Justine Musk's Blog, page 21

the role of intuition in the art of creative badassery

1

I was at an event where I had a conversation with a famous American director who said something that surprised me.

(I can’t blog about the event, except to say that it wasn’t in the States, and the master of ceremonies said things like: “You can take pictures, but you shall post them NOT! You shall tweet them NOT!” and would break out into spoken-word poetry.

It was also an excuse to buy a hot dress, especially when the airplane got me to one destination but left my luggage somewhere else. “It appears,” I sighed to my boyfriend, once my plight had revealed itself, “that I must go shopping.” The dress of course forced me to purchase appropriate footwear. Such is life.)

The director said, “I couldn’t find my act breaks or my plot points if my life depended on it.”

He said that when he wrote his scripts, he trusted himself to know in the moment of filming what the scene would require. When he filmed, he engaged directly with what was in front of him. If the script needed changing, he would change it. If the actor thought up something better, he would use it. He encouraged his actors to improvise. Auditioning them, he liked to throw surprises at them. He would push them in directions different from what they had prepared. He wanted to see what they had in them, what they could present in the spur of the moment.

Keep in mind, this isn’t some indie filmmaker who does impressionistic stream-of-consciousness vaguely European movies that people tend to talk about and give awards to but might not actually bother to see. His movies are the kind in which things tend to go BOOM. He pulls in big box office. He gets under the skin of the popular culture, and in return that culture adores him.

I couldn’t find my act breaks if my life depended on it.

“Other people can,” I told him, and it’s true. Books and websites on plotting, on storytelling, will break his screenplays down to teach eager readers about plot points. Yet – based on what the director told me – there’s an intuitive, gut-feeling, spontaneous approach – an in-the-moment approach – to his work that those books and blogs don’t indicate. That can’t be codified.

(He reminds me a little bit of Stephen King: because he works in genre, because some might dismiss him as formulaic, others think that they can imitate him and find big success of their own. And so they try. And fail miserably.)

I’m not saying this director wings it as he goes along; I think, through his obsession with movies and his own natural talent, he’s developed an instinctive sense for story structure. But what struck me about that conversation is how much he trusts his own voice. How much he trusts the process. He shows up with screenplay in hand, but if the process leads him in a different direction he won’t hesitate to follow.

2

A screenplay isn’t a finished movie but an outline for a movie. And I love to outline. I outline my novels, my blog posts, my life. But what I could never help but notice is how the process of actually creating will surface new ideas, surprising moments, that then need to be reckoned with. That work to change the outline: to reshape the very thing that’s shaping it.

An outline is a living, evolving document.

They say that life happens when you’re making other plans; sometimes creative work does as well.

As Patricia Ryan Madson says in her great little book IMPROV WISDOM, creativity builds on itself, link by link and moment by moment.

When we make a plan for something, we’re thinking about the future; when we operate from that plan, we’re looking to the past; creativity, however, happens in the present. Much like life itself.

The moment.

The right-now.

So we have to put the past and the future aside and pay attention to what’s right in front of us.

3

The outline doesn’t dictate creativity. It acts as a vessel to contain it and give the process a certain shape. But creativity is sly, it throws itself against limitations and looks for ways around or through or behind them; or it builds on them in unexpected ways.

Creativity thrives on limitations, as Brian Eno points out in this interview. He will stimulate his own creative process or that of others by introducing limits:

“…one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”

Take away the starting point, and you don’t know where to begin.

The outline is the starting point.

The outline is the box, and maybe creativity doesn’t happen outside of the box so much as against the box.

(My favorite example of this is a moment from Monty Python’s SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL. Two riders on horseback come into view, except they’re not really on horses. They’re skipping along and clopping coconuts together and exchanging dialogue as if there is nothing absurd about any of this. It’s hilarious. It also wasn’t in the script. The production didn’t have the money for horses. They had to think up a way to work around the limitations of the budget: to have horses without having horses. In other words, they had to get creative.)

Creativity builds on itself. It’s strange, in a way; it happens inside us, in the deep underworld of our brains, but also seems to be a force outside of us, operating from its own mysterious consciousness. It weaves things together, it invents relationships, it, as Steve Jobs so famously said, connects the dots. The danger about working from an outline is that we try and force the process when what we need to do is surrender. Flow with the go.

And this happens in our lives as well as our creative work — you can’t tease apart the two. Cheryl Strayed (one of my new favorite writers) writes about how disappointed she was when she reached the ancient age of 28 without having written a novel. Only to discover, several years and one finished manuscript later:

To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up.

Creativity draws on so much more than the outline: it draws on all our levels of intelligence, our personal history, our accumulated knowledge and life experience. It happens in the moment. You think you have a plan: the moment teaches you otherwise. You show up for a big event but the airline loses your luggage. You think you have a novel in you but it turns out to be an epic poem. Or a documentary. You think you have the scene down cold but the director tells you to perform another role. You need horses in your movie only to find you can’t afford them.

What is creativity, in the end, but continuous problem-solving? And the nature of problems is that you can’t plan for them until they rise up and announce themselves, often by smacking you in the face. They are the unknown variable, the X factor, the monkey wrench thrown into the gears of your outline. They demand your focus and your humility. In return, they just might give you greatness.

photo credit: the|G|™ via photo pin cc

what a famous director taught me about intuition + creativity

1

I was at an event where I had a conversation with a famous American director who said something that surprised me.

(I can’t blog about the event, except to say that it wasn’t in the States, and the master of ceremonies said things like: “You can take pictures, but you shall post them NOT! You shall tweet them NOT!” and would break out into spoken-word poetry.

It was also an excuse to buy a hot dress, especially when the airplane got me to one destination but left my luggage somewhere else. “It appears,” I sighed to my boyfriend, once my plight had revealed itself, “that I must go shopping.” The dress of course forced me to purchase appropriate footwear. Such is life.)

The director said, “I couldn’t find my act breaks or my plot points if my life depended on it.”

He said that when he wrote his scripts, he trusted himself to know in the moment of filming what the scene would require. When he filmed, he engaged directly with what was in front of him. If the script needed changing, he would change it. If the actor thought up something better, he would use it. He encouraged his actors to improvise. Auditioning them, he liked to throw surprises at them. He would push them in directions different from what they had prepared. He wanted to see what they had in them, what they could present in the spur of the moment.

Keep in mind, this isn’t some indie filmmaker who does impressionistic stream-of-consciousness vaguely European movies that people tend to talk about and give awards to but might not actually bother to see. His movies are the kind in which things tend to go BOOM. He pulls in big box office. He gets under the skin of the popular culture, and in return that culture adores him.

I couldn’t find my act breaks if my life depended on it.

“Other people can,” I told him, and it’s true. Books and websites on plotting, on storytelling, will break his screenplays down to teach eager readers about plot points. Yet – based on what the director told me – there’s an intuitive, gut-feeling, spontaneous approach – an in-the-moment approach – to his work that those books and blogs don’t indicate. That can’t be codified.

(He reminds me a little bit of Stephen King: because he works in genre, because some might dismiss him as formulaic, others think that they can imitate him and find big success of their own. And so they try. And fail miserably.)

I’m not saying this director wings it as he goes along; I think, through his obsession with movies and his own natural talent, he’s developed an instinctive sense for story structure. But what struck me about that conversation is how much he trusts his own voice. How much he trusts the process. He shows up with screenplay in hand, but if the process leads him in a different direction he won’t hesitate to follow.

2

A screenplay isn’t a finished movie but an outline for a movie. And I love to outline. I outline my novels, my blog posts, my life. But what I could never help but notice is how the process of actually creating will surface new ideas, surprising moments, that then need to be reckoned with. That work to change the outline: to reshape the very thing that’s shaping it.

An outline is a living, evolving document.

They say that life happens when you’re making other plans; sometimes creative work does as well.

As Patricia Ryan Madson says in her great little book IMPROV WISDOM, creativity builds on itself, link by link and moment by moment.

When we make a plan for something, we’re thinking about the future; when we operate from that plan, we’re looking to the past; creativity, however, happens in the present. Much like life itself.

The moment.

The right-now.

So we have to put the past and the future aside and pay attention to what’s right in front of us.

3

The outline doesn’t dictate creativity. It acts as a vessel to contain it and give the process a certain shape. But creativity is sly, it throws itself against limitations and looks for ways around or through or behind them; or it builds on them in unexpected ways.

Creativity thrives on limitations, as Brian Eno points out in this interview. He will stimulate his own creative process or that of others by introducing limits:

“…one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”

Take away the starting point, and you don’t know where to begin.

The outline is the starting point.

The outline is the box, and maybe creativity doesn’t happen outside of the box so much as against the box.

(My favorite example of this is a moment from Monty Python’s SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL. Two riders on horseback come into view, except they’re not really on horses. They’re skipping along and clopping coconuts together and exchanging dialogue as if there is nothing absurd about any of this. It’s hilarious. It also wasn’t in the script. The production didn’t have the money for horses. They had to think up a way to work around the limitations of the budget: to have horses without having horses. In other words, they had to get creative.)

Creativity builds on itself. It’s strange, in a way; it happens inside us, in the deep underworld of our brains, but also seems to be a force outside of us, operating from its own mysterious consciousness. It weaves things together, it invents relationships, it, as Steve Jobs so famously said, connects the dots. The danger about working from an outline is that we try and force the process when what we need to do is surrender. Flow with the go.

And this happens in our lives as well as our creative work — you can’t tease apart the two. Cheryl Strayed (one of my new favorite writers) writes about how disappointed she was when she reached the ancient age of 28 without having written a novel. Only to discover, several years and one finished manuscript later:

To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up.

Creativity draws on so much more than the outline: it draws on all our levels of intelligence, our personal history, our accumulated knowledge and life experience. It happens in the moment. You think you have a plan: the moment teaches you otherwise. You show up for a big event but the airline loses your luggage. You think you have a novel in you but it turns out to be an epic poem. Or a documentary. You think you have the scene down cold but the director tells you to perform another role. You need horses in your movie only to find you can’t afford them.

What is creativity, in the end, but continuous problem-solving? And the nature of problems is that you can’t plan for them until they rise up and announce themselves, often by smacking you in the face. They are the unknown variable, the X factor, the monkey wrench thrown into the gears of your outline. They demand your focus and your humility. In return, they just might give you greatness.

photo credit: the|G|™ via photo pin cc

limits + problems + the role of intuition in the art of creative badassery

1

I was at an event where I had a conversation with a famous American director who said something that surprised me.

(I can’t blog about the event, except to say that it wasn’t in the States, and the master of ceremonies said things like: “You can take pictures, but you shall post them NOT! You shall tweet them NOT!” and would break out into spoken-word poetry.

It was also an excuse to buy a hot dress, especially when the airplane got me to one destination but left my luggage somewhere else. “It appears,” I sighed to my boyfriend, once my plight had revealed itself, “that I must go shopping.” The dress of course forced me to purchase appropriate footwear. Such is life.)

The director said, “I couldn’t find my act breaks or my plot points if my life depended on it.”

He said that when he wrote his scripts, he trusted himself to know in the moment of filming what the scene would require. When he filmed, he engaged directly with what was in front of him. If the script needed changing, he would change it. If the actor thought up something better, he would use it. He encouraged his actors to improvise. Auditioning them, he liked to throw surprises at them. He would push them in directions different from what they had prepared. He wanted to see what they had in them, what they could present in the spur of the moment.

Keep in mind, this isn’t some indie filmmaker who does impressionistic stream-of-consciousness vaguely European movies that people tend to talk about and give awards to but might not actually bother to see. His movies are the kind in which things tend to go BOOM. He pulls in big box office. He gets under the skin of the popular culture, and in return that culture adores him.

I couldn’t find my act breaks if my life depended on it.

“Other people can,” I told him, and it’s true. Books and websites on plotting, on storytelling, will break his screenplays down to teach eager readers about plot points. Yet – based on what the director told me – there’s an intuitive, gut-feeling, spontaneous approach – an in-the-moment approach – to his work that those books and blogs don’t indicate. That can’t be codified.

(He reminds me a little bit of Stephen King: because he works in genre, because some might dismiss him as formulaic, others think that they can imitate him and find big success of their own. And so they try. And fail miserably.)

I’m not saying this director wings it as he goes along; I think, through his obsession with movies and his own natural talent, he’s developed an instinctive sense for story structure. But what struck me about that conversation is how much he trusts his own voice. How much he trusts the process. He shows up with screenplay in hand, but if the process leads him in a different direction he won’t hesitate to follow.

2

A screenplay isn’t a finished movie but an outline for a movie. And I love to outline. I outline my novels, my blog posts, my life. But what I could never help but notice is how the process of actually creating will surface new ideas, surprising moments, that then need to be reckoned with. That work to change the outline: to reshape the very thing that’s shaping it.

An outline is a living, evolving document.

They say that life happens when you’re making other plans; sometimes creative work does as well.

As Patricia Ryan Madson says in her great little book THE WISDOM OF IMPROV, creativity builds on itself, link by link and moment by moment.

When we make a plan for something, we’re thinking about the future; when we operate from that plan, we’re looking to the past; creativity, however, happens in the present. Much like life itself.

The moment.

The right-now.

So we have to put the past and the future aside and pay attention to what’s right in front of us.

3

The outline doesn’t dictate creativity. It acts as a vessel to contain it and give the process a certain shape. But creativity is sly, it throws itself against limitations and looks for ways around or through or behind them; or it builds on them in unexpected ways.

Creativity thrives on limitations, as Brian Eno points out in this interview. He will stimulate his own creative process or that of others by introducing limits:

“…one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”

Take away the starting point, and you don’t know where to begin.

The outline is the starting point.

The outline is the box, and maybe creativity doesn’t happen outside of the box so much as against the box.

(My favorite example of this is a moment from Monty Python’s SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL. Two riders on horseback come into view, except they’re not really on horses. They’re skipping along and clopping coconuts together and exchanging dialogue as if there is nothing absurd about any of this. It’s hilarious. It also wasn’t in the script. The production didn’t have the money for horses. They had to think up a way to work around the limitations of the budget: to have horses without having horses. In other words, they had to get creative.)

Creativity builds on itself. It’s strange, in a way; it happens inside us, in the deep underworld of our brains, but also seems to be a force outside of us, operating from its own mysterious consciousness. It weaves things together, it invents relationships, it, as Steve Jobs so famously said, connects the dots. The danger about working from an outline is that we try and force the process when what we need to do is surrender. Flow with the go.

And this happens in our lives as well as our creative work — you can’t tease apart the two. Cheryl Strayed (one of my new favorite writers) writes about how disappointed she was when she reached the ancient age of 28 without having written a novel. Only to discover, several years and one finished manuscript later:

To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up.

Creativity draws on so much more than the outline: it draws on all our levels of intelligence, our personal history, our accumulated knowledge and life experience. It happens in the moment. You think you have a plan: the moment teaches you otherwise. You show up for a big event but the airline loses your luggage. You think you have a novel in you but it turns out to be an epic poem. Or a documentary. You think you have the scene down cold but the director tells you to perform another role. You need horses in your movie only to find you can’t afford them.

What is creativity, in the end, but continuous problem-solving? And the nature of problems is that you can’t plan for them until they rise up and announce themselves, often by smacking you in the face. They are the unknown variable, the X factor, the monkey wrench thrown into the gears of your outline. They demand your focus and your humility. In return, they just might give you greatness.

photo credit: the|G|™ via photo pin cc

if you’re a fiction writer just starting to blog

“I hope to look through my life at life.” – Maya Angelou

If you’re a fiction writer just starting to blog and wondering what to blog about, you face an interesting challenge: how to pull in your right readers who have never heard of you?

The standard blogging advice is to claim your niche. Choose a particular topic and become the expert on that topic, the go-to girl or boy for whatever it is that you’re passionate about.

It’s good advice, but authority blogging seems better suited to bloggers who actually have a service or product to sell within that particular niche. They don’t attract ideal readers so much as ideal customers.

Which is kind of the thing about most blogging advice: it’s not really directed at you, oh Fiction Writer. Your interests and passions range across a whole inner landscape. Your area of expertise is your worldview; your service and your product (I know, I feel you wincing, but for lack of a better word) is your voice. But unless you’re already a published writer with a following, no one is going to seek you out for either of those things unless they already know you.

What you have to do as a blogger is to create value for your readers, value that’s immediately obvious – say, in a headline that gets retweeted – to hook and reel them in. This is the point where standard blogging advice is to get inside your reader’s head and think about the problems they have and how you can solve them. It’s good advice, but again, it seems better suited to bloggers who actually have a service or product to sell that directly addresses a concrete and solvable problem: 5 ways to do this and 16 ways to do that.

Which is why a lot of writers will blog about writing – Sean Platt and Jeff Goins being two prominent examples. It’s their area of expertise. It offers up problems of plot, structure and platform that go well with authority blogging: witness the catchy headlines on the cover of any issue of Writer’s Digest.

The problem here is that a) people who are interested in writing are not necessarily interested in reading your kind of fiction and b) there are sooooooooooo many writing blogs that it’s probably best to focus on something else.

Besides, as fiction writers we do wrestle with questions and problems. They just happen to be the kind of abstract, theoretical problems (“Can love conquer all?”) that we ground in the specifics of plot and character and work out through a particular narrative. And as fiction writers, we have our obsessions: those questions that we’re compelled to ask again and again, entering the same theme through different doorways, like Monet and his water lilies or Degas and his dancers.

How could you take one of those questions and put it at the center of your blog?

Instead of using it as a catchall drawer for random musings, why not turn your blog into a personal quest through asking, researching and answering or exploring different aspects of that central question? It could be spiritual, emotional, or social. What’s of interest to you is of interest to others. You can do what great writers, philosophers, and even social scientists have done: used themselves as their best and most original case study, a jumping off point into the universal. Not only does that relate to your fiction, it can feed your fiction and help to inspire it.

You would have to expand your own experience and insight. You would have to take your thoughts seriously (if yourself, not so seriously). You would have to be bold enough to speak the truth as you see and feel and know it (but boldness can develop over time, with practice and experience, one baby blog post in front of another).

Lauren Cerand once made the awesome observation that social media is something you make. (“We get so hung up on the ‘social’ part, we forget about the ‘media’ part.”) If you don’t like the kind of social media that other people are making, you can make something different. You can experiment and stretch the form, stretch yourself, in ways that serve you (and your readers).

Commit to the learning curve, the process of trial and error, and who knows: as you reach out with your voice post after post after post, you might find your real voice. As you find your readers, you might find yourself.

if you’re a fiction writer just starting to blog ( + wondering what to blog about)

“I hope to look through my life at life.” – Maya Angelou

If you’re a fiction writer just starting to blog and wondering what to blog about, you face an interesting challenge: how to pull in your right readers who have never heard of you?

The standard blogging advice is to claim your niche. Choose a particular topic and become the expert on that topic, the go-to girl or boy for whatever it is that you’re passionate about.

It’s good advice, but authority blogging seems better suited to bloggers who actually have a service or product to sell within that particular niche. They don’t attract ideal readers so much as ideal customers.

Which is kind of the thing about most blogging advice: it’s not really directed at you, oh Fiction Writer. Your interests and passions range across a whole inner landscape. Your area of expertise is your worldview; your service and your product (I know, I feel you wincing, but for lack of a better word) is your voice. But unless you’re already a published writer with a following, no one is going to seek you out for either of those things unless they already know you.

What you have to do as a blogger is to create value for your readers, value that’s immediately obvious – say, in a headline that gets retweeted – to hook and reel them in. This is the point where standard blogging advice is to get inside your reader’s head and think about the problems they have and how you can solve them. It’s good advice, but again, it seems better suited to bloggers who actually have a service or product to sell that directly addresses a concrete and solvable problem: 5 ways to do this and 16 ways to do that.

Which is why a lot of writers will blog about writing – Sean Platt and Jeff Goins being two prominent examples. It’s what they know. It’s their area of expertise. It offers up problems of plot, structure and platform that go well with authority blogging: witness the catchy headlines on the cover of any issue of Writer’s Digest.

The problem here is that a) people who are interested in writing are not necessarily interested in reading your kind of fiction and b) there are sooooooooooo many writing blogs that it’s probably best to focus on something else.

Besides, as fiction writers we do wrestle with questions and problems. They just happen to be the kind of abstract, theoretical problems (“Can love conquer all?”) that we ground in the specifics of plot and character and work out through a particular narrative. And as fiction writers, we have our obsessions: those questions that we’re compelled to ask again and again, entering the same theme through different doorways, like Monet and his water lilies or Degas and his dancers.

How could you take one of those questions and put it at the center of your blog?

Instead of using it as a catchall drawer for random musings, why not turn your blog into a personal quest through asking, researching and answering or exploring different aspects of that central question? It could be spiritual, emotional, or social. What’s of interest to you is of interest to others. You can do what great writers, philosophers, and even social scientists have done: used themselves as their best and most original case study, a jumping off point into the universal. Not only does that relate to your fiction, it can feed your fiction and help to inspire it.

You would have to expand your own experience and insight. You would have to take your thoughts seriously (if yourself, not so seriously). You would have to be bold enough to speak the truth as you see and feel and know it (but boldness can develop over time, with practice and experience, one baby blog post in front of another).

Lauren Cerand once made the awesome observation that social media is something you make. (“We get so hung up on the ‘social’ part, we forget about the ‘media’ part.”) If you don’t like the kind of social media that other people are making, you can make something different. You can experiment and stretch the form, stretch yourself, in ways that serve you (and your readers).

Commit to the learning curve, the process of trial and error, and who knows: as you reach out with your voice post after post after post, you might find your real voice. As you find your readers, you might find yourself.

the most badass thing you can do as a creative

“We write to expose the unexposed.

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.

Otherwise you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in.

Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words—not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.” – Anne Lamott

I was trying to help a friend figure out the ‘brand story’ of her new company when I realized she was talking in two different voices.

One voice was charged with passion, talking rapidly and with vivid inflection. Her eyes would light up. This was the voice that I wanted to listen to because it was interesting. It seemed a pipeline to her inner life.

But then the second voice would step in and hijack it.

The light would dim from her eyes, her voice would fall toward a monotone, and she would start talking in abstractions, rationalizations, explanations that undercut the things she had told me moments before.

This was supposedly the ‘logical’ voice – except the logic didn’t seem all that logical to me. It was as if its sole purpose was to talk herself out of the things she had been saying in the first voice.

But on some level she must have known that this second voice was bullshit – which was why her eyes would dull over, the vitality ebb from her expression, her whole body seem less alive.

When I called her attention to this, she said she hadn’t noticed.

I saw something similar when a woman in my writing workshop talked about the memoir she wanted to write. She was the survivor of narcissistic parents who had nearly sucked her dry. She would start talking about her experiences –

– when another, ‘logical’ voice would kick in. That voice would quickly reassure us that, sure, her parents had some flaws, but they were really good people and she was really grateful to them and appreciative of everything they’d done for her. The second voice was like a glossy magazine cover with all the right headlines – but no content underneath.

It was a façade. It spoke in platitudes and clichés.

It was boring, and if she allowed that ‘logical’ voice to dictate her writing she was dead.

True creation happens when we allow ourselves to speak with that first voice. It taps into the source of our originality: ourselves, what’s really going on inside us, what we’re honestly thinking, feeling, dreaming. There may be nothing new under the sun, but we make it new when we filter it through the unique matrix of our own personalities and quirky worldview.

The problem is how quickly we disconnect from that voice and switch over to what appears to be ‘reason’: the stuff that some part of you feels you need to say and do and think in order to fit in.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan writes extensively about how men and women lose their authentic voices in a culture that teaches us that in order to have power, you have to sacrifice relationship, and vice versa. So boys learn to disconnect from the language of feeling, vulnerability and empathy in the pursuit of personal power. Girls learn to submerge their sense of individual power for the sake of relationship: it’s more important to be ‘nice’ than to risk confrontation and possible exile.

We learn to not-know what we truly know when it cuts against the social grain, and accept a more superficial ‘knowing’ instead, shaped by outside forces rather than our own inner authority.

When that first voice – of true knowing – speaks up, the second voice steps on it.

(Carol Gilligan tells of a woman she was interviewing who suddenly said, “Do you want to know what I think…or what I really think?”)

Margaret Atwood once observed that silence and powerlessness go hand-in-hand. What goes unsaid can be more revealing than what is being said, because it’s those areas of our lives around which we feel powerless that we tend to keep secret. That’s where shame grows: in the dark, behind closed doors, isolated from any real sense of human community that would incorporate our experiences into a much bigger picture.

Training someone to be ‘nice’ can be a way of silencing that first voice. Too often it gets locked up in a vague sense of shame and a fear of exposure.

But as human beings, we long to know that we’re not alone. We crave access to the inner lives of others — we want to know what you really think — which is why projects like Postsecret become wildly popular and turn into bestselling books. We have an instinctive drive toward the truth, so we eat the apple or open Pandora’s box or unlock the forbidden door or choose the red pill. We want the authentic life, and not the illusion of it.

But the truth is subversive and chaotic. It will set you free, but first it will raise hell – and quite possibly create a whole new order. The truth is not polite, and it is not afraid to challenge the overriding cultural story otherwise known as the status quo.

The most powerful thing you can do as a creator is to shift the paradigm. To blow open the old way of looking at things. To bring something into the light and give it a name. You do this by using the first voice, which leads you to Bluebeard’s locked room and hands you the key.

The second voice only leads you to Bluebeard.

are you a cup of tea…or a shot of tequila?

I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea…I’d rather be someone’s shot of tequila anyway. – Unknown

Dan Blank describes a conversation with an author friend. There are so many people trying to develop their own brand/audience/platform, the author says, that the market is supercrowded with people screaming, “Look at me!”.

To get noticed now, the author continues, you have to act crazy.

You have to engage in an increasingly “reckless chase for attention”.

But I think that chasing attention, recklessly or otherwise, is stupid.

It’s pretty much a cosmic law that anything you chase will run away from you. An object in motion tends to stay in motion.

Also, attention is fleeting. Here and gone. It’s not enough just to get it, you have to maintain it, and to do that you need to resonate with your readers in a way that moves and compels them.

Consistently.

Over time.

Resonance, not craziness, is what cuts through the noise — because we are hardwired to pay attention to the stuff that is relevant to us.

(It’s why you jolt to the sound of your name, no matter how absorbed you were beforehand or how chaotic your environment.)

For something to be relevant, it has to have the ring of truth. If it pretends to be one thing but turns out to be something else, then it’s of no use to us (and we’re annoyed). It might even be a con (and we’re pissed).

So we have to trust that it’s authentic.

Being relevant is hard.

It means you have to create something that other people actually want or need, and can’t get down the street for a cheaper price. It has to be totally unique, either in what it does, what it is, how it’s delivered – or the larger meaning that it comes to represent.

Being authentic is hard.

It means you have to get real, and be real, and show other people that reality (not all of it, just the parts that relate to your message). This is also known as putting yourself out there – your beliefs and opinions, your work, your ideas, your pride, your ego, your feelings, your voice. Maybe you open windows into your personal life. Maybe you don’t. Either way, there’s a sense of exposure, of laying part of your soul on the line.

Some people will throw tomatoes at you.

Other people will trust you. They recognize that you’ve got skin in the game — which means that you’re playing for real.

This is the part where people tend to think I’m saying: Just be yourself. But most people don’t know who they are, and ‘being yourself’ becomes deeply problematic when you’re looking for the self that you’re supposed to be being.

You want to be a focused, highly skilled, freak version of yourself.

You want to dig down deep to find that unique part, that weird and maybe slightly psychotic part, that beautiful raw fucked-up part, that you spent a lifetime learning to hide in the first place. We try, instead, to be everybody’s cup of tea. But then we’re not unique, and so we lose. We’re also not particularly authentic, so we lose again.

We’re a social mask dealing with other social masks, and we’ve been cut and buffed and measured in ways that seem pretty much the same.

Which is why I love the word Namaste. It’s that moment at the end of yoga when you and the teacher bow to each other. Namaste translates to mean, The divine in me recognizes and honors the divine in you, Or, I greet that place where you and I are one.



I like to think of it as:

The freak in me recognizes and honors the freak in you.

Which is what I think the best creative work truly does. It’s your inner freak speaking to my inner freak. Saying: you are my brand of crazy.

And that will always get my attention.

6 things you need to know about your inner genius

Becoming one’s true self means revealing one’s innate genius. — Michael Meade

1.

You have one.

She goes by many names. Inner genius. Deep self. Intuition. North Star. Inner voice. Muse. Spirit. Creative intelligence. Higher Power.

I like ‘daimon’, myself.

The ancient Greeks saw the daimon as a spirit who lived deep within the human psyche.

Mythology has it that each soul comes to earth encoded with a special mission, which it forgets as soon as it enters the stratosphere and must spend its life-on-earth rediscovering. The daimon is a kind of cosmic travelling companion and spiritual familiar meant to help the soul stay on track. She can be a force of creation or destruction (she can get seriously pissed), depending on whether the soul heeds or denies her subtle instructions.

She’s a badass.

(Over time, the daimon divided into the angel who sits on one shoulder and the devil who sits on the other.)

You don’t actually have to believe this stuff. Treat it as a metaphor for your unconscious. At any given point in time, your unconscious is processing a zillion bits of information that your conscious mind can’t handle. It’s blending things together and making loose associations and working over problems and figuring out what you should do with your life, based on the information acquired from your experiences and the way those experiences made you feel. Its aim is to point you toward what feels good (hot fudge sundae, love, meaningful experience, doing what you’re good at) and away from what feels bad (anything that might eat you).

2.

She communicates in code.

Your daimon does not believe in straightforward communication. That would just make things too easy.

Your daimon is like that really hot man or woman who casts you alluring glances and disappears into the shadows, beckoning you to follow, because she totally likes to play mindgames like that.

The soul has to figure out its special life purpose on its own. That’s the only way it can grow and evolve and learn whatever it needs to learn in order to fulfill the sacred contract that brought it here in the first place. In that great lesson, that growth and transformation, lies the meaning of your life.

The daimon won’t do your work for you. You have to actively co-create your own existence – and make your own meaning.

The unconscious lives in the part of the brain that has no language. It is nonverbal, nonlinear, big-picture: it flashes on the forest all at once, instead of walking from tree to tree to tree. When it wants to get your attention, it puts a dream or an image or a hunch into a mental bottle and lobs it up into your conscious. Or it filters incoming stimuli so that you will, as they say, see signs: things in the outside world that seem to link together in uncanny ways, creating a pattern of meaning just for you (Jung called this ‘synchronicity’).

3.

The day-to-day world gets in her way.

There’s the story embedded deep in your soul – the story of your real, true life – and then there’s the story that everybody else would have you live out.

At any given time, we face a choice: to forge our own path, work out our own story, or fit ourselves to the agendas of others.

The soul would have us find our singular purpose.

Mass culture would deny that purpose and promote the same goals for everyone.

To find and follow your purpose, you have to turn down the volume of the culture.

The kind of creative thinking that draws from the wealth of the unconscious happens on a different frequency than practical, everyday thinking. The alert and vigilant and (somewhat) focused state of mind that daily life requires to complete that to-do list is not conducive to creativity.

If anything, the creative state of mind (dreamy, loose, slow, relaxed, absorbed) and the pragmatic state of mind are polar opposites.

To get out of ‘pragmatic’ and into ‘creative’ requires a downshift in brain waves. It’s why meditation is so helpful. It’s why naps are a good idea. It’s why so many of our best ideas and insights pop off when we’re zoning in the shower, or driving or running or doing some other repetitive activity that puts our conscious minds on automatic. When the conscious mind settles down, the mental gatekeepers get off work and the unconscious comes out to play.

4.

She will take you away from what you know.

Every hero’s journey starts with a separation. To follow your calling, you have to leave the ordinary world behind and venture into uncharted territory. The old idea of you, shaped by external voices and internalized as your own distorted view of yourself, has to die so that a new reality may emerge.

You can’t find yourself if you never get lost.

Tara Sophia Mohr points out in her post 7 Surprising Ways to Discover Your Calling that one way to recognize your calling is when you don’t have everything you need and you aren’t yet the person that you need to be.

That’s kind of the point.

You have to start before you’re ready. You have to get beyond your comfort zone. Only on the journey can you overcome the obstacles and acquire the skills, knowledge and self-knowledge that will get you to your destination.

The journey owns you.

And that’s a good thing.

5.

You will resist her.

If it was easy to create cool epic shit, to be authentic and original, then everybody would do it….

6.

She demands discipline and mastery.

…which is why you need a disciplined mind. Caroline Myss says that your inner creative badass, your daimon, is always speaking to you, guiding you, telling you what actions to take.

And they’re often little actions.

Sometimes they don’t even seem all that creative.

They’re about sending that email or taking that seminar or cleaning out your closet or paying your bills or any of the other mundane activities that, left unfinished, clutter up your headspace and distract and annoy you. They scatter your focus. They prevent you from getting to your real work.

Creative work also happens in little actions. Writing that page. And another and another until eventually you have a novel. Small actions, taken consistently over time, that don’t seem to be making any difference until they accumulate into something extraordinary: the so-called big bang, overnight success, quantum leap.

Listening to your daimon about the small things, and training yourself to complete those tasks one after the other after the other, is a practice. It strengthens your willpower and attunes you to your inner voice.

So when your daimon has something big to say – you can hear it.

And when she points you to the challenge of your life – you’ll be ready.

why 40 is not the new 30 ( + ‘weird’ is good for your soul)

You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you. — Isadora Duncan

When someone found out that my 40th birthday is almost upon me, she chirped, “Don’t worry – 40 is the new 30!”

Although I don’t remember what I said in response, I remember what I thought:

I don’t want 40 to be the new 30.

I’ve already been 30. I felt like a student who handed in a good paper and wants credit for her work.

I wasn’t sure why I felt this. It’s not like I want to get older and die. It’s not like I enjoy this growing awareness of my own freaking mortality. It’s not like I am displeased when people tell me – as they have since I was 19 or so – that I look younger than my age (thank you, excessive facial baby fat).

Then I came across some information about the word ‘weird’.

Weird, or wyrrd, as the mythologist Michael Meade explains in his book FATE AND DESTINY, comes from old roots that include the German werden, meaning “to become, to grow.” We are each born with a unique mix of limitations, gifts and potential – fate (the cards we are born with) and destiny (the story in the soul we are meant to live out) – that

“taken together comprise that which is truly weird and inherently unique about us.”

It’s our weirdness – our uniqueness – that enables us to be remarkable, to shine, to create a kind of value in the world that can’t be dismissed, ignored, imitated or replaced. The word ‘destiny’ can mean ‘to stand out, to stand apart’, especially when it involves the revelation or demonstration of one’s inner genius. So it’s by developing our weirdness that we find our true destiny. Our unique point of awesomeness. Our superpower. Our special sauce.

Or not.

Because, as it happens, no one is born into this world with a set of instructions that neatly dictates what our gifts are and how best to use them. Maybe we sense, deep down, the story that we are meant to live out — the purpose and meaning of our own individual existence – but we don’t exactly know what it is, and there isn’t anybody who appears on our doorstep to tell us.

All we can do is explore the world, each other, and the nature of our own experience.

All we can do is pay attention to the things that come up for us in the twists and turns of the living narrative that is our life, in the

“fateful issues and darkest areas that most of us try to avoid, outwit, or outrun.”

Life has a way of forcing us into events that we would never in a million freaking years choose to live out on our own. It’s those nights of the soul that show us who we are – and who we can be, if we choose to walk into our own potential (across that broken glass, those burning coals).

We are forged in fire and conflict (which is why ‘conflict, conflict, conflict’ is the first rule of writing fiction).

Wisdom, as Meade points out, involves “a darker knowledge of life as well as ways of finding uncommon illumination.”

I realized that it was the ‘darker knowledge’ I wanted to protect. It is that deepening ownership of my proud weird self. Claiming that ’40 is the new 30’ felt like a dismissal of everything I’ve come through in the last ten years, including the death of my infant son and my divorce. Those things are part of me now. They are my broken places.

And I am stronger for them — and weirder, and more unique, for the ways this life has knit me back together.

At 40, I’ve got more goddamn soul.

To learn your destiny is to know who you are (and vice versa). To fail at this is to live out a secondhand existence. To consume your life instead of create it.

Someone recently observed in the comments section that so many of us don’t know who we are. When 40 is the new 30, when we try to age backwards, is that really such a surprise?

why most dating advice tends to suck ( + an interesting definition of ‘soulmate’)

1

There’s a story this culture likes to tell about men and women.

It goes something like this: men and women are at war with each other because men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Women have emotions and men do not.

Women want relationships and men do not.

Men have sexual desire and women not so much.

Therefore, men must manipulate as many women as possible into having sex with them (because that’s what all men want) and women must manipulate men into commitment and marriage (because that’s what all women want).

Which means that dating isn’t about having different experiences in order to learn about yourself, figure out what you want, and develop authentic connections with people (however that connection chooses to express itself).

It’s about playing the game (The Game). It has rules (The Rules) both for men (be as alpha as possible) and women (don’t have sex with him for 90 days, or until he puts a ring on it, or until hell freezes over, or whatever).

It means that women should look a certain way and act a certain way.

It means that men should look a certain way and act a certain way.

And if all goes well – if you follow The Rules, and drive the right car, and have the right body, and aren’t a total slut – then it means that the woman who is looking and acting a certain way and the man who is looking and acting a certain way will have a hugely expensive wedding and live happily ever after even if neither of them knows who the other person truly is, or what they themselves truly want, beneath all that looking and acting.

2

There’s a story this culture likes to tell about men and women.

It goes something like this: ladies, all that newfound independence is ruining your love life (and so thank God there are men like comedian Steve Harvey here to ‘empower’ you by telling you this! And the fact that the second of his three marriages blew up into such a vitriolic mess doesn’t make him any less qualified to lecture you about relationships, right?)

It’s making men feel cowed and inadequate, and that’s your fault.

Or it’s making men feel like they can treat you like ‘sports fish’ (ie: think that having casual sex with you gives them the right to treat you badly), and that’s also your fault.

Don’t blame the men. They’re just stupid insensitive horndogs with no emotions and no sense of accountability or responsibility, so to actually expect anything of them only enables them to call you needy, desperate, crazy or a golddigger. So blame feminism. Blame yourself. The reason that some guy didn’t call you isn’t because he might be immature, or a user, or married. It’s because of something you did wrong (like sleeping with him too soon, you slut!), or another woman did wrong (like sleeping with him too soon, that slut!) so now you won’t get to marry him and have, like, a hundred of his babies. He’s just not that into you (nevermind if you’re not into him, but just didn’t know it yet).

(According to the dating gurus, I slept with my boyfriend way too soon and for the wrong reason. I slept with him, see, because I wanted to. I had been celibate since the end of my marriage and decided it was time to take a lover, so to speak. He was a friend, he was hot, and I knew he wasn’t an asshole. So I did it. And then, dear reader, I did it again. When he made a commitment to me, it wasn’t to get the cookie. It was because we had forged an authentic connection. It was also because I am fabulous.)

3

And you do want to get married and have babies — right? — because if you don’t, then what is wrong with you? Calling off that wedding would be selfish, even though you already know it’s a mistake, because your family wants to see you happy and your Aunt Lydia is excited that her little Emma gets to be the flower girl and besides, where else are you going to wear that five thousand dollar dress?

4

When I was but a wee twentysomething teaching English in Japan, an American woman in her early thirties reflected, “All my single friends want to be married. And all my married friends want to be single.”

She told me, “First you’ll see a wave of weddings. Then a wave of babies. Then a wave of divorces.”

She wasn’t wrong. I turned out to be ahead of the curve – among the first of my circle to get married, get babies, get divorced – but others quickly followed.

Divorce is hell. Which makes me wonder why so many of us skip and run into an institution that has such a high chance of going nuclear. Especially if you don’t really know what to look for in a mate, partly because you don’t know yourself well enough to know what would best serve you in a mate (and vice versa).

You get to that knowledge through experimentation, trial and error, but we don’t give that process its due; we’re too quick to think that something must be wrong with us.

“But don’t you think,” a married girlfriend said to me recently, “that men in Los Angeles only want to date twenty-five year olds?”

I presented my philosophy: “If a man only dates twenty-five year olds, then let him. Let him go. He is not your intended audience, and how convenient of him to have removed himself from the equation so that you don’t waste your time.”

What’s sad is that this culture presents this as some kind of norm, so women think they have to chase these guys anyway, or that the majority of these men are even capable of providing the kind of intimate, emotional connection women say they want (especially if the men are working all the time, which is how they got to be such successful, desirable alphas in the first place). Underneath the heterosexual fairy tale our culture likes to tell is the tacit, lowest-common-denominator, cynical understanding that men marry youth and beauty (the princess) and women marry wealth and status (the prince).

(Biology, people! It’s the nature of evolution! Get that into your head!)

This belief system may conveniently feed our insecurities in a way that serves our consumer culture (buy those breasts, that car, that designer outfit, that Botox, that house in Malibu)– but up to you whether you buy into it or sell your soul to it. Our beliefs act as a filter for the world: if that’s what you expect of human nature, that’s the reality your unconscious will co-create for you by pointing your perceptions to what supports those beliefs and screening out what doesn’t.

5

The myth that all men are more or less the same – they don’t have feelings, they don’t care about relationships – keeps women off balance, insecure, doubting themselves, and in constant competition with other women. It cuts them off from their inner, intuitive voice that would alert them to red flags. It robs them of the sense of choice that comes with the belief in abundance. It makes many women feel that they are fully responsible for the success of their romantic relationships and makes some men feel that so long as they’re paying the bills, they’re not required to do anything else.

It makes way too many women believe that any relationship is better than no relationship – since eligible single men are as elusive as unicorns – so they better stay in the relationship they’re in, even if it’s emotionally or physically abusive.

It also ranks and evaluates men according to how much money they have — as if that has anything to do with how well they do or don’t treat women.

There’s an episode of MILLIONAIRE MATCHMAKER where Patti Stanger, the matchmaker in question, instructs the female millionaire client on how to present herself to a group of potential mates. Patti tells the woman – already drop-dead gorgeous, and the CEO and founder of a successful clothing line – to blow-out her long, wavy blonde hair and wear a body-fitting dress that shows off her legs. “None of this hippie-dippy stuff,” Patti says, gesturing to the woman’s boho-chic outfit.

Then Patti directly addresses the camera. Yes, she admits, viewers will criticize her for always giving women the same advice about how to look and what to wear (blow out your hair, wear a tight sexy dress). “It’s not what I want,” she says defensively, “it’s what the men want. They all tell me that’s how they want a woman to look.”

But that reminds me of something Henry Ford said, about how if he had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it right in front of you.

I define ‘style’ as the story you tell the world about yourself, and so what happens when that story is a little…off? Maybe you’re a boho chick in a tight-minidress world, and somewhere there’s a guy who might or might not know he’s looking for exactly that. A guy (or girl) whom you would adore. What if you were to lock eyes with that person across a crowded room…and then completely fail to recognize each other because of the story your outfit isn’t telling?

What if, instead of trying to appeal to the masses, you developed a very polished and particular point of view? That point of view, that style, that story, could act as an excellent filtering system, pulling in the people who resonate with it — and with you.

What if, instead of trying to please the people who might not like your natural style, you simply let them go? Let them go. They are not your intended audience.

6

I heard Caroline Myss give this definition of a soulmate:

A soulmate is the person who makes your soul grow the most.

A soulmate, she added, could be anyone. Anyone. A lover, a spouse, a friend, a family member…or even an adversary.

This is different from the popular conception of ‘soulmate’ as someone who will always understand you, never cause you trouble, love you deeply and passionately and forever, never bother you with inconvenient needs of their own, always remember to put out the cat, and so on. Scratch a cynic, find a romantic: maybe because we can’t find that idealized version of a partner, we swing so quickly to statements like men only want to date twenty-five year olds or women don’t like nice guys.

(By the way, if you do something or pay for something only to expect sex in exchange, you do not qualify as ‘nice’.

And straight women do want nice guys. As a sex therapist recently said, and please excuse the blunt language, “Women want nice guys who fuck like jerks. And it’s easier to take a nice guy and teach him how to fuck like a jerk, then to take a jerk and teach him how to be a nice guy.” Amen.)

We have gotten it into our collective head that love is supposed to look a certain way and arrive in a highly specific kind of package. But what if it doesn’t work like that? What if we opened ourselves up to the possibility that love will surprise us? It will blow in from unexpected directions and push us to new places?

What if we accepted this idea that a ‘soulmate’ isn’t someone who completes us, but anyone who helps us figure out how to complete ourselves?

Maybe that would take some of the pressure off.

Maybe then the search for sex, companionship and love wouldn’t be a game, or a hunt, or a battle of conflicting agendas. It could be, instead, a daily practice of self-knowledge, authenticity, and communication (without going all woo-woo or breaking out the chants and beads or anything, unless of course you’re into that).

What if we opened up the fairy tale and shifted the dialogue a little bit?

What would happen?

* With thanks to Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s excellent book OUTDATED: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life. Check it out.