The Last Word On Nothing

In the past year I’ve gotten extremely interested in books about creativity and creation. I used to hate these kinds of books. I thought they were self indulgent and annoying. And many of them are. But I’ve found a few I really like, and I like them because they don’t actually talk all that much about how to come up with ideas. In fact, they are blunt and sometimes cruel about ideas. They don’t matter, they say, they only matter if you can use them. In fact, some go so far as to say that ideas are not even yours unless you do something with them.

If I may brag for a moment, ideas are almost never my problem. Whenever students or audience members at a talk ask “how do you get your ideas” I always struggle. I can’t really imagine having trouble thinking of ideas. Which means I’m one of those surely insufferable people who goes on about how ideas are everywhere, in everything. I’m sure it sounds incredibly annoying to someone who is stuck trying to come up with ideas. We’re not trying to be annoying, I promise. It’s just a hard question to answer. (And in the moments when I do struggle, I have some tricks, which I’ve written about here before).

Ideas aren’t my problem, figuring out which ones to use and what to do with them is. You can have a million ideas and if you do nothing with them then what good are they? And, for me at least, ideas are often like glow sticks. You know the kind you have to break and shake to make glow? They only glow for a certain period of time. After a while, they fade, and become dull plastic sticks that I’m gathering in a pile in the corner of the room.

This isn’t always the case. I have a few ideas right now that are still glowing, radioactive almost, in the pile. They’re so alluring they’re a little bit scary because they might cause terrible cancer or I might not really be able to truly pick them up and do them justice. I’ve rambled at my friends about these ideas, but they remain scribbled notes in a notebook. Drawings and scenes and tree diagrams, thoughts about how to best execute them, character sketches and coding questions.

Which is what led me to these books about creativity. Because in my mind, true creativity isn’t about ideas, it’s about execution. And I was struggle to even begin. Some of the books were incredibly useful! But as I was reading them, I kept getting stuck on something.

Lots of these books often talk about a creative force. And a lot of them call it God. Some call it God and then say “but it doesn’t have to be god, it can be anything you like.” I was raised religiously ambiguous (my mother was raised Catholic, my father is a staunch atheist, the kind who will lecture people who come to the door with religious reading material) but these days I don’t place any faith in a God. And I certainly am not ready to hand over credit for my ideas to one. And while I found these books generally very useful, I often struggled to get over all this God talk.

“Remembering that God is my source, we are in the spiritual position of having an unlimited bank account,” writes Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. She’s talking about ideas, the flow of ideas out there, and I generally agree with that. There is an unlimited bank account of ideas in the world. It’s just the God part that I can’t quite get around. Earlier in the book she says that you can replace “God” with anything you like. But I struggled with that too. What would I replace the word “God” with? Myself? That seems cocky at best. Cameron sometimes also refers to this thing as “The Great Creator” which still felt too… Godlike to me. I needed a concept that felt realistic but that also wasn’t real. Something that represented the ideas in the world, that I do think are out there, but that wasn’t religious.

So I came up with something, well, ridiculous. But it helps me, so perhaps it will help you: a barrel of slimy, glowing eels.

Hear me out. In Big Magic, another book about creativity, Elizabeth Gilbert has a section about the American poet Ruth Stone. I’ll quote Gilbert here, but she’s recounting something Stone told her about her writing process:

As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming . . . ’cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, “run like hell” to the house as she would be chased by this poem.

The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would “continue on across the landscape looking for another poet.”

And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first.

In many versions of the story (and in my memory), this tail is attached to a tiger, although looking back at Gilbert’s book it seems that Stone never mentioned a tiger, only a tail. Anyway, in my head it’s a tiger, and you have to catch its tail. So maybe, I thought, the unlimited bank account of so-called “Great Creator” was just a giant container of tiger tails. This image was delightful to me — a snooty old-timey banker standing in front of a vault that, when opened, is fully of writhing tiger tails.

This image made me think of eels, I guess because tiger tails, unattached from their feline bodies, are quite eel like. And because I am never one to shy away from an extended metaphor, I ran with it.

The barrel of slimy, glowing eels has always been inside me. The eels feed on the ideas and art I take in, read and experience. They grow and mate in this barrel, like a disgusting soup. A disgusting soup that I rely on for my livelihood. I must take care of my barrel of slimy, glowing eels, and be sure not to break the container so they all escape. But I do want to carve out a doggy door (eel door?) so that they can get out, and back in I suppose. Perhaps I have to take a woodworking class to carve this doggy/eel door and to best care for these eels (this would be some kind of professional writing classes or training, in case you’re not following my fucked up metaphor).

I have to train myself on the most effective eel catching methods, too. How does one catch eels? Bare handed? Do I design myself some gloves? Or some kind of hunting stick, or camera trap. Maybe I should sing to the eels, to make them feel safe. I need to become an eel expert, to be able to tell which are healthy and which are sick and need attention, and which should be let go. Some eels are not meant for my barrel.

So by the end of this strange game of telephone inside my own brain, I wrote the affirmations that Cameron requires in The Artist’s Way, but replaced God with “barrel of slimy, glowing eels.” Which sounded like this:

I am willing to let my barrel of slimy, glowing eels, create through me.

Through my use of creativity, I serve my barrel of slimy, glowing eels.

I am a channel for my barrel of slimy, glowing eels’ creativity, and my work comes to good.

As I listen to my barrel of slimy, glowing eels within, I am led.

Now, whenever I’m diving into one of my big ideas, I imagine it as a big, healthy, glowing eel. An eel whose trust I must gain, who I need to train and groom and coax out of the barrel. A beautiful eel who, if I treat her right, will become a friend, and will bring me joy and creative happiness.

And that works for me. What that says about me, well, I’ll leave that to you.

In the meantime, I’ll spend my time trying to avoid the metaphorical version of this:

Image: German: Zwei Flussaale by Aloys Zötl.