To Be or Not to Be... Alone?
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that being a writer can be a lonely thing. Even people who work collaboratively (my Q&A with Lisa and Laura Bunbury comes to mind) have to spend a lot of time in their own heads. As Willa Cather said: “The business of writing is a personal problem and must be worked out in an individual way.” Naturally, this applies to the non-writing artists, too. I don’t think of my classical piano life as one that has been particularly social or exciting. Instead, I think of long hours at the same piano keys, day after day, year after year, unending solo time made more comfortable with the occasional chai latte or rewarding dessert.
Loneliness plays a recurring role in creative work. A recent study actually concluded that loneliness can lead to increased creativity. Feeling lonely can connect us more deeply to our emotions, keep us undistracted by the needs and demands of others, and free us from others’ expectations—plus, our imagination kicks into gear because it works most when it’s needed, and feeling lonely is not a particularly enjoyable feeling. (In fact, if you’re getting a little too Eeyore on yourself for the sake of your art, please do just phone a friend.)
Solitude is necessary
Obviously (I hope!), solitude does not have to consist of loneliness. In Julia Cameron’s famous 12-week guide The Artist’s Way, Cameron opens with two tools necessary to her suggested program: Morning Pages and the Artist Date. Both are solo endeavors that are meant to get you in touch with yourself. Cameron believes that we all have an inner artist child, and it’s important to spend time alone with that child as its nurturing parent. This is the idea behind the Artist Date, a weekly block of time set aside to take yourself out on a creative playdate. “You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist,” Cameron writes. “Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing.”
In her book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, Twyla Tharp similarly stresses the importance of solitude. In one of her chapter-end exercises, “Build Up Your Tolerance for Solitude,” Tharp suggests sitting alone in a room for one minute and letting your thoughts wander. Each day, add more time until you can sit for ten minutes of “mindless mental wandering…Note that this activity is the exact opposite of meditation.” The idea is to listen to yourself until a word or a goal materializes. “Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity,” Tharp writes. “Self-reliance is a happy by-product.”
Solitude might be my favorite part of the creative process. In some ways it’s the safest, because there’s nobody to judge or expect anything from you. It’s the part of the creative process where you can roll out of bed and throw a big sweatshirt on and just think and put words down (or musical notes, or paint, or whatever) and there’s no external pressure (which is great, because sometimes the internal pressure is already more than one can handle). It’s also something of a sacred time, that time before you’ve revealed your art to anyone. When I first get an idea for something that feels important to me—like the novel that’s been percolating in my system for a few months—I tend to safeguard it. I want it to be mine alone for as long as it possibly can be, before the world comes in and affects it. In the case of my next novel idea, only my boyfriend has been told the general gist, and even he was sworn to responselessness before I would share it. When an idea is new, everything feels exciting and fragile, and the Idea is not yet sturdy enough to be a Thing. The most minor reaction from the outside world can alter it before it even takes shape.
The early stages of any project are magical, because that’s when the most possibility is there. Jokes abound about writers with brilliant novels in their heads that will stay brilliant as long as they never write them down. I also like being alone with an idea and its early stages because I’m excited by the experimental/discovery part, which is a different journey for every project. Anaïs Nin wrote: “I believe I could never exhaust the supply of material lying within me. The deeper I plunge, the more I discover.”
Well, solitude is not always necessary
However, not every creative has the luxury of being alone all the time. Jane Austen—who lived with her mom, sister, friend, and a team of servants—wrote daily in the family sitting room, surrounded by people and interruptions. (Fun fact: Austen also started every day with playing the piano.) Other artists are busy cramming their passion-project work into little pockets of their busy days (I will never cease to be amazed at how much of my own novel I scribbled out on my iPhone Notes app on the New York City subway while in music school), and more still have, you know, actual families to raise.
Even for those of us with all the time in the world for solo art-making (my main girl Amy Beach comes to mind—husband, money, servants, no kids, fun Victorian hair), connecting with the world is just as important to art as alone time. Have you ever read the Acknowledgments section of a novel? As much as we like to think of writers as lone masters of their books, those books are really not brought into existence by a single human being. Lists of people who had a hand in a book often go on for paragraphs if not pages. These are the people who supported the writer, who read the early drafts, who offered opinions and edits and reactions, who helped the writer get what they needed to get the thing done—emotionally, mentally, physically.
Is it true? Does this mean that art is not created in a vacuum of lonely isolation? Correct! It’s important to nurture relationships with other people, to develop a community to get support from and to learn from. This is why we do crazy things like have piano teachers push us to and past our limits, share scripts with other writers so they can open our eyes to innumerable ways to make our work better, make our boyfriends read our vomit-draft article outlines so they can let us know when we’re not making any sense (okay, maybe I’m specifically talking about my own activities). Screenwriter John August invites followers to join him on occasional 60-minute “write sprints” on Twitter; Sundance Collab offers a Writers’ Cafe on Zoom three times per week; and the entire concept behind organizations like National Novel Writing Month (coming up soon!) is that artists get more done with the support of a community.
All of this—I believe—is the second phase in what I’ve come to feel are the… (drumroll!):
Three phases of art-making
Keeping the world out. This is that sacred time when it’s just you and your little fragile secret idea trying to figure each other out. It’s the journey from having the idea in the first place to actually starting to make the Thing. This is the magical part.
Letting the world in. This is when you have a Thing and it’s time for the critiques and opinions of others. If you think your Thing is the most brilliant and greatest Thing, this is a pretty important step for bringing it (and you) back down to reality. It’s a difficult phase emotionally, because it’s kind of like watching your kid go off to school for the first time. You and your idea are not one and the same anymore. Your idea now exists outside of you for other people to see and have opinions about. Some of those opinions might be excellent insights that are worth incorporating as you continue shaping the Thing you’ve made into the best version of itself. And—sometimes this is difficult—taking this feedback is okay and necessary for the Thing to thrive, even if it didn’t come from you.
In the world. This is when the Thing is “done” in terms of: maybe it’s published, or maybe the paint is dry and it’s hanging on a wall somewhere, or the concert is over, the recording is done, the deadline passed. George Sand wrote: “One writes for all the world, for all who need to be initiated… What is art without the hearts and minds on which it pours?”
What’s fun (or daunting) is that you can alternate phases 1 and 2 (and, sometimes, 3) forever. Because I’m a control freak, I find myself wanting these phases to be super organized, as if I’m a creativity machine and everything comes along a conveyor belt at just the right time. While one project is in Phase 2, maybe another is in Phase 1, and another has just gone into Phase 3, and this rotating experience continues ad infinitum. How easy would it be to have the expectedness of a schedule of this process: 7-10 a.m. could be Keeping the World Out time and 10-1 p.m. could be Letting the World In time. Unfortunately—at least for me—both creativity and random demands of life tend to operate on their own wild anti-schedules.
Benjamin Franklin found this out, too, after creating an ideal daily schedule as part of a thirteen-week plan he devised to achieve “moral perfection.” From Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work:
The plan worked, up to a point… But the virtue of ‘order’—“Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time”—appears to have eluded his grasp. Franklin was not naturally inclined to keep his papers and other possessions organized, and he found the effort so vexing that he almost quit in frustration. Moreover, the demands of his printing business meant that he couldn’t always follow the exacting daily timetable that he set for himself.
Questions to ask ourselves
So, if a schedule isn’t the answer, being in tune with ourselves is imperative. Knowing what’s best for ourselves and for the work at any given time takes practice. Sometimes the work (and/or we) needs serious alone time. Sometimes the work needs to be shown to someone for feedback, or we need to go to a teacher to learn something, or we need to run an idea by a friend, or get some accountability support, or vent about how hard it is to write. Sometimes we just need a break altogether. What makes this all the more difficult to navigate is that it’s extremely easy to launch into one of these activities as a way of procrastinating a more important (and more difficult) endeavor.
This is sort of dramatic, but one way I test what I really need to be doing at any given moment is to ask myself: if I die in 3 hours, is there something unfinished here that would doom me to be a raving ghost for eternity?
Other helpful—and less dramatic—questions to stay on creative track include:
Is there an activity I care about that I haven’t done for a long time? I.e. have I only been revising this novel and getting readers to critique it for so long that I haven’t actually had alone time with new words in a notebook for months? (Yes.)
Does this thing I’m doing right now have to be done right now? Would I get the same sense of “I’m on it” if I simply put it in my calendar for a different day and moved onto something that is currently gnawing at me?
What feels good right now? Knowing what I need at any given moment is something I struggle with immensely, but knowing what feels good—or what sounds like it would feel good—is a great way to direct creative energy. Keep in mind, however, that sometimes the thing that needs to be done the most is not something that is going to feel good—in these cases, think about how good it’s going to feel after the fact. Also, if “what feels good” is lying on the couch and eating cookies, feel free to roll with it. But if that’s always the answer that comes to mind, maybe try to think a little deeper.
What boundaries do I have right now? Do I want to keep them? I wrote that I generally don’t like to share new ideas because I’m protective of them in the germination phase. It’s easy to hold onto ideas long past this phase out of fear of others’ feedback. Know the difference between holding a sacred idea close and being an overprotective parent who just needs to let the thing free. Conversely, are you in a rut of only revising work and sending it out for feedback? I am, and this is starting to indicate to me that I may have some fears about actually starting work on new ideas I’m supposedly feeling excited about. If this resonates with you, get yourself to a proverbial or literal drawing board!
What does and doesn’t feel comfortable? Know what you’re feeling comfortable with as well as what you’re uncomfortable with. Ask yourself if the discomfort is an invitation. You don’t need to push yourself into things that don’t feel right, but sometimes we have to embrace discomfort to move forward (growing pains are a real thing, after all). So, if you’re feeling really averse to alone time, that could be an indication that you need some alone time. And if you’re feeling terrified of letting the world in, well, maybe it’s time to let the world in. (The good news is, you can let the world in and enjoy those cookies on the couch at the same time.)
Wise words from Michaela Coel in her recent Outstanding Writing Emmy acceptance speech for I May Destroy You: “Do not be afraid to disappear—from it, from us—for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.”
Today is the birthday of St. Paul’s best, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose policy was to never talk with anyone about a book he was working on. In 1940 he wrote: “I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.”
In closing, a poem from the man who wrote it best.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.