I used to think there was something inside of me. Something special. Even when other people didn’t. Even after an uncle made fun of my singing, I kept singing. Even when I couldn’t make sense of written notation and my playing abilities were limited I kept writing songs. Even when nothing made sense in my mind I kept on scribbling.

I don’t feel that way any more. And I’ve come to realise that my motivations for wanting to be creative are very different. Mostly I’m just hoping some creative output will make up for the hopeless failure I feel I’ve become. Unemployed, unhinged, uninvolved – so many ‘un’ words, so much lacking. I can’t be who other people want, and I can’t be myself and I can’t seem to find a way to be happy. I can’t hold up pretenses. I can’t pretend I’m not completely disillusioned with everything. I know it’s been a really long day and that I’m dabbling with things – art supplies and techniques, specifically – that I know next to nothing about, but right now my heart is breaking. I just want to give it all away. I want to get rid of all these art supplies and stop embarrassing myself.

Art was always my consolation. In my loneliness I would take comfort in the poems I’d etch out. When peers would ignore me I’d receive interaction and stimulation instead from teachers happy with my work. And that day I told the person who made my heart sing that I loved them, that day when they admitted they weren’t interested in me at all, I told myself I would at least have a song. My heart couldn’t stand the interrogation my mind was giving it. Asking over and over “why don’t you like me? why am I not good enough?” didn’t seem to change the facts that you didn’t and I wasn’t. So I distracted myself with lines and rhymes, counting syllables and changing chords. I mourned at my Roland keyboard, keeping busy and sane.

Art was always my consolation, but I hoped that it might too be my salvation. I hoped it would make things better. I hoped it would explain things, I hoped it would explain me. I hoped (if not the son they imagined) it would produce a son of which my parents could still be proud. I hoped that it would impress the next person to steal my heart. I hoped that it would somehow fill all the various voids.

But it’s too much – and not enough, all at once. I feel the shame of not feeling like enough coupled with the pressure to be prolific and profound when in truth I’m just a very amateur, very frustrated painter hack. Things need to change. How, I don’t yet know. But things need to change.

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I don’t do as much as I would like to. Infact I don’t even do as much as I intend to do. There’s this great inexplicable and hard-to-describe resistance that gnaws at me. I try to ignore it. It gets louder. I usually then procrastinate, play computer games, over-eat, over-sleep… But it doesn’t stand up to close scrunity. The voice inside me that says “You’ll never be able to do this” doesn’t make a lot of sense in the face of the understanding that I’ve usually done some version of the task before. Often numerous times. But, as Steven Pressfield notes in The War Of Art, it doesn’t have to make sense. It is an emotional impulse not a logical one.

It is currently summer in Australia and I’ve been going for late afternoon/early evening walks through the bush escarpment around this area. I started doing this in part because I wanted to get some exercise, but I was also inspired by Julia Cameron’s comments in Walking In This World. The thing that I came to notice was that when walking became about noticing the environment around me and spending time with myself (and much less about physical exertion and ‘exercise’) it became deeply satisfying. I don’t have to motivate myself to take these walks. If anything I am eager to go. Some days I can’t wait to get out of the house and my departure time gets earlier and earlier.

These little expeditures have completely changed my outlook on art, certainly, but life more generally too. I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of nature. It doesn’t matter if it’s hot or dry or raining, it is always beautiful. Watching the sunset is always beautiful. And you’re never really alone – not even in the bush. There are tiny Finches bouncing in and around bushes, vocal White Cockatoos soaring above the trees. Even the occassional Cicada. Somehow there is such a sense of possibility in the great outdoors. The walls of my workspace feel at times like mental constraints as much as physical ones.

I take my iPod shuffle with me on these excursions. It is full of podcasts and music – currently Michael Jackson, Kate Bush, The Beastie Boys. It also contains my own podcasts and music demos. I listen to them on these walks. I am relieved in these moments to discover they’re not as awful as I imagine. I can see merit in the things I attempt. I can listen to three different demos of the same song and notice the development of not only the song, but myself as the songwriter and creative talent. It is just a new way of bonding with these artforms and doing so in a physical way – and for a person who spends so much time in his mind, this is a welcome reprieve.

At the present time I am procrastinating over a podcast interview. I’m not confident about the direction I think the interview should take. This uncertainty bothers me. I wonder if I can make the interview work. I ignore the fact that I’ve recorded many such interviews before, including another where I had similar concerns about the conversation’s arc. Two things help me overcome my anxiety. The first of these is preparation. The more prepared I am, the more confident I feel. It isn’t about scripting every thought because you need to be fluid and react to the interviewee in a meaningful way. But it is about exploring their work and having an understanding of them and the issues that relate to them.

The second is perhaps a little more abstract. At some point you have to stop researching and just meditate on all the information you have and make sense of it yourself. I used to think when I couldn’t find a direction for an interview that I needed ‘more information.’ The opposite actually proved true. I need to limit the inflow of information so I can focus on processing that information. (And frankly at times the fear you don’t have enough information can become a form of procrastination.) I needed to be alone with my thoughts. Again a natural uncluttered setting seems to help with this. Sometimes I’ll go to a local park and sit on a bench with my notepad and watch ducks while making notes. Other times I’ll just sit in my backyard.

I find myself caught between simple goals and grandiose plans. Julia Cameron warns of the dangers of attempting big things too soon. I totally understand this, infact I’ve experienced the creative retreats that overcommitting too soon can inspire. But I always want aspirations that are ‘big’ enough to inspire me and excite me and make me feel as though what I do is important and matters. It is a balancing act, I suppose.

I still compare myself and my work to that of other people. People who have had different opportunities and different histories and different levels of personal and artistic development. This isn’t helpful. I know this isn’t helpful.

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Sunday 1 November
Wordcount: 2047
After re-readng Julia Cameron’s thoughts on finishing things…

The moment we finish something, we get a sort of celestial pat – sometimes even a shove – a small boster rocket of energy to be applied elsewhere.

… I decided to start the day by finishing some small tasks. I made my bed, new sheets for a new month and new beginnings, washed some dishes and did some cleaning up. I had a shower, and then I started writing. I couldn’t believe how easily the words flew onto the page, how many memories came flooding back in that moment. I did a test run for a few days in October and decided I could write two thousand words in two hours. Today, however, I did it in one! Huzzah!

Monday 2 November
Wordcount: 4067 (+2020 on previous day)
The words came less fluidly. I was reluctant to show up and write. Certainly less uninspired than yesterday. I have a lot of video to review that relates to this project and while this is infinitely useful and helpful, it can also mean writing takes much longer if you get distracted by going too far down the path of memory lane. I’m resisting the urge to write more than approximately two thousand words a day. This is all about consistency. If I leave the page wanting to write more hopefully that enthusiasm will translate into good things for tomorrow’s effort.

Tuesday 3 November
Wordcount: 4717 (+650 on previous day)
A completely horrible day on all fronts. [Somebody said something that was intended as encouragement but actually had the opposite effect altogether. They hoped that I could sustain the project for the 50,000 words. The only thing is up until they said that I never doubted I could. I genuinely thought I'd get to the 50,000 words with ease and still not be at the end of the project. This doubt really took hold in my mind, I didn't reach my daily wordcount and everything went downhill from there.]

Wednesday 4 November
Wordcount: 4717 (No increase on previous day)
It was hard to imagine a worse day than yesterday… but here we are. Actually I did a lot of things, even writing, on this day. It was quite a productive day. I just didn’t do anything on the NaNoWriMo project. (I played a lot of music. I recorded a song – and it relates, um, thematically, at least, to the NaNoWriMo project.) I figure tomorrow really can’t be worse than today. Like, it just isn’t possible. You can’t write less than nothing. (Let’s keep the bar low people!)

Thursday 5 November
Wordcount: 5885 (+1168 on previous day)
I took a break from the narrative of the project itself and worked on a section that was always intended to be an appendix to the book. I wrote about writing the song that I mentioned earlier. It was a very emotional process, but it yielded a breakthrough more than a breakdown. I shared some background on the story with a friend via email and this reaffirmed to myself that this was a story worth telling. Mostly I am just happy to be writing again.

Friday 6 November
Wordcount: 6368 (+483 on previous day)
I wrote a little bit in the morning and then spent the rest of the day staring at the screen. I wish I could say this wasn’t true…

Saturday 7 November
Wordcount: 6368 (No increase on previous day)
After the cabin fever of Friday I knew I needed to get out of the house, so I did. I spent some time in a local park and was impressed at how much more clearly I thought in that place. There was no writing on this day, but when I got home I started cleaning up madly. Decluttering for creativity or merely procrastination? I guess time will tell.

Sunday 8 November
Wordcount: 7356 (+988 on previous day)
Things are slowly taking shape. Very slowly. Infact I have a feeling that by the end of the month I’ll have written 30,000 words. Sure it won’t be the 50,000 NaNoWriMo hopes to inspire, but it still isn’t too bad. It’s certainly more than anything else I’ve written. (Indeed the current 7356 words is the longest continuous non-Academic piece I’ve ever written, so that is something to be thankful for too.)

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I adore Annie Lennox. From her work with Dave Stewart in the Eurythmics to her solo efforts, I have enjoyed it all and found so much inspiration from her talents as a performer and songwriter. It is oddly comforting to know that she experiences much the same doubts that I do when she sits down to work on something.

Annie Lennox:

It’s weird. Some songs just come [explosive sound] like that, really really weird. This is what I’m saying about the preparation before the song. Very strange. Some days I’ll go to try to write a song and I’m thinking, ‘I’m rubbish. It’s really crap you know. I can’t do anything, anything at all.’ And it’s almost like this builds it up and [explosive sound] out comes a song.

If you haven’t heard Annie’s most recent studio album Songs of Mass Destruction you should really check it out. I daresay it’s the album of her career.

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The last week was a bit of a bust for me. Besides a couple of articles for Somebody Think Of The Children, I didn’t really write at all. Towards the end of the week even the morning pages became difficult. I would get to the end of the first of the three pages and I couldn’t bare to look at them any longer. Somehow I knew if I really put my inner thoughts on the page a whole lot of procrastination and inaction and doubt and shame would present itself. I mean it took me this long to decide I was a writer; can I really be a writer if I am not writing?

Eventually I did manage to push through the morning pages and the thing I came to realise was I am scared. I am scared that I can’t pull off my current project. I am scared that trying and falling flat on my face would somehow validate all my creative detractors from over the years. But, actually, on closer consideration I come to realise that my creative champions throughout my lifetime greatly outnumber my creative detractors – so why do they occupy so much mental real estate?

I’m trying to figure out some sort of workflow. It’s much more difficult than I anticipated. On the one hand if I spend all my time on Twitter, I don’t get much writing done. But if I avoid it entirely my sense of community is diminished, I feel removed from the world, I can’t bounce ideas off of people or offer and accept support. We’ve always had this sense that many creative pursuits, but particularly writing, were isolated solitary activities. And in some ways, they can be. But the Internet has been instrumental in connecting people with similar passions and building communities around those passions. I want to share and learn, but I also feel vulnerable. I have moments when I feel great doubt and share this, secretly hoping for someone to step in and say, “Don’t be silly. You are very talented” or something similar. Twitter is not the place for those moments. People are just as likely to further add to such doubts or use them as the basis of ongoing jokes.

I guess it is a question of balance, as with all things in life. I keep trying to convince myself that the effort will win out. In the meanwhile I hope working with the morning pages and The Artist’s Way exercises will help silence the creative jabs of the past.

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