Subtract ... comparison

Warning signs your envy is out of control - and finding 'expansive comparison' instead.

Once I met a scientist who compared himself to Picasso.

He admitted this quietly, in a sheepish sort of way, when I asked him about the role of ego and ambition in his ground-breaking research. He said he did not feel competitive with other scientists, but that when he thought about his own life and his work in the long term, it was Picasso’s range and ambition and innovation he aspired to.

I loved the scientist for this. I loved that he was reaching for something grand, and was searching beyond his own field for a guide. The fact that his role model was not Darwin or Einstein or Galileo but instead the world’s most famous painter spoke to me of an optimistic, reaching, creative intelligence. It struck me that his approach was the kind of thing artists do, in making their work. Looking for inspiration everywhere – from other times, other genres, other cultures. Grabbing material and approaches from anywhere, and pulling it into the work.

The scientist came to mind because I have been thinking about artists and comparison, that thing we are constantly told not to do. Comparing ourselves with others, we learn, is a toxic trait, a path straight to misery, and we must train ourselves out of it. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I compare my work to that of other artists all the time, and I think it helps me become a better writer. But it’s true that there are damaging versions of comparison. So when does it harm, when does it help, and how do you know if your envy is out of control?

Competitive comparison: the problem of envy

I have three dear friends who may be the only writers I have ever known to be free of the common problem of artistic envy. I think they are highly unusual. It’s very good to be friends with people like this – the kind of people who, when you occasionally confess to your own shameful envious feelings, look at you as if you are speaking another language. They simply, truly, don’t understand. It is good to know this kind of person because they show you that envy is not the natural, inevitable state we are so often led to believe it is.

I am – sadly – not like these friends. I have most certainly envied fellow writers in my time, and I have also experienced the envy of others. I think I can say for certain that whether it travels from you to others, or from others towards you, envy is a poison that will embitter you, sour your talent, destroying your creative work and your friendships as you go. It is a poison that you can, if you choose, eradicate from your life.

But you’d better choose fast.

We all know artists whose talent has been diminished, clouded or even totally consumed by envy and bitterness. We all know it’s bad, and we are all ashamed of the tendency in ourselves. But I’m not sure we realise just how easily even a little bit of envy erodes our talent and any potential sense of fulfilment or joy. I’m also not sure we acknowledge how often we enjoy our envy, how much we like to cultivate and spread it.

In my early years as a writer I used to find others’ confessional accounts of their own envy – like this one and this one – deeply reassuring; I hoarded them and shared and read them repeatedly. They meant someone was telling the truth about ugly feelings, which meant I wasn’t alone, and it meant those feelings were somehow natural and inevitable. But over time something has shifted because these days when I see artists lengthily confessing to their envy – or not confessing it, but subtly or nakedly displaying it – I just feel depressed and bored.

This corrosive, competitive comparison has a few different sources, I think. One of them is anxiety, particularly around crunch points in an artist’s life (opening a show, applying for funding, publishing a book, watching the dreaded prize or grants lists come out) – those times when expectations and reality converge in mostly disappointing ways. A lot of this is to do with financial pressure. We all know that the economics of living as an artist or a writer are deeply stressful, and when you’re stony broke and see other writers ‘succeeding’ while you are ‘failing’, it’s no fun.

But another wellspring of envy is what seems to me a fairly juvenile conception of ‘fairness’; the dichotomy of the deserving-vs-undeserving. This springs from some sense of entitlement. Maybe you have not even admitted this to yourself yet, but I think it’s often lying there deep inside. This entitlement – to success and recognition – comes by right of … what? Our parents’ belief in our specialness? Our English or art teacher’s?

Perhaps it comes from expectations set by early success that never quite repeated itself? Or conversely from a period of recent luck, giving you a greedy certainty that this hard-won success is for keeps. Maybe our entitlement comes from some assurance we received from a publisher or art dealer or fellow artist that hard work leads to success, or from the fact that we were working in that style, with those materials, on that story/topic/idea/place long before that artist. From our suspicion that we worked harder, for longer, than them. Does it come from the idea that we were first in the queue?

All of this is rubbish. None of us is entitled to anything, and if I’m older than seventeen and continue to believe that good things should only come to the right people, that’s a sign of my arrested development. Who am I to decide who the ‘right’ person is anyway?

One thing about this destructive form of comparison is the weird arrogance at its centre, despite how small the competitive envying person might feel. It’s what Kathryn Chetkovich called a ‘peculiarly severe egotism’:

I refused to let myself form the question, but I knew it was in there, all the more powerful for going unasked: If I couldn’t do that, what was the point of my doing it at all? With that peculiarly severe egotism of the insecure, I could not believe I would ever be the best, and I could not bear to be anything less.

Warning signs of dangerous envy

So how do you know if - beyond the odd, passing lurch in the gut - your tendency to envious comparison is getting out of control? Here are some warning signs I’ve observed over the decades, in myself and in others.

• You half-consciously designate a ‘competitor’, often someone whose work is released around the same time as yours, and track their progress (or not) with excessive interest.

• You closely follow ‘successful’ artists whose work you do not respect in the media or on social media, and privately share their posts with others for ridicule.

• You come up with many reasons for another’s success, other than their work is good.

• You take real pleasure in ‘hatchet jobs’ and ‘takedowns’ (reading - or worse, writing them) and avidly share them with your friends.

• Thinking about others’ success makes you want to stop working. Worse, it does make you stop working.

• Reading / seeing work you admire makes you want to stop working. Worse, it does make you stop working.

• You think and speak a lot about your own inadequacy and failure, putting your energies into this instead of your work.

• You hang around with other people who also fetishise failure and difficulty – it’s a currency between you.

• You keep tally of other artists’ output and milestones and compare yours unfavourably.

• You register official complaints about the winner of a prize/grant/opportunity for which you were a contender (yes I have actually heard of this, and more than once).

• You follow news of award shortlists, publication offers, grant recipients, exhibition prices or book deals with excessive interest. Or, at all.

• You find it difficult to congratulate artists whose work you don’t like because it’s ‘dishonest’ (another might call it ‘gracious’).

• You are angry, as opposed to temporarily upset or disappointed, when you are rejected or don’t win a prize, sell your work, get a grant.

• You loudly criticise other artists in your sphere and recruit friends to your cause.

• You only compare yourself to artists in your own genre/art form/city/country - the closer to home, the more assiduously you can keep an eye on their progress.

If you recognise more than two or three of these, I have a question for you: Why are you doing this? And I have some advice: stop it. Now.

Make an enemy of envy

Make an enemy of envy, says critic Jerry Saltz. But unlike most people who talk about this, Saltz stresses the urgency of the task: ‘You must make an enemy of envy today. Today. By tonight,’ he says, because ‘if you don’t, it will eat your life.’

In How to Be an Artist, he writes:

‘It will eat you alive as an artist; you’ll live in its service, always on the edge of a funk, dwelling on past slights, always seeing what other people have, scanning for other artists who are mentioned in some story instead of you. Envy distracts the mind, leaving less room for development and, most important, for honest self-criticism.’

If you think envy may be a problem for you, read that paragraph again, aloud. Take it in. Is this what you want for yourself?

In the end, all this stuff is not only dangerous and corrosive. After a certain point in an artist’s life it is also just unbelievably boring. As Zadie Smith wrote of her own teenage impulses in this direction:

In truth, my preoccupation with other people’s luck and beauty had long ago turned ugly, my cleverness had curdled into bitterness—none of it was remotely interesting.

An alternative! Expansive comparison

The greatest problem with a tendency to negative comparison is that it suffocates and smothers the artistic impulse, closing things down, when what every artist needs in order to keep working is oxygenation - we need inspiration, generation, the constant opening out of our creative pathways.

Happily, comparing yourself to others doesn’t have to be corrosive and ugly. Done in the right way, comparison can be an expansive exercise, galvanising, and nourishing.

You already know the positive kind of comparison I’m talking about, but perhaps you don’t call it that. Maybe it’s better described as emulation, channelling, even ‘impersonation’. Still, it does involve comparing yourself or your work to another – but instead of falling into paralysis or bitterness, you use the exercise to work, to do better, expand your horizons, aim higher.

This kind of comparison can show you what you want, and function as a kind of touchstone for your work when you are feeling lost – think of my scientist and his Picasso. Several different types of nourishing comparison – and how to do it – come to mind.

Go wild with your role models

At any time I have any number of creative role models travelling around with me in my mind. These are most often people I’ve never met, and I know nothing of them other than what I see of their public life. Mostly they are not Australian. Frequently they are dead, and often they are not writers. But I carry them around with me because the ways they have created and conducted themselves in public life, their artistic choices and their bodies of work, show me how I want to proceed in mine.

The way to get this to work for you is to open your mind – you have all of history, all of art, and the whole world to choose from! Why limit your self-comparison choices to your small, often quite mediocre, local and contemporary artistic milieu? Why not choose Picasso? (Madonna does.) Why not Nureyev? Why not O’Keefe, Caravaggio, Austen, Dr Seuss, Bourgeois, Hitchcock, Woolfe, Anohni and the Johnsons or Troye Sivan? And yes, I am including people not of my own gender here, for why should gender be an obstacle?

I loved talking years ago with the (now 90 year old) expressionist painter Ann Thomson (definitely one of my role models) about her art. An early draft of my Saturday Paper profile included her observation, in relation to the highly sexist 1960s, that her gender never once occurred to her as a barrier.

“I never had any idea it would be any different for a woman. Why would it be? I was an artist! And I related to the great artists! I didn’t think whether they were men or women, I just thought they were the great people who did what I wanted to do!”

Why not choose the great artists? Why not even choose someone or something other than an artist as your role model? Why not an astronaut, an economist, a doctor – or a museum, a tree, a ship? This sounds nuts, but once you start thinking broadly about potential comparisons, the universe opens up to you in magnificent ways.

I wrote about this kind of thing in The Luminous Solution as one of the nine creative processes I discovered in my PhD research. I called it ‘impersonating or embodying’ – a more specific, more active and deliberate version of the role-model idea. It involves:

… imagining the perspective offered by someone, or even something, completely unrelated to you or your work … In [this] fashion, I found comfort and inspiration in the disturbing and mysterious works of the surrealist artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois. During the writing of The Natural Way of Things, I was often highly anxious that I didn’t understand the meaning of what I was doing. When I came across Bourgeois’s strange works, I decided to abandon my attempts to understand, by way of ‘pretending’ to be a visual artist. Rightly or wrongly, I felt visual artists were not required to articulate the meaning of their work as they made it in the way writers feel obliged to; it seemed to me that their job was purely to create.

In one recorded session, I articulated my impersonation process by alluding to Bourgeois’s Cell installations, in which female body parts and pieces of clothing hang inside large, threatening metal cages:

Every time I start getting anxious, when I think, ‘I don’t know what it means, what am I trying to say?’ and all that, I think, ‘I’m just going to be a visual artist with this book.’ I’m going to be Louise Bourgeois, who just made her weird things and put them out there—I’ll just hang some uteruses in a cage. That’s the only way for it to work.’

…

Using other art forms and artists as role models in this way can give a surge of energy to the writer’s process, with great surprises and important developments often resulting.

Observation, then action

In the course of writing my books I frequently come up against horrible and seemingly insurmountable problems. These might be problems of structure, voice, character - anything. At these times I turn to other writers to see how they might have overcome such problems.

I clearly remember one February day when I’d returned to writing The Weekend after taking a long break from it. Nothing was working in the scene I was writing and rewriting. The prose was dead. It was impossible.

After I went to the kitchen and tearfully complained to my husband that this book was a failure, and after he drily replied, ‘Welcome back to work,’ (meaning I always said this and to be honest it was quite tedious for him to have to hear it yet again), I went back to my desk and picked up my copy of Anne Enright’s The Green Road that happened to be lying nearby. I read my scene, then I read one of hers. Mine was dull, lifeless. Hers sparkled with energy. So what was the difference?

I read them both, over and over, comparing closely, to discover that while my prose itself was fine, the person in my scene was not doing anything. She was sitting and thinking about herself. The people in Enright’s, by contrast, were thinking about themselves but also moving, talking, responding, noticing the world around them. There was my answer: my static interiority versus her layering of thought and exterior movement and perception. I snapped out of it and got back to work. I retrieved my scene and loaded it up with a lot more movement and externalisation of my character’s mind state, improving it and solving two other problems into the bargain.

This leads me to one of my personal rules about comparison. I’m only allowed to do it if it is attended by detailed, careful observation - and then action. If I allow my observation to be followed by paralysis and whining about my misfortune, I deserve all the misery I get.

This comparison-into-action model also helps fend off the icky resentment that goes with envy, because it requires you to look carefully and honestly at how your envied other came to their glorious state of perfection, success, whatever.

OK, sometimes it’s their pure good fortune and your bad. (Even that’s revealing: shit happens over which you have no control, so you may as well get over yourself.) But more often you discover that they got there via a hell of a lot of (mostly invisible to you, the casual ungenerous observer) hard work, some luck, strategic thinking, initiating contact with helpful people, risk, doing scary things, failure and learning from it, improving their skill through long and disciplined self-education, not whining, making mistakes, hard revision, etc. etc. etc. Almost all of which are available to you too, if you want them. But only if you take action - the sooner the better.

Beyond compare

There is an alternative, of course, to all of this comparing: just don’t do it. Turn away from it whenever it enters your mind and put your energies elsewhere. Forget about what other people are doing. Just – do your work.

Ursula le Guin – yes, even she! – wrote about the destructive power of comparison. ‘My insecurity is incurable’, she said, but:

Fortunately, it operates only when I read about writers I dislike, never when I’m actually writing. When I’m at work on a story, nothing could be farther from my mind than anybody else’s stories, or status, or success.

So simple, so true. It’s impossible for me to work well if I’m too distracted by other people’s stuff of any kind, but this insecurity-envy loop is a particularly damaging one.

But every practising artist will recognise this, I believe: when you are truly absorbed in your work, in the discoveries and the puzzles and the materials and the vision and potential mastery within it, everything else falls away.

We all began this creative life, after all, because of what was inside us, not what was outside. The greatest cure for all creative ills, always, is to shut out the jittery performative world - and go back to the work.

This month I’ve been …

Reading

• Women & Children, Tony Birch

• Lioness, Emily Perkins

• The Settlement, Jock Serong

• Not a Novel, Jenny Erpenbeck

• One Another, Gail Jones

Watching

• May December

• WHAM!

Seeing & visiting

• Charleston House, Lewes, United Kingdom

• Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland

• James Joyce grave, Zurich, Switzerland

Listening to

• Read This, Anne Enright

• Thanks For The Offer, Jojo Hick (my nephew! debut single!)

Eating & cooking

• Spanakopita at Morchella, Clerkenwell UK

• Orecchietti with pumpkin, broccoli, cauliflower, chilli