I started in show business as an actor. Well, strictly speaking I started as the lead singer for a rock-and-roll band, but given that I was thirteen when I auditioned for “Paradox” in Jimmy McNally’s cramped basement, and that the pinnacle of our public performances was playing the midnight “Rock ‘n Bowl” at the Timonium Fair Lanes, where Jimmy also worked as a fry cook, let’s just say for simplicity’s sake that I began my show business career as an actor.
No one, least of all I, should argue that an actor’s work is easy; but the discipline it requires, in my experience, can be leveraged largely from external sources. If you have some talent and ideally get a little training, then you can start auditioning for jobs. If you manage to land those, then someone other than yourself will be telling when to show up, what to do when you do, and when to go home when the rehearsal or show is done.
Anyone who decides, like I did back in the late 1980’s, that they also might want to wright for the stage, soon learns that the coterie of people in place to whip-crack— the teachers, directors, and stage managers—are simply not there for playwrights. This is because-- and we all know it is true, whether or not we care to admit it-- no one in or out of this business really cares if anyone ever wrights another original play. (I promise I will dedicate another essay to this subject, so save your outraged disputations to this easily provable fact for when I do.)
So what do you do when you want to create new work in an art form that does not want new work? And how do you drive yourself when you are used to others imposing the necessary discipline? Well, if you are me, in the late 80’s, an impoverished, arrogant and charmless college drop-out, working as a day laborer at the National Archives, you do what your Irish Catholic forbears taught you to do: you create demons. With time and careful nurturing, these demons will grow strong enough to drive you to create.
I won’t enumerate the various demons I have spawned to spur me over the years. Some are deeply personal, others closely held trade secrets. If you want demons to propel you, conceive and grow your own. I will share, however, a fairly prosaic one which I have employed probably with the most success over the longest periods of my career: the demon of hours tracking.
Here’s how it goes. Decide how many hours you can devote to creativity in a given day, week or month. Shoot for that goal. If you make it easily, adjust it higher. If you miss your mark, consider adjusting it lower, but first try again to hit it. Keep upping your goals over the weeks, months and years of your career. In 2010 I put in more “creative hours” in a single year than I have since 1997 when I was working full-time as a freelance documentary writer; and to my credit, I have been more conservative over the last half decade about what counts. Back in the 90’s, when I was single and had little to care about besides putting food and booze in my mouth, getting laid and becoming the greatest playwright you might ever meet, everything I did that was even remotely creative counted against my “writing work hours”: all the movies I saw, all the books I read. I remember describing the discipline to someone at a party and joking, “Hell, even this conversation counts. I can count sexual fantasies against my hours, though they usually don’t take me all that long.”
About three months ago I began to toy with the idea of giving my demons, especially the “hours-tracking” demon the year of 2011 off. The fantasy felt delicious. When you let demons drive you, you often find yourself feeling like you work for them instead of the other way around. Even as I write this I’m thinking to myself, “Well, this is taking quite a while to get right, but that’s good, because it’ll count against my hours for the week.” Only it won’t, because I am not tracking them anymore. It feels odd, like I’m writing this essay for free; but of course, I’m always writing these for free. My only payment before was the satisfaction I got from beating back my demons for another week.
Messing with one’s discipline has consequences. One result will soon become apparent to readers of Just Wrought, as the output here is sure to diminish. That is part of the plan though, since I am looking to listen more than talk going forward. Other consequences are less predictable. I could slip into a slough of laziness: watching more TV, reading more trashy books, staring more often out the window at nothing but the trees. Frankly, all of that sounds pretty good right now.
Potential upsides include happening onto new veins of creativity to mine, ones that were obscured by a slavish devotion to appeasing my demons. Or I might finally decide to give up writing all together. Seems unlikely, but odd things happen when you cut yourself loose.
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