Creativity

Work, not inspiration.

I am a pretty creative guy. Five books, almost four thousand newsletters, 10 million words written, hundreds of hours of music recorded, radio, podcasts—you get the picture. A word that people like to use nowadays is “content.” I dislike this word. Like, would you say that Jeff Koons produces content? No, you would say that he was an artist and that he produces art. I don’t think my books are content—I think they are literature. And even these essays are not content. There is an artistry, and a craft that goes into them. I have been called a “content machine.” I would rather be called an art machine.

Now that we got the semantics out of the way, some people create a lot and most people create nothing at all. There’s nothing wrong with that. Most people are not creative people. A trader and a car mechanic have something in common—they’re technical experts, but they’re not creating anything. Occasionally, they will come up with a creative solution to a problem, but for the most part, they’re putting part A into slot B, and that is their job. Again, nothing wrong with that. You can make a good living in jobs like this.

I had one of these jobs, and there were things that I wanted to say, so I said them, and eventually I moved away from the technician job to the creator job. Now I create for a living, and get paid for it. The success of this endeavor hinges on me still having things to say after 20 years. Somehow, I never seem to run out of things to say, though we have covered a lot of territory in these essays, and much of the rest of it is uninhabitable. All creatives have something to say, whether it’s through visual art, music, writing, architecture, or something else. The defining characteristic of a creative is having something to say.

There are days when I have nothing to say. I find that I have nothing to say about politics or political thought anymore—I have given up trying to proselytize people. No amount of evidence will make some people see that free minds and free markets lead to human flourishing. I got a philosopher, Chris Freiman, to speak at my Daily Dirtnap conference in the spring. He was the most popular speaker, by far. Of course, he was preaching to the converted. And some people make a very good living preaching to the converted. Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, Dan Bongino, Michael Knowles, and Matt Walsh (and their liberal counterparts) all make a lot of money telling people what they want to hear. That seems very boring. Yes, they have influence, but it is the wrong sort of influence. People cannot be persuaded until they are ready to hear the message, and often, they aren’t ready to hear the message when we’re enjoying great prosperity. So it is all noise. I could play that game, if I wanted to. And in fact, I do. My writings are full of conservative ideas, but I soft-sell them to the point where they are unrecognizable, persuasive brainworms that, bit by bit, chip away at people’s intransigence. You can’t argue with people about politics. You can’t argue with people about ethics. But upstream from politics and ethics is philosophy, and when you’re talking philosophy, you’re talking about reason and logic. In another life, I would have been a philosophy professor, but I like big houses.

There is a quote: “I only write when inspiration strikes, but fortunately it strikes at 9am every morning.” Writers write. Painters paint. If you’ve ever run into a writer who’s always “working” on a book, and has been for ten years, and can’t seem to finish it, that is not a real writer. That is a writer who waits for inspiration to strike. I never got the Stephen King book on writing, but I gather from the book that he basically treats it as a job. If you write 1,000 words a day, you’ll be done with a book in two-and-a-half months, which is not a lot. Spend a couple of hours writing, go to lunch, go swim in the pool, go walk the dog, and recharge your brain for tomorrow when you can write another 1,000 words. I am actually not that disciplined—I write in spurts. I will go for a week or two when I’m writing 3,000 words a day, and then take a month or two off. But I get to the same place in the end. I have an artist friend who is very prolific, creating 100-200 works of art a year. He has his routine—he works at night until the wee hours. I write in the morning, and the evening, but not in the afternoon. In college, I fancied myself one of these tortured soul writer-types, tapping away at stories at 2am. I do know a woman who took ten years to write a book, but it was a big project, and it turned out to be one hell of a book, reviewed in the New York Times and all that. No freaking way I could stay focused on something for ten years—I need instant gratification.

1,000 words a day. One painting a week. One song a month. I think a lot of reasons creatives don’t create is because they are unable to break down a big project into smaller, bite-sized pieces. A book is made up of 12 chapters. So write a chapter. Too hard? A chapter is 150 paragraphs. Write a paragraph. Write a sentence. Write a word. Staring at the blank document in Microsoft Word is pointless. I don’t often get stuck, but when I do, sometimes I’ll just write nonsense, like, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, and then it will remind me of a story about a dog, and then I am off and running. You don’t think, then write—you write, then think. That is true of all creative endeavors. I bet if you ask most artists, they don’t really have an idea of how a painting is going to turn out when they start. I know for a fact that music producers have no idea what a song is going to sound like when they open the project file. When I write a story, I have no idea how it is going to end. I make it up as I go along. You write, then think. When you stop writing, you stop thinking. No, it’s not going to be perfect. You go back and edit and clean it up later. But I don’t write with my brain.—I write with my hands. I’ve told people that if my hands ever got chopped off in some horrific farm equipment accident, that I’d be finished as a writer. I should take out an insurance policy on my hands.

Part of being a creative is throwing shit out. Not everything I write (or play) is good. In fact, prior to writing this piece, I got halfway through two others and deleted them. Maybe I should delete this one. I’ve spent an entire afternoon recording a DJ mix, and then shitcanned it. I can’t go back and read my old books, because I will find fault in them. I just have to accept that was the best job that I could do at the time, with the information I had available to me. And part of being a creative is knowing that not everything you do is going to be perfect, and you have to accept that. This is no business for perfectionists. I’ve known music producers who can’t stop fucking with a track, twiddling this or that, trying to get it perfect, and the next thing you know, six months have gone by, and it’s still not done. You know what’s better than perfect? Done. There are very few pieces I’ve written that would have benefitted greatly from a complete teardown. I am not a perfectionist. Even the New York Times makes errors. They make so many errors, there is a Twitter account dedicated to their errors.

The thing I enjoy writing the most is short stories. They are also the hardest. Imagination is like an air conditioner in the summertime that is struggling to keep up, and then you end up with a $500 electric bill. It consumes as much energy as an AI data center. So even though I love writing short stories, I dread them—they just take so much out of me, mentally and emotionally. 80% of people who write fiction cheat—they’re actually writing about their own experiences, and just changing the names. I have done that once, and only once. When I write fiction, I write fiction—it is pure imagination. By the way, the vast majority of movies you watch these days are based on books. It was not the movie studio or the director with imagination—it was the writer out in Wyoming writing about gay cowboys—like Annie Proulx with Brokeback Mountain—that was the basis for the acclaimed motion picture. The creatives are doing all the heavy lifting. Ludlum with Bourne, Herbert with Dune, even Requiem For a Dream by Hubert Selby—all books. Someone had an idea, a vision, wrote 1,000 words a day, and it becomes part of the cultural lexicon.

Creativity is not genius. It is work. You have as many good ideas as I do, but you’re spending your weekends at little kid birthday parties.

P.S. I hope you read Night Moves when it comes out in October.