Yes You Can And Neither Can They.
Earlier today I tweeted about how watching some piece of creative endeavour that thrills you is energising; how it sends you away restless and wanting to create something of your own. I had a reply from someone saying that they felt the opposite; that seeing something great by someone else made them realise they would never reach those standards and thus they found it demoralising.
I know exactly how he feels. So I thought I might blog this. This is my theory about that feeling and what we need to recognise when we feel it. I hope that some of you might find it helpful:
Much of the unhappiness we feel in the creative process stems from the fact that we started as fanboys and fangirls of the thing we’re now involved in. You go into novel-writing, because you’ve always loved novels. Your whole life nothing made you happier than sitting in a corner with a book, absorbing the stories, living with the characters, luxuriating in the beautifully-turned words, the well-phrased observations about life and how it is lived, the worlds created before your very brain and now you, too, want to create those worlds, turn those words. You want to become a playwright because you’ve loved the theatre since you discovered it. You’ve seen everything there is to see, you’ve read plays, spent your money and spare time standing at the back with the cheap tickets so you could see everything you possibly can and now you, too, want to create those scenes that beguile and provoke. You go into comedy because you’ve never been happier than sitting in those rooms, watching those women and men with the audience in the palm of their hands, pouring out these brilliant and hilarious thoughts. You’ve got a point of view, you know what’s funny and now you too want to make strangers rock forwards in unison and delight as your ideas hit them. Every single person starts as a fan of the thing they end up doing. And it makes us very unhappy when we come to do it ourselves. Because we end up judging our work by impossible standards. I don’t mean judging it against that of people whose work is superior to ours, I mean judging our own work in a way we can never be equipped to judge it. You can never truly judge your own work. Not really.
Here’s a really good thing to remember. There are two ways into a theatre:
You can walk with the excited crowds along the street, warm with the glass of wine you just had in the bar down the road. You go in past the polished glass and the gleaming brass, past the liveried doorpeople tearing your tickets, up the marble staircase with the sculpted handrail. You walk into the plush, red auditorium with the sprung velvet seats and the gilded alabaster cherubs staring at you from the proscenium, glowing in the light of the chandelier hanging from the ceiling rose. You get yourself seated, open your bag of Maltesers, look at the program you bought. The whole room is rich with anticipation. The hairs on the back of your neck go up as the lights dim and the curtain is raised and there before you is a set designed by a genius, wrought by craftsmen and then through a door in the back of that set comes the person you’ve come there to see: that figure from film, from television that you’ve always wanted to be in the same room as, and they begin to speak finely wrought words, teased out of the language by a master…
That’s one way in. The other way is: You schlep round the back to a side-street, go through the entrance opposite a strip joint where a woman with a sour expression who smells of stale cigarettes and tea grumpily shoves some keys in your hand. You make your way down the thin, rat-run corridors with their peeling paint to your musty dressing room. You put on the your costume, still damp with the sweat of last-night’s performance, and you make your way back along the corridors to the stage. You go through the sprung doors that always smack back at your head as you pass through, into the backstage area, covered in struts and weights holding up the flats of that set, plastered with arrows and instructions and lists. And there in front of you is a table with all the props everyone is going to need over the next two hours, each in its own space, delineated by masking tape, and you take the prop you need for your first entrance, you wait by a door for the exact moment, the exact word and then you go through it. You’re met by a haze of light and beyond and in it a vague, organic mass whose mood and intention you can’t divine and then you say the words that you’ve been paid to come there and say…
There are two ways into a theatre. When you’re reading someone else’s work, or standing in front of it, or listening to it, or watching it, you get to come in the front of the theatre. You get to see it as the finished product. That’s how you meet it and that’s how you judge it. When you’re looking at your own work, you can’t get in the front. You don’t have a ticket. You have to go round the back. The only way you can look at your work is from the side that shows how it’s put together, because that’s all you can think of when you see your own stuff – how you put it together. What the process was, what you added, what you cut, what you always intended, what arrived in the moment as you were creating it that feels like it’s not even yours to claim, it was the subject of such a bolt of inspiration. It can look ugly – the struts, the spars, the sandbags holding it all up, the gaffer tape sticking it together in an ungainly way. And because you can only see your work that way, it’s not really reasonable to judge it against stuff you’ve only seen by coming in the front. In fact, not only is it not reasonable, it’s simply not possible. They are two entirely different experiences making you miserable by pretending to be the same thing.
And by the same token, you should always remember when you come in the front of a theatre and look at what is happening on the stage that behind the set there are stage weights and pulleys and people dressed in black with headsets, wandering around looking hassled. Even if you can’t see exactly what those things are it’s good to remind yourself they’re there. It’s good to remind yourself that no matter how brilliant someone else’s piece of work that you’re marveling at might be, they’ve gone through the same process as you do: They’ve rewritten and restructured and redrafted. They’ve stood back from what they’ve just done and thrown the whole thing across the room in disgust and self-loathing. They’ve had to lose bits they’ve loved, they’ve added bits they weren’t meaning to that you think were genius bits of craft and that just plonked themselves down on the page or the canvas or the score.
We all always imagine it’s easier for other people. My image of other writers is that they sit down at their old school typewriters, with a box of cigarettes, a visor, those weird armband things and just go brrrrrrrrrrrrrr ping brrrrrrrrrrrrr ping brrrrrrrrrrrr ping! Done. “Now to spend my advance on sweets and prostitutes.” Of course they don’t do that. I mean obviously we all spend that money on sweets and prostitutes in the end, but not straightaway. There’s a lot more work to be done first.
For a long time I would write a new stand-up show every year and take it up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And it took months and it was painful. I can remember sitting in other comedians’ shows and thinking, “You bastards. You’ve just turned up and done this.” Of course I ought to have been able to have seen that was untrue with a second’s thought – I’d seen them out and about doing work-in-progress gigs, same as me, after all – but the image of someone else’s work just coming easily, fully-formed and God-given is irresistible and every creative person beats themselves up with it.
But it’s not true. Stop it. Remember which way into the theatre you’re going.
(Since you ask, this is an extract from a lecture I gave a few years ago at Birmingham University on ‘Unhappiness In The Creative Life And What To Do With It’)
Photo: Idil Sukan (http://idilsukan.com)
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