Watching a short film of artist Do Ho Suh patiently tending the astonishing paper rubbings of his former New York apartment, I felt something shift in a problem that had been plaguing me for weeks.
The problem is so familiar to me, and maybe to most artists, as to be a routine part of the creative process. It is the problem of resistance. Sometimes it seems that resistance is the central experience of writing, and for me it comes in two broad types. There is the external resistance I have to actually sitting down to write – i.e. me resisting the work – and then the resistance I discover within the project itself – the work resisting me, its maker.
External: my resistance to the work
I used to think my perennial reluctance to go to the desk was just a matter of procrastination, that well-known, almost fetishised aspect of the artist’s life. I would collect favourite quotes and stories about it, like the (possibly apocryphal) one a painter friend told me about Lloyd Rees, who apparently once said he could spend all day lifting paint out from the cracks between his studio floorboards with a pin – and then all the next day putting it back in – in preference to painting. There are all the jokes about the housecleaning and cooking (procrastibaking) that only gets done when it’s time to write.
There is a deal of psychology research into the causes of procrastination, which boil down, I think, to fear and perfectionism. I found Carol Dweck’s work on the fixed-versus-growth mindset completely revelatory as a younger writer (in a nutshell: if you think of talent as a fixed quantity you’re more likely to procrastinate, whereas if you see talent as a mutable, growable resource, you’re more likely not to).
But given that I have thought about procrastination for a long time, overcome it enough to finish and publish a number of books, and yet still have this feeling of resistance all the time, I think it’s a deeper and perhaps a more essential part of the writing life than I’ve acknowledged before. It’s not just laziness, fear (I can’t do it) or perfectionism (if I don’t write anything, it won’t be awful), although all of these are definitely at play at any point in my own avoidance.
The other day I wrote a list of my symptoms of simple procrastinatory resistance. They include mindless internet use (especially social media and news/current affairs); too much television; too much daytime socialising; excessive anticipation of and rumination about non-writing jobs (like cooking dinner or social arrangements); excessive anticipation and planning of writing-adjacent jobs like cleaning the studio or archiving papers (planning, that is, as opposed to doing); excessive shopping of any kind; excessive planning of non-writing tasks, from travel to budgeting to household jobs. It was helpful to clearly identify these and write them down. I’ve done all of these this week alone.
Like most practising artists I have a series of effective remedies for this kind of resistance. The first is to re-establish a clear and regular routine, a habitual going to the desk.
I’ve always loved the Flaubert observation on this: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’1 I was reminded of this recently by actress Nikki Shields talking with Michael Cathcart on Radio National’s The Stage Show. She too used the Flaubert injunction to keep herself on track. Being a creature of intentional habits helped her work, she said:
It really spoke to me because … theatre is such an athletic investment, and such an emotional investment, and it really does require so much energy. You have to take care of yourself when you are your work, and your psychological state is how you make your income. I love the idea that being ordinary from day to day allows you to really tip into something that is out of the ordinary in your work.
I have not ever considered writing ‘an athletic investment’, but I certainly recognise its emotional demands, and have often found an intense session at the desk strangely physically tiring, too. What I like about a strictish routine is the way it conserves my energy by removing a huge number of micro decisions every day. If you do the same thing at the same time every day or week, you don’t need to make decisions over whether, when, or what to do. That conserved energy is then available for your work.
This is really about discipline: the ‘grit’ or pragmatism every artist needs. It’s not very sexy, but it is, I firmly believe, at the heart of every professional artist’s life. But there are other, more interesting ways of thinking about it.
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