentially so unmediated by those forces—so vast, raw, and intimate. Even competitiveness can sometimes be just an outlet for wanting to connect with the world—the only outlet we know, in some cases—in which case the threat of creative failure (whatever that means to you) is also the threat of isolation. I don’t mean it’s profane or problematic to write query letters or apply for grants or submit your work. There’s a place and time for it, but it might be most helpful to leave it outside when you’re trying to (re-)establish a practice—to learn to recognize the pounding beats and storylines that come along with before it invites itself in and spoils the fun.
When it does, that competitive streak stomps its obsession with the end result all over the place, leaving crusty, muddy tracks in the shape of “outcome.” It trains us to fear showing up or shows up before we’ve even gone inside a practice. Maybe we’re a mile away and it’s already barking. Our aversion to that aggression can be sneaky, quietly re-directing us away from intentions to show up to a practice in favor of something more time sensitive or tangible and definitely way less thorny. (Last year for me that tended to be gardening or home organization, which was kind of a nice creative outlet in its own right but felt a little too engrossing and obsessive to be just that. The volume knob was turned up suspiciously high.) I’m oversimplifying, chalking this up to unwanted competitiveness—there can be plenty of tendencies and messages that compound into aversion. In all, their effect leads us to distrust ourselves and the process.
And that distrust can play out even when the practice looks fine on the surface. Now that I’m on the other side of this recent way station of non-practice, I’m noticing (and working to let go of) my over-editing tendency. It gets me all tangled up in confusion as I re-write things over and over again, trying to get them to fit together before they’re ready. That over-editing was so pronounced before I floated away for a while, so it isn’t surprising, actually, that I would get burnt out and quietly dip out. And as I settle back into a creative routine I see that sustainability isn’t just about the surface details of the practice (when, where, how) but also what I allow myself to work on, and how I work. How much I fight with my instincts or reflexes. I’m learning what approaches to drafting allow me to express things without tangling myself up. Right now, that’s in small fragments or vignettes; as I build the project in Scrivener docs, I add a date for when I wrote them to help “mark” them without yet placing them into a structure. I’m trying to practice using my voice and trusting that form will emerge through that.
There’s a practical side of this openness to process. It doesn’t mean giving up desire to make things—to write books, to publish something, or any other accomplishment where there’s a finite outcome. It can actually make that path smoother and also more fun. Peter Elbow’s approach to the writing process comes to mind here—the “growing” and “cooking” framework he describes in his book Writing With Power. These two kinds of creating/writing, he advises keeping separate. Generative, open creativity (growing) is given space to unfold without being impinged upon by editorial critical-mindedness (cooking). Cooking is (or can be) also very creative and essential to the process, but it’s hard to do before you have something to work with first. When growing and cooking collapse into each other, everything can get gummed up. It’s like stopping yourself before you’ve started, cutting off clarity that comes through engaging with the process in its raw state (not to mention the source of the raw ingredients). I also think about Lynda Barry and her playful theorizing around the raw potency of images (like in this lecture on YouTube), which has helped me to take play more seriously.
Of course, there’s a paradox there: you can’t (or can’t reliably) make contact with or cultivate raw material that you can shape into dynamic, satisfying, unique, shiny finished work when that’s what you’re going for straight away. It doesn’t always come out of hiding or sprout in the harsh temperatures or glaring light of that mandate to produce.
I find it comforting to remind myself that dull, raw drafting can and will be transformed later in the process. Embracing that slow, cyclical nature is one way to warm back up to a practice. It makes everything lower stakes and makes for a handy re-frame—like, this raw matter isn’t meant to sparkle yet. Or even to know the “dumber” and messier you’re letting yourself be, the freer you’re being, and that’s often where exciting things happen. It can keep the editorial or competitive reflexes at bay to situate mess as movement towards the finished work those reflexes/parts are ultimately looking for.
But it’s interesting, and possibly shocking, to consider just how long you’d be willing to let yourself create (or grow) before the editor (or cook) comes in to clean things up or put the pieces together and get that shit out the door. On a rainy walk the other night, I realized that I’d been subtly and maybe arbitrarily slipping from the “growing” lane I’ve been trying to occupy over to the “cooking” lane. It just seemed like time for that, based on nothing that was actually happening in the work. (Maybe it was some subconscious “new year” drive: alright, 2024, gotta finish this thing!) Recognizing my swerve as premature, I felt a little stab of damnit. Like, holy shit, I’ve already been working on this book for so long—years—and here I am, still growing. But then it occurred to me how very little of that time has been unburdened with pressure. I’ve had satisfying, engrossing, creative, and even playful experiences with it, but those experiences have pretty much all been embedded within a general sense that I should figure something out soon (and anxiety that I won’t). I’ve also passed into, through, and out of an MFA program, churning me through deadlines and their lingering aftermath. The deadlines helped me to (forced me to) put things out there into conversation when, left on my own, I would have kept ruminating and trying to perfect. (I.e., that over-editing and perfectionism can mask as engagement with the process. Tiny bit more on that in a sec.) But I didn’t learn to trust myself by following through on the deadlines, I just turned things in.
So I think something that happens is that deadlines (like the ones you get in school) can be so helpful in creating structure and giving us a reason to show up to our practice—and then getting us to hand things over even when we don’t feel ready—that we then try to give them to ourselves when we want to get back to the work. Try to be stern, demanding, disciplined, etc. The deadlines end up feeling arbitrary, results are spotty; we feel bad, double-down, feel worse. Over-editing, overcooking, avoidant anxiety about the process, and trying to create (an artificially imposing) structure—I guess where all these things connect for me is around self-trust: trusting myself to have a direct relationship with the work, to find out for myself what routine is too tight or too loose, what is too much striving or not enough, what feels like my voice and what doesn’t. Seeking external support and accountability can be a part of that—I’m not talking about shutting out all guidance and connection, and trying to go at things alone—but when I don’t trust myself, shit is more complicated, confusing, and hard to follow through on.
The cycle of distrust can be hard to interrupt, especially when avoidance is afoot, but one cool thing—and a way to interrupt the storyline about not deserving your practice—is that even ghosting the practice is one of the ways it teaches us. You find out for yourself what happens when you get away from that practice. (Miranda Mellis spoke to this in Experimental Practice episode 1.) So even that gap becomes a starting place, a part of being a practitioner, and that sense of already being in it can light the way as you move towards deeper (or different kinds of) involvement with it—a lantern that you can’t put out, no matter how long you’ve been away or have been fighting with yourself.
Yours with love,
Siloh
P.S. If you feel called, I invite you to share in the comments about something that’s helped you find some ease with your creative work or routine—a word, a sentence, maybe a hypothesis or speculation about what what works for you. (Here are a few more of mine: a space heater or blanket, a watch, a certain time of day, earplugs, remembering to fill the well by reading things and talking with friends…)
Now booking creative advising sessions!
Now through February 14th, 2024, I’m offering 55-minute, one-on-one creative advising sessions at a sliding scale price of $75-$175. I still have a few slots left! Held via Zoom or phone, these are spacious conversations which yield greater clarity about what you’re working on/with, and connect you with creative strategies and resources you can use on your own terms.
Bring your charged, confusing manuscript, your desire for a creative routine, your email marketing questions, your website, your aspiration for file maintenance to stop standing in the way of your publishing goals (gulp), your four different planners—anything that you’re doing/making/conceptualizing—and we’ll collaborate on moving things forward in a way that feels good.
To schedule, reply to this email or email me at info@silohradovsky.net. <3
After Valentine’s Day I’ll be taking a brief hiatus, but stay tuned for more opportunities to work together!
Daily artifacts
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (!)
Slug university at the Mason County Master Gardener’s workshop (did you know slugs have like 27,000 teeth?)
Cold days then warm days; the phrase “atmospheric river”
Red chili beans
Fountain pen and ink nerdery
Too much seed catalog obsessing
Resume syntax; feeling silly writing “résumé” (and never remember which direction for the dashes)
Not done with “planning the year,” like I know how to do that, but occasionally things feel managable anyways—the cadence of a week, a day
Good advice from the CHANI app and Yoga with Adriene (wisdom, really—learning not discount that)
Offerings
My website — More about my work
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice
Follow me on Instagram — It is what it is
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters