I put off reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit for a long time. I saw it come across the transom when I was an editor, and thought, there’s a brilliant, successful artist, and I’m sure we have nothing in common, and I’m sure she has lots of advice for things I won’t do. I’m sure she also thinks I need to be like her, and I’m sure she ate only egg whites and avoided butter like the plague.
I was wrong. OK, I don’t know about the egg whites thing. But the point is not that she’s a brilliant artist and you’re not. Her point is this: your ability to create, to do something worthy and unique and real, isn’t a fluke; it comes as a result of creating a pattern of doing, and the conditions you put in place and keep there.
Tharp lies in bed every morning and thinks about how she doesn’t feel like going to work out for two hours (which she does every single day, God bless her). She doesn’t want to get up and she doesn’t want to go. It’s the last thing she feels like doing. But she doesn’t have to start by working out—all she has to do is hail the cab. Once she leaves the building and gets in the cab, the rest just happens.
You have to get up, and you have to have a next step. You don’t become accidentally creative or successful; you get there on purpose, by creating the conditions in which can do do or write or think or make something. It doesn’t just happen.
This post didn’t just happen, for instance. I got up and made coffee and pretended I don’t have 1,000 other things I have to do, and did this. Why? Because I said I would, for one. And you said you wanted to be part of it (accountability!).
But words aren’t worth much if you don’t put action behind it. The idea of a 21-day challenge (which is what this is) is Tharp’s idea in action. Get up, and do it every day. Twenty-one days? Please.Tharp has been getting up every morning and hailing a cab for decades.
Another thing: Tharp used to bask in the myth that if she only had more time, space, resources, her own studio, her own theater…then she could really create something good.
Nope. Wrong. She discovered that the opposite is true: “Limits are a secret blessing, and bounty can be a curse.”
She talks about how some of her most fascinating, brilliant, complex projects were born of little resources or time, and conversely, how the times she was given access to lots of time, space, and dancers yielded uneven, frustrating, and disappointing work.
“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources,” she writes.
The lesson? Don’t expect creativity to come out of vacuum, and don’t wait until you have all the resources in the world to make something happen.
I often puzzle at the romantic idea people have, that later, much later, when they retire or have money or move to an island in the Mediterranean, THEN they’re going to sit down and write that book, that screenplay, that novel. Then they’re going to be creative.
Really? After you’re “done” living, you’re going to write about it? Good luck with that. That is not how it works. Imagine that day, when you sit down in your new house on your island, the breeze coming in through the window. You open your new leather-bound journal, your pen hovering over the page. And….then what.
NOW I WILL WRITE MY LIFE STORY.
I can’t think of anything worse.
If you want to create something, start creating now. Where will you go and what will you find? Who knows. That’s the fun part. All you have to do is get up, get out, get in a cab. The rest will happen.
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The prompt I was given: What book changed your life or perspective?
My prompt to you: What myth or flat-out wrong ideas has kept you from doing something you want to do?
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