The Artist's Way (18 page)

Complete the following sentence. “If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I would try …”

Jealousy, I've often heard, is a normal human emotion. When I hear that, I think, “Maybe your jealousy—not mine.”

My jealously roars in the head, tightens the chest, massages my stomach lining with a cold fist as it searches out the best grip. I have long regarded jealousy as my greatest weakness. Only recently have I seen it for the tough-love friend that it is.

Jealousy is a map. Each of our jealousy maps differs. Each of us will probably be surprised by some of the things we discover on our own. I, for example, have never been eaten alive with resentment over the success of women novelists. But I took an unhealthy interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of women playwrights. I was their harshest critic, until I wrote my first play.

With that action, my jealousy vanished, replaced by a feeling of camaraderie. My jealousy had actually been a mask for my fear of doing something I really wanted to do but was not yet brave enough to take action toward.

Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren't able to
get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion. It doesn't allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe. Jealousy tells us there is room for only one—one poet, one painter, one whatever you dream of being.

The truth, revealed by action in the direction of our dreams, is that there is room for all of us. But jealousy produces tunnel vision. It narrows our ability to see things in perspective. It strips us of our ability to see other options. The biggest lie that jealousy tells us is that we have no choice but to be jealous. Perversely, jealousy strips us of our will to act when action holds the key to our freedom.

Your jealousy map will have three columns. In the first column, name those whom you are jealous of. Next to each name write why. Be as specific and accurate as you can. In the third column, list one action you can take to move toward creative risk and out of jealousy.

When jealousy bites, like a snakebite it requires an immediate antidote. On paper, make your jealousy map.

Even the biggest changes begin with small ones. Green is the color of jealousy, but it is also the color of hope. When you learn to harness its fierce energy on your own behalf, jealousy is part of the fuel toward a greener and more verdant future.

The phrases that follow are more of your sleuth work. Very often, we have buried parts of ourselves that can be uncovered by some digging. Not only will your answers tell you what you missed in the past; they will tell you what you can be doing, now, to comfort and encourage your artist child. It is not too late, no matter what your ego tells you.

Complete these phrases.

It is important to acknowledge our positive inventory as well as our shortfalls. Take positive stock of what good you have to build on in the present.

Finish these phrases.

TASKS 

CHECK-IN 

O
NE OF THE MOST
difficult tasks an artist must face is a primal one: artistic survival. All artists must learn the art of surviving loss: loss of hope, loss of face, loss of money, loss of self-belief. In addition to our many gains, we inevitably suffer these losses in an artistic career. They are the hazards of the road and, in many ways, its signposts. Artistic losses can be turned into artistic gains and strengths—but not in the isolation of the beleaguered artist's brain.

As mental-health experts are quick to point out, in order to move through loss and beyond it, we must acknowledge it and share it. Because artistic losses are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become artistic scar tissue that blocks artistic growth. Deemed too painful, too silly, too humiliating to share and so to heal, they become, instead, secret losses.

If artistic creations are our brainchildren, artistic losses are our miscarriages. Women often suffer terribly, and privately, from losing a child who doesn't come to term. And as artists we suffer terrible losses when the book doesn't sell, the film
doesn't get picked up, the juried show doesn't take our paintings, the best pot shatters, the poems are not accepted, the ankle injury sidelines us for an entire dance season.

We must remember that our artist is a child and that what we can handle intellectually far outstrips what we can handle emotionally. We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.

The disappointing reception of a good piece of work, the inability to move across into a different medium or type of role due to other people's expectations of us are artistic losses that must be mourned. It does no good to say, “Oh, it happens to everybody” or “Who was I kidding anyway?” The unmourned disappointment becomes the barrier that separates us from future dreams. Not being cast in the role that's “yours,” not being asked to join the company, having the show canceled or the play unreviewed—these are all losses.

Perhaps the most damaging form of artistic loss has to do with criticism. The artist within, like the child within, is seldom hurt by truth. I will say again that much true criticism liberates the artist it is aimed at. We are childlike, not childish.
Ah-hah!
is often the accompanying inner sound when a well-placed, accurate critical arrow makes its mark. The artist thinks, “Yes! I can see that! That's right! I can change that!”

The criticism that damages an artist is the criticism—well intentioned or ill—that contains no saving kernel of truth yet has a certain damning plausibility or an unassailable blanket judgment that cannot be rationally refuted.

Teachers, editors, mentors are often authority figures or parent figures for a young artist. There is a sacred trust inherent in the bond between teacher and student. This trust, when violated, has the impact of a parental violation. What we are talking about here is emotional incest.

A trusting student hears from an unscrupulous teacher that good work is bad or lacks promise or that he, the guru-teacher, senses a limit to the student's real talent or was mistaken in seeing talent, or doubts that there is talent…. Personal in nature, nebulous as to specifics, this criticism is like covert sexual harassment—a sullying yet hard to quantify experience. The student emerges shamed, feeling like a bad artist, or worse, a fool to try.

It has been my perilous privilege over the past decade to undertake teaching forays into the groves of academia. It is my experience as a visiting artist that many academics are themselves artistic beings who are deeply frustrated by their inability to create. Skilled in intellectual discourse, distanced by that intellectual skill from their own creative urgings, they often find the creativity of their charges deeply disturbing.

Devoted as they are to the scholarly appreciation of art, most academics find the beast intimidating when viewed firsthand. Creative-writing programs tend to be regarded with justified suspicion: those people aren't studying creativity, they're actually practicing it! Who knows where this could lead?

I am thinking particularly of a film-department chair of my acquaintance, a gifted filmmaker who for many years had been unable or unwilling to expose himself to the rigors and disappointments of creating. Channeling his ferocious creative urges into the lives of his students, he alternately over-controlled and undercut their best endeavors, seeking to vicariously fulfill or justify his own position on the sidelines.

As much as I wanted to dislike this man—and I certainly disliked his behaviors—I found myself unable to regard him without compassion. His own thwarted creativity, so luminous in his early films, had darkened to shadow first his own life and then the lives of his students. In the truest sense, he was a creative monster.

It took more years and more teaching for me to realize that academia harbors a far more subtle and deadly foe to the creative spirit. Outright hostility, after all, can be encountered. Far more dangerous, far more soul-chilling, is the subtle discounting that may numb student creativity in the academic grove.

I am thinking now of my time at a distinguished research university, where my teaching colleagues published widely and well on film topics of the most esoteric and exotic stripe. Highly regarded among their intellectual peers, deeply immersed in their own academic careers, these colleagues offered scant mirroring to the creative students who passed through 
their tutelage. They neglected to supply that most rudimentary nutrient: encouragement.

Creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms. By its very nature, creativity eschews such containment. In a university where the intellectual life is built upon the art of criticizing—on deconstructing a creative work—the art of creation itself, the art of creative construction, meets with scanty support, understanding, or approval. To be blunt, most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.

Student work, when scrutinized, was seldom
appreciated.
Far from it. Whatever its genuine accomplishments, it was viewed solely in terms of its shortfalls. Time and again I saw promising work met with a volley of should-have-dones, could-have-dones, and might-have-dones, instead of being worked with as it was.

It is not my argument that the world of academia be turned into an exalted artists' studio. It is, however, my point that artists attempting to exist, grow, even flourish, within that milieu recognize that the entire thrust of intellectualism runs counter to the creative impulse. For an artist, to become overly cerebral is to become crippled. This is not to say that artists lack rigor; rather, that artistic rigor is grounded differently than intellectual life usually admits.

Artists and intellectuals are not the same animal. As a younger artist this was very confusing to me. I myself have considerable critical gifts, and have in fact won national awards for practicing them. It was to my own rue that I discovered that these same skills were misapplied when focused on embryonic artistic endeavors—mine or others. Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor. As a teacher, it has been my sad experience that many talented creatives were daunted early and unfairly by their inability to conform to a norm that was not their own. It would be my hope that the academics who read this book and apply it would do so with an altered appreciation for the authenticity of growth for the sake of growth. In other words, as
taller trees, let us not allow our darker Critical powers unfettered play upon the seedling artists in our midst.

Without specific tools and sufficient ego strengths, many gifted artists languish for years in the wake of such blows. Shamed at their supposed lack of talent, shamed by their “grandiose” dreams, the young artists may channel their gifts into commercial endeavors and then forget their dreams of doing more groundbreaking (and risky) work. They may work as editors instead of writers, film editors instead of film directors, commercial artists instead of fine artists, and get stuck within shouting distance of their dreams. Often audacity, not authentic talent, confers fame on an artist. The lack of audacity—pinched out by critical abuse or malnourished through neglect—may cripple many artists far superior to those we publicly acclaim. In order to recover our sense of hope and the courage to create, we must acknowledge and mourn the scars that are blocking us. This process may seem both painstaking and petty, but it is a necessary rite of passage. Just as a teenager must gain autonomy from an overbearing parent, so too an artist must gain autonomy from malignant artistic mentors.

When Ted finished writing his first novel, he bravely sent it off to a literary agent. He also sent a check for one hundred dollars to pay the agent for taking the time and trouble to read it. What came back was a single page of unusable, irresponsible, and vague reaction: “This novel is half good and half bad. That's the worst kind. I cant tell you how to fix it. I suggest pitching it out.”

When I met Ted, he had been blocked for seven years. Like many beginners, he hadn't even known to get another opinion. It was with great difficulty that he handed his novel over to me. As Ted's friend, I was heartbroken for him that this novel had been manhandled. As a professional, I was impressed—so impressed I found myself with my first student to unblock.

“Please try to write again. You can do it. I know you can do it,” I started in. Ted was willing to risk unblocking. It is now twelve years since Ted began his work with the morning pages. He has written three novels and two movies. He has an impressive literary agent and a growing reputation.

In order to get to where he is now, Ted had to refeel and mourn the wounding he had endured as a young writer. He had to make his peace with the lost years this wounding had cost him. A page at a time, a day at a time, he had to slowly build strength.

Like the career of any athlete, an artist's life will have its injuries. These go with the game. The trick is to survive them, to learn how to let yourself heal. Just as a player who ignores a sore muscle may tear it further, an artist who buries his pain over losses will ultimately cripple himself into silence. Give yourself the dignity of admitting your artistic wounds. That is the first step in healing them.

No inventory of our artistic injuries would be complete without acknowledging those wounds that are self-inflicted. Many times, as artists, we are offered a chance that we balk at, sabotaged by our fear, our low self-worth, or simply our other agendas.

Grace is offered an art scholarship in another city but doesn't want to leave Jerry, her boyfriend. She turns the scholarship down.

Jack is offered a dream job in his field in a faraway city. It's a great job but he turns it down because of all the friends and family he has where he is.

Angela gets terrible reviews in a terrible play and is then offered another lead in a challenging play. She turns it down.

These lost chances often haunt us bitterly in later years. We will work more extensively later with our artistic U-turns, but for now, just counting them as losses begins the process of healing them.

Art is the act of structuring time. “Look at it this way,” a piece of art says. “Here's how I see it.” As my waggish friend the novelist Eve Babitz remarks, “It's all in the frame.” This is particularly true when what we are dealing with is an artistic loss. Every loss must always be viewed as a potential gain; it's all in the framing.

Every end is a beginning. We know that. But we tend to forget it as we move through grief. Struck by a loss, we focus, understandably, on what we leave behind, the lost dream of the work's successful fruition and its buoyant reception. We need to focus on what lies ahead. This can be tricky. We may not know what lies ahead. And, if the present hurts this badly, we tend to view the future as impending pain.