If my writing process had a spirit animal it would be the Tortoise from the fable “The Tortoise And The Hare”.
For those unfamiliar, “The Tortoise And The Hare” is a childhood tale in which a tortoise challenges a fast, boastful Hare to a race. The Hare accepts, expecting to rout his slow moving opponent.
On the day of the race, the Hare jumps to a commanding lead. So commanding, that he decides to take a nap before completing the race. While the Hare snoozes the tenacious Tortoise inches his way forward, and crosses the finish line just as the Hare wakes up… teaching the shittalking and showboating Hare an important lesson in humility.
How does humble pie taste you cocky asshole
As a writer I’ve always loved the fabled tortoise. Like the lumbering hero, my writing process is slow and steadfast… often painfully so. I anguish over every word, labor over half formed sentences, and pick apart each paragraph like a wounded body on an operating table.
Is this enjoyable?
No, in fact, at times it is insanity inducing. But I’ve always viewed it as a cost of business. While the process may be painstakingly slow, something as sacred as the written word deserves this level of care. As the Tortoise And The Hare teaches us: slow and steady wins the race.
But what if the Tortoise isn’t the hero we make him out to be? What if the Hare is really the enviable character of the story?
We praise the Tortoise’s plodding persistence, but we ignore the Hare’s rapid efficiency. Let us not forget that the cocky Hare dozed off, and was still inches away from winning the race. If he had invested in a better alarm clock, he could have enjoyed both a swift victory and much needed nap. If that’s not efficiency in action I don’t know what is.
Good Luck In The Rematch
This hot take has put my own writing process into question. Are my agonizing writing procedures a necessary evil, or an excuse for my own inefficiency? Perhaps this writer could learn something from the newly humbled Hare. That’s why I created:
The Anxious Writer’s Power Hour
The challenge is an A/B test between two different writing methods. I want to pit my cautious, methodical writing process against one that is fast, free flowing, and (hopefully) more efficient. It’s a title fight between my inner perfectionist and his nimble, easy going cousin.
So how does it work?
For the next 4 weeks I will write 6 articles a week. Each article must be at least 250 words.
During the week (Monday thru Friday) I will write what I call “Hare Articles”.
A “Hare Article” has a strict time limit. Each weekday I will set a timer for an hour and start writing. Once the clock hits 60 minutes, I stop. It doesn’t matter if my work is incomplete, incoherent, or an inspired mess: once the hour is up, I stop writing and post what I’ve done.
Over the weekend I pass the baton to the more exacting part of my brain, and write a “Tortoise Article”.
A “tortoise article” is a post without a strict time limit. I can take as much time as I need over the weekend to complete it. As long as I submit it by 11:59pm on Sunday night.
At the end of the month I will submit the best “tortoise” and “hare” articles to a panel of my most sophisticated friends, and they will select a winner.
Who will win? Anyone’s guess!
Will Tony learn a lesson? I hope so!
Will he lose his mind in the process? Undoubtedly!
I invite you to place your bets, take your seats, and enjoy The Anxious Writer’s Power Hour!
On the evening of October 31st I came up with a silly idea. Most silly ideas I have are shot on site. However, through some miraculous ruse this one snuck past the gatekeeper and on November 1st The Be Creative And Shit Challenge was born!
The idea was simple: every day of the month of November I would create and share something (a drawing, poem, sculpture, etc.). The catch was, the quality of the creation didn’t matter. In fact, the shittier the better! I wanted to set the bar so low I had no excuse not to make something everyday.
I didn’t have many expectations going into the challenge. I thought of it as a playful way to flex my creative muscle, and get a chuckle from my friends and family kind enough to care.
However, in the process I learned some things about the joy of creation, laughing at your self consciousness, and the importance of taking small, silly, but bold actions in your life.
This blog is a summation of what I learned from making shitty art for a month.
The guy who made this sculpture is about to give you life advice
Lesson 1: You have hands for a reason. Use them!
We live in a digital world. A growing chunk of the population spends most of their waking hours slouched over Laptops and Tablets. Entire careers consist of moving lines of code, parsing through ones and zeroes. Even creative acts like photography, music production, and film making are done digitally.
These statements aren’t meant to disparage technology. It has provided many wonderful resources for people to create and share their work. But I think it has robbed us of the experience of creating physical things. Molding and manipulating objects is a uniquely human affair, it is what separates us from other lame animals without opposable thumbs.
Nice phins bro
The challenge reconnected me to the primal pleasure of crafting things with my hands. The tactile sensation of penning words on a page, brush strokes on a canvass, wet clay in my palms. I even wrote the first draft of this article with pen and paper. Check it out in its messy glory.
The digital world may be sleek and shiny but it is not a substitute for making something tangible. You’ve got hands for a reason, put them to good use!
Lesson 2: Set The Bar Low At The Beginning
The motto for this challenge is “create and share one SHITTY thing a day”. The emphasis on “shitty” was intentional. I wanted to remove any quality control from the process, and set the bar so low that failure was near impossible.
Anyone who has wanted to lose weight, save money, or work towards a goal of any sort knows that building a habit is diabolically difficult. If it were easy we would all have six pack abs and thousands more dollars in the bank. The same goes for any creative habit. That’s why I set a goal for myself that was only one step removed from “put your ass in a seat”.
The cool thing is, once you put said “ass in a seat” great things can happen. Simply showing up makes a difference. It builds momentum, strengthens the “habit building” synapses in your brain, and can lead you to create something you’re proud of.
Pretty Proud Of This Guy
Marginal gains aren’t sexy, but they are the building blocks that lead to something bigger.
Lesson 3: The Key To Sucking Less Is Giving Yourself Permission To Suck
Here’s the tough truth about starting anything… You suck in the beginning. It doesn’t matter if it’s playing the piano, teaching yourself to code, or learning to juggle, you’re not going to be very good when you begin.
And it gets worse! if you’re passionate about something you know what it looks like when performed at a high level, and you know that what you’re doing doesn’t compare. This is a phenomena that American Public Radio Personality Ira Glass calls “The Gap”.
Is there a way to pole vault over this dreaded gap, and skip the suckage? Not one that I’ve discovered, or anyone else for that matter. But The Be Creative And Shit Challenge taught me a cheat code you can use to lessen these growing pains:
Give yourself permission to suck!
Gave myself plenty of permission to suck with this sketch
Embrace your mediocrity with open arms. As Winston Churchill put it “success is going from failure to failure with great enthusiasm”. Starting anything is hard enough, haranguing yourself because you’re not “good” makes it twice as difficult. You’re now fighting a war on two fronts. Simply acknowledging that, at its onset, doing anything is hard and you’re going to suck a little takes pressure off yourself, and clears space for you to improve.
Lesson 4: Embrace Anonymity
Each day before posting my shitty work, my anxious mind took great joy in imagining all sorts of nightmare scenarios that would occur when I hit “send”. Sometimes my work would ignite an angry twitter mob. Sometimes it would awaken a nasty troll lurking on the dark corners of the internet. Other times it would be the object of ridicule by all the pretty girls who wouldn’t date me in High School.
To my knowledge none of these nightmare scenarios occurred. What happened instead? Well… nothing really. A friend might send a few words of support or the occasional heart emoji, but for the most part my beloved creations were either ignored, glossed over, or quickly forgotten after someone posted a more riveting picture of their dog in sunglasses.
Nothing you create will ever be better than this
At first glance this was disheartening. Why won’t the world shower me with the praise or scorn I so duly deserve? But upon further reflection was quite liberating!
You’ll never have as much freedom as when you’re starting out. Use your anonymity to find a voice and master your craft. Let it provide a safe space to experiment with ideas… especially whacky ones like this challenge. Some of them won’t stick, but who cares; hardly anyone’s watching.
Lesson 5:The Essence Of Creativity Is Fucking Around
I want to let you in on a little secret… Making terrible art is fun. I mean like REALLY fun!
People seem to enjoy it too. My most beloved works were often the shittiest.
A Fan Favorite
There is something disarming about seeing a horrible drawing. It lowers your defenses and makes both the creator and the observer a little less self conscious. It’s a reminder to be playful in a world that often seems sad and serious.
Writer and cartoonist Tim Kreider said: “The essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it”. I say we take this “fucking around” a little more seriously. At the end of the day we’re a bunch of monkey descendants on a rock hurtling through space. Why not enjoy the ride!
Lesson 6: If you want to be “creative” embrace the verb “to create”
In his article “The noun and the verb”, writer and illustrator Austin Kleon says: lots of people want to be a noun (writer, painter, actor) without doing the verb (writing, painting, acting). He concludes by urging people to “Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).”
For this blog I’m re-purposing his idea into: “If you want to be creative (adjective), embrace the verb “to create”.
Prior to this challenge, I fancied myself a creative person. I had some vague ideas in my head about songs, blogs, and books I’d like to write. I may have even lavished myself with titles like writer, poet, musician… all while creating nothing.
This whole silly endeavor was a challenge to myself to create something, anything, no matter how trivial it was. To do the verb “create”, even in it’s shittiest form, rather than sit comfortably and pine to be creative while not backing it up with any action.
This challenge was what I needed to get started. The blog you’re reading is me giving myself the advice I need to keep going. It’s personal but I think I’m far from alone in this struggle. If you’ve related to any of this, I invite you to embrace the verb and go out and create something!
Lesson 7: Support The Shit That Inspires You
I was going to end on the last point but there’s an immutable law of blogging that the best listicles need seven items.
I’ll keep this short and sweet. There are a lot of people out there making better art than the shit I’ve shared over the past month. These people have been some of the hardest hit by the global pandemic.
If you have money to spare, make a statement with your dollar and support people in your community making cool shit.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”– Jack Torrance The Shining
Today’s post is brought to you by the most relatable axe wielding murder to grace the silver screen… Jack Torrance from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”
This happy and very sane fellow!
In addition to being a deranged lunatic Jack is, like myself and some of you, an aspiring writer. He takes a job at the remote Overlook Hotel to escape the distractions of modern life and finally finish his novel.
Unfortunately a mixture of cabin fever and malevolent spirits in the hotel convince him to ditch the novel and try to kill his family instead.
The extent of Jack’s insanity is revealed when his wife Wendy discovers that his novel is merely the sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” written on hundreds of pages.
A detail I love is that the formatting on each page is different. It seems in the midst of his madness Jack took the time to play around with the formatting. Once a writer always a writer!
On the day I completed this challenge we were still waiting on the results of the US presidential election. An event so exacerbating that it makes Jack Torrance’s lunacy relatable.
In an attempt to retain my sanity and avoid Jack’s fate I created my own “one sentence” novel; formatted in a few different ways. I hope it brings some much needed sanity to your day!
Centered The Screenplay The Pyramid The Ol’ Off The Rails Jack
“If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter” – Blaise Pascal
3 lines. Seventeen syllables. Five syllables in the first and third line, seven in the second.
This is all you need to write a Haiku. A Japanese form of poetry so terse it requires more syllables to explain than write. Yet, it took me nearly an hour to write the Haiku below:
I’ll preface this by saying that I write at a pace that makes glaciers look like Formula One cars. But still, it’s a Haiku for fuck sakes! Why did such a simple poem take so long to write?
Paradoxically, Haikus are difficult to write because they’re simple. When the infinite expanse of an empty page narrows to the confines of 17 syllables, you have to choose every detail with care.
When you’re robbed of the luxury of inessential words and superfluous syllables, you’re forced to pair an idea down to its most elemental form. That’s what makes this a great exercise not just for writers, but anyone who makes a living teaching or sharing ideas.
In many cases “more” detracts from your message. Especially with the vast competition for people’s attention, it pays to express ideas in a quick, simple way.
So get your quills and start writing. Sayōnara folks!
“Be creative? I don’t have time for that! I’ve got stuff to do.”
A perfectly justified response when a “woo woo” right brainer, like myself says you should be more creative.
And look I get it…
It’s easy to think of creativity as a luxury reserved for the rare savant, the chronically underemployed “starving artist”, or the rich kid whose parents paid their way through art school.
But the truth is you don’t need to work in a creative field to “be creative”. Hell, you don’t even need a so-called creative hobby.
For the more practically-minded out there I want you to think of creativity as a form of problem solving. A way to come up with an abundance of solutions for everyday tasks you face.
For example, for my be creative and shit challenge I tasked myself to write the word “VOTE” using different objects in my apartment.
The task itself is simple, all you need is a circular object (for the “O”) and a few parallel objects (for the “V” “T” “E”) to construct the word.
While the task is simple, there are an infinite number of ways to complete it. This is where creativity comes in! You can use solid objects like I did with these pins:
You can cut objects into the different shapes like I did with this cucumber.
You can combine and bend elastic objects, like I did with these receipts.
These are just a few examples. There are likely hundreds of ways I could have spelled “VOTE” with the paltry possessions in my apartment.
While I chose a relatively straightforward problem to solve, the same principles apply to larger, more complex ones. The type of problems you likely deal with at home and work. And the even bigger ones we collectively face as a society.
Creativity is an expansive act. It widens our scope of the world, and allows us to manipulate mind and matter to create possibilities which previously didn’t exist.
This is something that can be applied to all people, in all disciplines. So whether you’re an abstract painter or an accountant, I invite you to bring a creative mindset to the problems you face.
Initially I highlighted the quote because it might make me sound cool at a cocktail party. But then I began to consider its implications.
Maybe creativity, in its purest form, really is just fucking around.
Think of it like this…
A great painting begins as a sketch on a page; a finished symphony with someone noodling on a piano.
The painting or the symphony may be the end result of creativity, but they are not its “essence”. The essence is the playful drive to make something out of nothing.
Creativity becomes hard, painful work when we take it too seriously. When we approach it with the lofty goal of making something timeless or significant.
When we do it for some ulterior motive, rather than just for “the hell of it”
However, I have a problem. One that gets in the way of actually creating anything.
You see, I have a little critic that lives inside of my head. He may be little but he’s quite mean and talks loudly.
He says things like:
“Dude you’re a terrible writer, don’t even try”
“Don’t publish that; they’ll laugh you out the room”
“That was a shitty little picture you drew.”
Can you relate?
While this “inner critic” speaks in different voices to different people; I suspect most creative people have one.
I’ve spent years trying to battle this inner critic… mostly to no avail… so for one month I wanted to try something else.
For 30 days I’m going to prove my inner critic right by creating one “shitty thing” every day. I call it…
“The Be Creative And Shit Challenge”
The goal is to create and share something every day for the month of November… no matter how shitty it is.
That “something” can be a drawing, photo, poem, piece of avant garde performance art… doesn’t matter!
The goal is simply to create one “shitty” thing a day. I want you to set the bar so low that it throttles any excuse your inner critic has.
This is no time to create your masterpiece. This is your opportunity to roll around in the creative muck. Enjoy the fun and failure that go hand in hand with making things.
And most importantly… Give that nagging “inner critic” in your head the “fuck you” it so duly deserves.
