Subtracting ... resistance

The two types of artistic resistance

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.

Gustave Flaubert

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.

Rachel Cusk talks about discipline as ‘desire’, and I agree. The discipline is born of wanting to do this thing more than you don’t want to do it. Cusk told the Louisiana Channel:

It’s something I think about a lot these days. Why do some people fail to serve their talent? Why am I still here, why are other people not? I think discipline is a massive component of creating a body of work, and the further I get the more I see that really is true. Turning up over and over and over again – whatever that is, it’s what some people are able to do and others aren’t. And talent is like personality, like any version of fate: it responds to how it is treated. You can live the wrong life, you can treat your talent wrongly, [or you can override a lack of talent by force of will]. I guess I believe in that, to an extent: desire. I don’t think talent is necessarily something handed out. I think desire is very powerful in making expressive work.

One of the benefits of discipline and routine is that it takes questions of ‘quality’ out of the equation, at least for a time. If you are bound to go to the desk a certain number of days a week or hours a day or to produce a certain number of words in a session, then ideas about whether the work is good enough, or you are good enough, are completely irrelevant. I have found a tremendous freedom in tossing any evaluations of quality – especially, and crucially, in the first draft stage – out of the picture altogether. Good work is highly unlikely to occur every day or week or session, often for months at a time. But so what? As the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Magazine art critic and writer Jerry Saltz told me, the only method that works is, well, work:

‘I’m afraid you just gotta work, work, work, you big babies! So what if it’s bad!?’

The above holds true most of the time. But discipline, routine, even understanding the patterns and causes of procrastination won’t always allow you to keep going. Occasionally, the turns of life can simply stop us in our tracks. While I’m in awe of the ability some artists possess to keep making work in the most difficult of circumstances, I am not that artist. I’ve suspended work many times – during serious illness, the serious illness of people I love, during bereavement. Other stressors – financial destitution, serious mental illness, violence, despair – are real blocks to the creative impulse and I think it’s irresponsible, not to say highly romantic, to suggest that creative work must always be possible. That said, I bow down to those artists who not only endure the direst circumstances, but use them as fuel and inspiration. Like Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, who survived a difficult early life to make it into art school, but had no money for paint. Instead she made work from bits of garbage she collected on the way to her classes. Her paucity of materials helped birth her wildly original work. Like other artists before her, she came to make art not just despite the difficulties, but in some ways because of them.

Internal: the work’s resistance to me

The causes of resistance I’ve described so far can be thought of as largely external. But the deeper type of resistance is a different beast, coming not just from within the artist, but from within the work itself. This sort of resistance comes even when one is not avoidant, when one may even be deeply engaged with the work. And in fact I have come to understand that this is a necessary kind of resistance – something that must be wrestled with, resolved, in the art making process.

Philip Roth referred to it as ‘looking for trouble’ in his 1984 Paris Review interview:

What matters most isn’t there at all. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

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My friend and colleague Vicki Hastrich may not have gone looking for trouble, but it found her anyway when she came up against an insurmountable problem in her ambitious, potentially impossible, novel in progress. In her extraordinary ‘natural history’ of herself, Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and The Singular Life, she writes:

The novel had failed. Perhaps not permanently, because there was still a maddening pulse at its centre, but certainly for the time being – maybe for a very long time. My material was exhausted, I was exhausted. I needed to take stock. I needed to repair.

I decided to go fallow.

The more I thought about it the more I warmed to the idea: I would go dormant but in a way that was still active. If I opened myself up and calmly listened, there might be all sorts of things to hear – things I didn’t immediately have to turn into something else, as writers often feel compelled to do. In fact, I would be anti-production.

Vicki revived her artistic life through making an intentional ‘fallow project’ of this anti-production (you can hear more about it in my podcast interview with her from a few years ago). I’m struck that in the extract above she refers to her book as ‘my material’, because the idea of materials and resistance is something visual artists often speak about.

I loved reading this, for example, in Idra Novey’s novel Take What You Need, featuring a sculptor protagonist:²

On the drive back from Deerfield, I tried to mentally prepare for the struggle up the front steps, to think of it as what Louise called the necessary battle with one’s material. No real art, Bourgeois said, was possible without a fight with one’s material. And wouldn’t she know, having conquered just about everything? Steel. Marble. Pantyhose. Nightmares. Surely, I could conquer a few pieces of sheet metal without tearing my shoulder from its socket.

Film artist Fiona Tan, too, welcomes the ‘resistance and obstacles’ offered by her materials.

I think there's something very important about having material that you can have in your hands - that you can see, and feel, and smell. And rub your fingers around in it or get your paintbrush wet. That’s all I think quite important. … there is a confinement, and within that I have to find a way – it’s quite helpful actually to have these restrictions because it makes you more creative, within the limitations of the material.

Nightmares or marble, sculpture or film or literature, the material is the material. And in a work of substance, within the material there will always be resistance. I have a certain amount of envy for visual artists and this issue of material resistance, because it allows the problems to be externalised. Whereas writing a novel, I’ve often said, is like working with a lump of clay, shaping and moulding it until it takes form – except first we have to invent the clay itself. Our material comes from within ourselves. This offers great freedom - but not, at least at the start, the helpful limitations Tan describes above.

Maybe this is why for me, this deeper type of material resistance is often greatest on starting a new project - my material is not yet invented, and the resistance is about finding my way into its creation. This could be a problem of form, voice, or some other thing that does in fact need to be right, or right-ish, in order to begin.

I used to think I could start anywhere, just barrel in with any approach, and the work would resolve itself around me as I went, so long as I had the discipline to just get stuck in. That served me well enough for a long time.

But these days I trust my unconscious more, and I understand that right now, starting this new work, I must pay attention to the particular resistance of the moment. It’s to do with form, I think, and pace.  

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Psychologist and writer whisperer Alison Manning³ believes this deep form of resistance is something that can be understood by paying attention to the body. The way one physically responds to a thought about the work – a tension in the face, say, or a slump of the shoulders, a change in the heart rate or sensation in the stomach – is, Alison says, delivering some information to the artist about the problem at hand. And the job for the artist is ‘attunement’ – paying close attention to, and accurately interpreting that somatic information, while remaining tolerant and accepting of the uncertain state required, often for uncomfortably long periods, for this interpretation to take place.

I believe her. For it was noticing an absolutely physical response to watching Do Ho Suh work – a sudden slowing of my breathing and heart rate - that led to the yielding in my current bout of resistance to my own work.

Suh entirely covered every surface in his old apartment with white paper – doors, walls, doorhandles, light switches, taps, stove knobs, all of it. And then he painstakingly makes a rubbing, with crayon or pencil, over the entirety of each surface.

In this short, beautiful documentary he was nearing the end of his third year on the rubbing part of this project. He says:

If I write ‘rubbing’ in Korean, people could read it as ‘loving’ because there is no distinction between R and L in the Korean alphabet. I think the gesture of rubbing is a very loving gesture, so I made the connection between rubbing and loving and that’s how the title came about. My energy has been accumulated and in a way I think my rubbing shows that …

Elsewhere he says the ‘process of rubbing is literally caressing the surface with a pencil, and is a gesture of loving.’

Which, of course, reminds me of what Nabokov reportedly told his students:

‘Caress the details … the divine details.’

And here’s my clue, in that gentle, physical word, caress.

Each time I think of Do Ho Suh in that apartment – his soft, careful voice, his crouching at his unperturbed, repetitive pencil work – everything in my body and mind instantly calms. My senses are trying to bring me a message. And I’m not entirely sure what it is yet, but it’s to do with this painstaking form of observation that is not a way towards the work, it is the work. My way through resistance for now is to quieten, to soften, to submit to something resembling Suh’s attentive, honouring, patient practice. I must not hurry toward the finished whole, but instead surrender to practice - possibly highly repetitive practice - on the part; to a slow, very quiet observance of the blank material of my novel. And begin my own version of rubbing = loving.

This month I’ve been …

Reading

• We All Lived in Bondi Then, Georgia Blain - published January 30

• Hazzard and Harrower - the Letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (read in proof - published in May)

• Modern Nature, Derek Jarman

• The Art of Mystery, Maud Casey

• Thinking About, Timothy Snyder (newsletter - thank you Viv Groskop!)

Listening to

• Read This - Michael Williams’ literary podcast

• Cover Two, Joan As Police Woman

• HG Wells, the father of science fiction - The Science Show ABC RN

Seeing, watching

• Ann Thomson survey, SH Ervin Gallery until March 3

• Amazing Grace - Aretha Franklin documentary, SBS on Demand

• Event For A Stage in Tacita Dean, Museum of Contemporary Art until March 3

Eating

• Thai fish fillet baked in banana leaves

• Spiced Indian slaw

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1. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Gertrude Tennant, 25 December 1876

2. Idra Novey, Take What You Need, 2023 Daunt Books, London

3. Alison is offering new workshops soon - the WriterMind Project. I highly recommend her - details at the link above.