The Artist's Way (20 page)

What do I mean by
filling
the
form
?
I mean taking the next small step instead of skipping ahead to a large one for which you may not yet be prepared. To be very specific, in order to sell a screenplay, you must first write one. In order to write one, you must come up with an idea and then commit it to paper, a page at a time until you have about 120 pages of script.
Filling
the
form
means that you write your daily pages. It means that when
obsession strikes—as it will—about how the damn thing is not any good, you tell yourself that this is a question for later and turn back to doing what is the next right thing. And that means you write the pages of the day.

If you break a screenplay down into daily increments, that small smattering of writing can get done quickly and promptly—before the dirty laundry. And it can carry you through the rest of your day guilt-free and less anxious.

Most of the time, the next right thing is something small: washing out your paintbrushes, stopping by the art-supply store and getting your clay, checking the local paper for a list of acting classes … As a rule of thumb, it is best to just admit that there is always
one
action you can take for your creativity daily. This daily-action commitment fills the form.

All too often, when people look to having a more creative life, they hold an unspoken and often unacknowledged expectation, or fear, that they will be abandoning life as they know it.

“I can't be a writer and stay in this marriage.”

“I can't pursue my painting and stay at this dull job.”

“I can't commit to acting and stay in Chicago … or Seattle or Atlanta …”

Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop. This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing. By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. Who can concentrate on a first drawing class when he is obsessing about having to divorce his wife and leave town? Who can turn toe out in modern jazz form when she is busy reading the ads for a new apartment since she will have to break up with her lover to concentrate on her art?

Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time—or at all.

Instead of writing three pages a day on a screenplay, we prefer worrying about how we will have to move to Hollywood if the script gets bought. Which it can't anyway since we are too busy worrying about selling it to write it.

Instead of checking into a life-drawing class at the local
culture center, we buy
Art
Forum
and remind ourselves that our stuff is not in style. How can it be? It doesn't exist yet!

Instead of clearing out the little room off the kitchen so that we will have a place to work on our pottery, we complain about needing a studio—a complaint that we ourselves cannot take seriously since we do not have any work to argue our case.

Indulging ourselves in a frantic fantasy of what our life would look like if we were
real
artists, we fail to see the many small creative changes that we could make at this very moment. This kind of look-at-the-big-picture thinking ignores the fact that a creative life is grounded on many, many small steps and very, very few large leaps.

Rather than take a scary baby step toward our dreams, we rush to the edge of the cliff and then stand there, quaking, saying, “I can't leap. leant. I can't….”

No one is asking you to leap. That's just drama, and, for the purposes of a creative recovery, drama belongs on the page or on the canvas or in the clay or in the acting class or in the
act
of creativity, however small.

Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. You mean I have to
do
something in order to feel better?

Yes. And most of us hate to
do
something when we can obsess about something else instead. One of our favorite things to do—instead of our art—is to contemplate the odds.

In a creative career, thinking about the odds is a drink of emotional poison. It robs us of the dignity of art-as-process and puts us at the mercy of imagined powers
out
there.
Taking this drink quickly leads to a severe and toxic emotional bender. It leads us to ask, “What's the use?” instead of “What next?”

As a rule of thumb, the odds are what we use to procrastinate about doing what comes next. This is our addiction to anxiety in lieu of action. Once you catch on to this, the jig is up. Watch yourself for a week and notice the way you will pick up an anxious thought, almost like a joint, to blow off—or at least delay—your next creative action.

You've cleared a morning to write or paint but then you realize that the clothes are dirty. “I'll just think about what I want to paint and fine-tune it while I fold the clothes,” you tell
yourself. What you really mean is, “Instead of painting anything, I will worry about it some more.” Somehow, the laundry takes your whole morning.

Most blocked creatives have an active addiction to anxiety. We prefer the low-grade pain and occasional heart-stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction.

Filling the form means that we must work with what we have rather than languish in complaints over what we have not. As a director, I have noticed that the actors who get work are the actors who
work
—whether they are working or not. I am thinking specifically about Marge Kottlisky, a fine stage and film actress who has always made herself available to work and to workshop writers' materials. She worked with the young playwright David Mamet in the St. Nicholas Theater Group in Chicago and now works with the somewhat older and more accomplished David Mamet wherever he is working. Rather than rest on any creative laurels, she engages in a very healthy sort of creative restlessness. When she is not engaged in the run of a show, she often takes a class to keep her hand in, and she always is available for read-throughs of new plays. Like all actors, she suffers from the “I'll never work again” syndrome, but unlike many less-committed actors, she never allows herself to make her work something she does only for others or only when she is paid. Yes, she wants to be paid, and I am not arguing here that actors should work for free. What I am saying is that work begets work. Small actions lead us to the larger movements in our creative lives.

Many actors allow themselves the dubious luxury of handing their careers over to their agents instead of keeping their art in the custody of their souls. When an agent is in charge of your creative life, you can easily despair that “my agent doesn't do enough” instead of asking what you yourself might do to hone your craft. Fill the form. What can you do, right now, in your life as it is currently constituted? Do that thing.

Take one small daily action instead of indulging in the big questions. When we allow ourselves to wallow in the big questions, we fail to find the small answers. What we are talking about here is a concept of change grounded in respect—respect
for where we are as well as where we wish to go. We are looking not to grand strokes of change—although they may come—but instead to the act of creatively husbanding all that is in the present: this job, this house, this relationship.

Recovering creatives commonly undergo bouts of fierce rage and grief over their lost years. When these creative kriyas occur, we desperately want to kick over the traces and get the hell out of life as it is currently constituted. Instead, make changes, small changes, right where you are. Fill this form with creative care until it overflows into a newer, larger form—organically.

As the poet Theodore Roethke phrases it, “We learn by going/Where we have to go.” We have found that when we fill the form, we do not often need to make large changes. Large changes occur in tiny increments. It is useful to think in terms of a space flight: by altering the launch trajectory very slightly, a great difference can be made over time.

Although we seldom connect the dots, many of our present-day losses are connected to our earlier conditioning. Children may be told they can't do anything or, equally damaging, be told they should be able to do absolutely anything with ease. Either of these messages blocks the recipient. The following questions are aimed at helping you retrieve and decipher your own conditioning. Some of them may seem not to apply. Write about
whatever
they trigger for you.

The following affirmations affirm your right to the practice of your creativity. Select five affirmations and work with them this week.

TASKS