Creative Life

A Shift in the Creative Paradigm

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People

From the latest installment of the Lefsetz Letter, tracing the changes that have occurred in our lifetime. As always, Bob Lefsetz is writing about the music industry, but if you’re a writer and you’re not reading this and mentally inserting “book” instead of “album”, it may be time to start paying a little more attention to what’s going on in the industry:

CREATION

Used to be expensive and we felt anybody who’d made a record deserved attention. Now anyone can record, even on their iPad, and we need a reason to pay attention.

As usual, the entire post is pure gold, but I find myself re-posting this fragment because I keep speaking to aspiring writers through work who mistake The Book as an end-goal. They’re all excited by the possibility of epub and self-publishing because it makes getting published achievable, but they haven’t figured out the counter-point of that.

What they want isn’t having the book out there, what they want is the attention. And they can’t understand why having The Book isn’t achieving that, ’cause they’re using new technology to try and achieve something attached to a very old paradigm.

The nature of creativity is changing. You need to think harder about what you really want from your creative life, ’cause there’s no one-true-path anymore (if, indeed, there ever was).

And I stand by my recent post that says if you’re a creative type and you’re not subscribed to the Lefsetz letter it’s really time to start. 

Joe Hill’s Secret to Achieving Creative Focus

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People , , ,

One of the things that makes the great truly great is their ability to make difficult things seem effortless, at least when they’re looked upon from the outside. It’s one of the reasons I’m intrigued by seeing the process of great writers up close, even if I’m long past the stage where I believe there’s some mysterious secret to writing that will unlock everything.

In this respect, Joe Hill’s tumblr post on creative math achieves greatness twice over. It makes his writing itself seem effortless, while simultaneously acknowledging the effort that goes into his work, and its a distillation of a great deal of complex thought and experience into a single elegant point:

what’s my trick for staying focused on a project? Happiness. I follow pleasure. It makes me feel good to stay focused on one thing at a time, to pour myself fully into it, so that’s what I do. I think any creative act usually grows naturally from enjoyment. Experiment with your approach and see what gives you the best high… then do that.

via Creative math: 1 > 2 at Joe Hill’s Thrills

When you consider the overall complexity of Hill’s creative output – he’s a novelist, a comic-book writer, and a damn fine short fiction writer – this advice seems wildly counter-intuitive. Monthly comic books have deadlines that roll through faster than novel deadlines, which means you naturally end up having to stop one and work on the other.

Judging by the rest of his post, Hill’s secret doesn’t seem to be working on something until it’s done, but creating hard edges to the times he devotes to a project. When he does a chunk of novel, he looks for a natural stopping point and allows it to lie fallow until he’s ready to pick it up again. 

Given some of my recent reading into the power of incubating creative work, this too seems like solid advice for creative-types with multiple projects running.