Thursday! 2-46: You, Me, Steinbeck, and Kafka vs Creative Anxiety.
V2, I46
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Writing has been a bit of a difficulty for me lately, as you may have gathered from the past couple or three newsletters. Nothing is wrong — or at least I don’t feel anything in particular is wrong — but I’ve not had the brainpower in me when my evening writing time comes around to get very much done. I’ve played around with a couple poems and the hints of a story, but I don’t have anything even in the playing around that I think is worth building into more.
Normally, that would worry me and I’d get down on myself for not being a professional and putting pen to paper and butt in seat and mind to task and soul to art and all the stuff professional creative folks are supposed to do to indicate how seriously they take their creative work. Nowadays, not so much. The switch in my thinking didn’t happen by accident nor did it happen all at once. I thought it might make an interesting discussion topic for this week.
See, we artists worry about our legitimacy all the time. If we aren’t making art, then are we really artists? If we don’t produce thousands of words a day, can we call ourselves writers? What happens in the fallow days, when ideas aren’t all that plentiful and we don’t have art to make? What are we then? Do we even have real value to our friends, our family, our community or…the world?2 As it turns out, though, we are not the only ones who’ve struggled with legitimacy or identity. Take as an example, John Steinbeck, who kept a detailed diary while he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. See if some of this doesn’t look familiar:
I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.
If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity.
Demoralization complete and seemingly unbeatable. So many things happening that I can’t not be interested.
He even had problems with dawdling and not putting in as much work as he thought he needed.
Although I got up early this morning I’m late getting to work and I don’t in the least know why.
Today much to my disgust the time has slipped away.
Does that sound like something you’ve said lately? Hey, I’m there with you. I’ve lost a lot of time griping to myself about how much time I’ve lost, which doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it. But that’s what we artists do, isn’t it? We waste time worrying about the time we’ve already wasted.
And how about Franz Kafka?3 Here's what he felt like when the words weren't flowing like a pure mountain stream.
Lack of appetite, fear of getting back late in the evening; but above all the thought that I wrote nothing yesterday, that I keep getting farther and farther from it, and am in danger of losing everything I have laboriously achieved these past six months. Provided proof of this by writing one and a half wretched pages of a new story that I have already decided to discard…. Occasionally I feel an unhappiness that almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity and of the existence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by undergoing every kind of unhappiness.
Have you felt that kind of unhappiness over not being able to write for a few days? I know I have. Heck, I’ve felt like that at least once a month every month for the past few years!
There is a strange comfort in knowing our own feelings of failure and inadequacy are bog-standard for the work we do. Steinbeck despaired. Kafka despaired4. So do you. So do I. The greater comfort, though, is in knowing we can still put our hands to our work and have that work amount to something. Steinbeck got up every day and wrote, even if he thought he was writing junk. I’m sure some of it was absolute garbage5, but not all of it. Kafka felt “almost dismembered” but nothing actually dismembered him6. He wrote his stories, as an intact human being7. You will feel like you'll never write a useful thing in your life again. You will, though.
Unless you quit.
Here’s the stark truth about being an artist. No one can stop you but you. Critics can hate your art. Your family can make fun of you. Your friends can call you crazy and roll their eyes at you. The world at large can ignore you and dismiss your work. Dogs can bark at you. Cats can hiss and arch their backs. Mosquitos can refuse to bite you because of your manifest foulness. Children can cry and mothers can fork the sign of the Evil Eye at you because your art is so very hideous.
But they can’t make you quit. Also, very few of those things will happen to you, despite how loud your fears become.
Let me say this plainly: No one can make you quit but you. You decide whether you will come back to your art each day or not. Even if yesterday was a complete washout, you can come back today and see what is there. Like our pal John said:
Yesterday was a bust and I’m sorry but I think today will be all right.
He wasn’t wrong. Today was all right.
This is where I’ve gotten myself lately. A day of writing failure doesn’t have to mean a week of writing failure. It’s only one day. Tomorrow brings new chances and ideas that have had another day to soak up our unconscious creativity8. The stuff that doesn't work right now might well work tomorrow or the day after. You can't know.
Franz Kafka, complete and fully-membered, once wrote to a friend9, “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity”. While I don’t entirely agree, I do agree that if you’re an artist and you give up on your art, you are dismembering your soul. To be sure, you will live on. You can function as a human being without your art, but you won’t be happy and you won’t ever feel “right”. I know because I’ve been there, for years. There came a point, though, when I had to finally figure out that writing -- even writing short stories and smaller poems -- isn't a sprint. You don't get where you want to go in a single shimmering act of teleportation. You walk. Or run. Sometimes you crawl. Sometimes you just sit and watch the world for a bit, but only for a bit. Then you get up and go on.
Because you’re an artist and your very cool art isn’t going to create itself, is it?
Neither is mine, which is why I will put away my worries about why I didn’t write and see what I shall write. Want to join me? Sit. Grab your pen or brush or chisel or instrument or whatever. Plenty of room.
Just, you know, mind Kafka. He’s a little odd.
What I Wrote This Week
I don’t just write poems and stories. I also take pictures! Here’s one of my recent snaps along with the poem it inspired.
But not literally because…where did that phrase come from anyhow? The only sense I can make of it is whoever invented it imagined eyelids like the peel of a fruit and keeping your eyes peeled meant keeping them open (i.e. with the peel off). The only other options that comes to mind are gross.
Dun dun DUNNNNN!
Yeah! How about Franz Kafka?
And also turned a character into a giant roach, which is not the worst way to work out some creative tension, honestly.
The Pomegranates of Wrath! The Plums of Great Annoyance. The Prunes of Pique.
Or turned him into a giant cockroach.
And in no way a cockroach.
Wait. Did you forget that your creative mind works even when you don’t intentionally think about creativity?
Who was also not a giant cockroach.