Creativity When Your To-Do List Never Ends
Late last year, I received this message from reader Courtney Daniels:
Has the pandemic really affected writers' and other creatives' ability to imagine/dream? Anecdotal evidence says it has. I've heard about other writers having trouble writing. (I've heard many have turned to other outlets or activities.) Or do you think this is an excuse, just a form of procrastination that has hardened into a habit (of not creating)?
I wish Mr. Schread could be here now.
My high school English teacher was thoughtful and methodical and painstakingly consistent. He never did something without a deeper purpose in mind, which often meant a deeper lesson for us, his students. Troublesome students claimed he was just being cruel, but I always suspected he had a reason for every little rule -- including why he would measure the margins of our papers.
Damn.
Why does that kind of thing even matter?
In his quieter moments, Mr. Schread could be found with a ruler in-hand, ensuring that the margins between the printer ink and the edge of the paper matched his EXACT specifications. He'd remind us once, before each assignment, and then a few forgetful or maybe purposefully rebellious students would receive an additional reminder, scrawled in red onto the page, should they ignore his rule:
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For the life of me, I can't remember the actual length. Two inches? 1.5? 1.675? Three decimal points wouldn't have surprised me, coming from The Schreader.
Yet for the life of me, I can't think of a more inspiring teacher. The man just understood writing, and creativity, and the ideas we need right now to answer Courtney's question.
I just wish I'd realized that part sooner in my own career.
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I loved Schread for many reasons, but the margins thing? I never really understood that until recently. The things I loved about him were much more obviously lovable. When he read a work of literature to us, he would stand on his toes, stretching one arm out, balancing a tattered copy of Huck Finn or Gatsby in one hand, periodically pushing up his glasses from the tip of his nose with the other. He'd bring characters and moments and stories to life. He'd bring words to life. Words. What I'd previously seen as just some kind of utilitarian thing, Schread made transformative.
Damn.
I want to write like that.
Of course, then reality hits. Especially as professionals, our to-do lists never end. The gears of modern work grind away at all that Schread-like emotion and inspiration. Then you add in a pandemic? (A pandemic?!) (EVEN MORE pandemic????) As I've been known to say:
Damn. (Among many other things. Oh-so-many other things, my friend...)
So why did Schread measure the margins? Why did we have such strict guidelines around seemingly superfluous things? Because clearly, they weren't. They aren't. They're little things we can control.
We can't always arrive feeling inspired, but we can work towards it. Or, shifting the emphasis, we can work towards it.
We won't always have the energy to muster those sweeping, Schreadian emotions. I don't know about you, but showing up at all is a win for me lately. Showing up and summoning the height of our powers? Good luck.
But we're professionals. We simply can't rely on luck. But we can rely on the simple things within our practice that help us assume the posture.
I think the things around our work often hurt our ability to do the work because we tend to rely on those things to get us into flow, rather than relying on the work itself. But we don't control most of the things around our practice. What we can control happens inside the work, and so often, those are tiny, little, seemingly superfluous things. We don't control those things that surround the work. The news. The weather. The general vibe we have in a room or that specific morning. What we control is the minutiae, the tiny, seemingly superfluous things that really, truly aren't.
As creators, we have a tendency to want to feel a sense of inspiration or flow first, THEN start the work. In reality, inspiration and flow are found by doing the work. We want to create the environment conducive to doing GREAT work instead of ANY work, when really, doing ANY work might just solve our problems. After all, momentum is the issue, not brilliance. So solve the actual problem.
* * *
This is hard.
It’s also dangerous to discount the very real mental health crisis underpinning this two-year-and-counting pandemic + news cycle + social media feed frenzy. I'm no scientist (that's my wife), doctor (also my wife), or psychologist (yep, you're reading the less impressive half of this couple). Take care of yourself. Take a break. Take it one day at a time.
I'm not (looks at long impressive list of credentials) my wife. But in matters of creative work, perhaps I've earned my lab coat, though I'm trading it for a hardhat. The best way to find a groove is to start grooving. The stuff around the work is out of our control. So what can we control? Whether or not we roll up our sleeves, cram on that hardhat, and slap down a bad draft. That's it. That's the entire job. Nothing beyond that exists -- being great, feeling inspired, seeing results. Those aren't even real things. The issue is momentum, so solve the real issue. Get to work. Once we do, the rest comes into focus a lot more easily.
As it turns out (and as I'm realizing all these years later), Mr. Schread didn't just teach me how to feel inspired or to write something great once in awhile, every so often, once-things-are-ideal-even-though-they-never-are.
No, Mr. Schread taught me something more useful and much more transformative: how to be professional.
He taught me how to respect the craft and respect yourself. To control what you can control. I can't control how I feel, or whether my imagination feels tapped. I can, however, create a practice wherein I bring a sense of pride and repetition to the little things, the things that others may see as superfluous, but they really, truly aren't. Those are the things that add up and give us our momentum again.
The rest of the world will always try to throw everything it can at people like you and me to prevent us from showing up and doing the very thing we claim to do.
To that I say, Nay-nay, World. Nay-nay. I shall not... (shalln't? Can we use start using shalln't?)
(Where was I?)
I shalln't succumb to the pressures of the people and the events and the madly spinning world which I don't control.
Instead, I will assume the posture of the professional. I will show up tomorrow, with respect for what I do and respect for how I do it. I will show up consistently, because consistency leads to ingenuity.
In our line of work, the good stuff doesn't happen in the periodic perfect moments, the ideal instances of inspiration. It doesn't happen in the big, dramatic readings, stretching from your tiptoes. It happens in the minutiae, in the the tiny little pockets of time and forward motion and hidden habits that we can use to build towards something greater.
It's right there where the good stuff happens.
In the margins.
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This is the second time I've written a story about Mr. Schread. The first received so many passionate replies, I now use it as my sample edition on the newsletter's home page. You can read it here.
This second piece originally appeared as part of my newsletter. Scroll down to subscribe for free and get one weekly story about creating work that resonates. Thanks for reading!