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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? …Simply, certain conditions are required.

That’s a quote from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, written by the French writer Albert Camus.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 24 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Balance, Health and Notebooks but today I want to talk about process and retreats and the dark nights of the soul.

On my journey as a writer I used to think pulling all-nighters was the way to write. It didn’t work. I used to think I had to write every single day. I don’t. I used to think I was a night creator, until I became a morning creator. Now, I’m an anytime creator, but I have a process. I repeat it, every day, until my first draft is done. This is the journey. You have to find your own process by doing and finding space and time to discover by making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

I’m not alone in this. Nearly every creator I’ve ever talked to about how they created something inevitably talks about their process, how they create a space and time for that process to grow into a creation.

In old French, process means “journey”, and in Latin, it means “to advance”. So, process is about the journey, not the end. We advance, we proceed, we journey into creation. It’s personal, because everyone is different, original.

So there’s no path to creation; you make the path by going on the journey because process is not a product, a finished product you walk on, journey along. And why is this? Because capitalism values product as the most important part of creation. Well, it’s not. Process is.

Process is hard work, but it can be fun if we’re not put under pressure. Going down a path you’ve never taken before, every day, is fun. It never finishes. It starts again and again. You never know what the character is going to say to the other character. You only know they’re in a garden. You don’t know why something appears in a painting while you’re painting. You advance a new process of manufacturing something, by mistake, by trying to figure out a solution. This is why process is associated with so many activities — arts, law, business, science, technology, thermodynamics, mathematics — because it describes so many different types of creative journeys.

At first, a good place to find your own working process is to study people in your field, as I mentioned in episode 19 when I talked about mentors. The best place to get information about the process of a creator you love, how they worked, is to read their autobiography, or biographies. There are many places online full of inspirational background information on the creative process of creators you love. You simply have to research them. Criticism, biographies are helpful, but a “Paris Review” interview, or a well written autobiography, are indispensable.

The best books to read on any process are, well, on process. Most of the time, when you go to the critics, you get information on the “end product”, the painting, the iPhone, the house. But does this show you how to go about painting, designing, or building those creations? No. You want to know how the creator went about creating it, not the thing itself. How did they do it.

Another important ingredient to process: How do you create space-time? As John Cleese says, you have to find a “space” where you can give yourself that “time” to connect with what some call flow, others genius, and what I call inspiration and the imagination.

Yes, this space can be created in your home or office, but what about what Cleese calls the “interruptions”, or what I call distractions: phone calls, ticking things off on lists, racing around all day? I’ll talk about Distractions in the next episode, alone with sacredness and awareness. Anyway, Cleese says if you are interrupted during your “creative state” then you lose the flow of what you were working on. Unless you create what he calls an “oasis of space-time” where there are “boundaries” of “space” and “time” then you can’t tap into inspiration, or what he calls creativity.

Boundaries can be difficult to create. This is OK. This is not. But if we stick to our own authenticity, your own integrity, that this is what I need to do, not what I want to do, then out of our own integrity and authenticity comes natural boundaries. Then, you do the work. You do the work just like you would for your day job. How long that is is up to you. Ninety minutes seems to be the most universally accepted amount of time, or so research shows. This is the time when creative work is optimal, before opening the blue screen in the morning, when you get into a deep kind of concentrated work. After that ninety minutes people are supposed to have diminishing returns. It makes sense too, because we operate on ninety minutes cycles in sleep. You get up at the same time every day as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it and you “sweat and labor.”

Stendhal used to give himself two hours every day. You can start in the morning like Auden. It can be late at night like Dostoyevsky. Faulkner used to say, “I get inspired, at 9 every morning.”

Hemingway, mornings. And they all created for a set amount of time. If they only wrote one word during those hours, well then that was the work for that day. Tolstoy wrote in the morning, preferably after a short walk.

I go for a short walk before I write. I didn’t steal it from Tolstoy. I do it because it makes me feel good. Flaubert frequently wrote twelve hours a day, beginning in the late afternoon and continuing through the night. He complained how his throat hurt from writing. Yes, he read every single sentence out, many times, until he got it right. I started reading my stuff out loud after reading about Flaubert. I found out Richard Ford reads his stuff out to his wife too. I did this for one novel then gave up on it. Flaubert rewrote each page of Madame Bovary at least four or five times, a lot of the pages as many as a dozen times.

I know a lot of musicians who write their songs on the road, performing. Many writers I’ve met need to be absolutely still in a blank room to get anything done. So process can be movement or stasis, or a combination of both. Certain creators need to be in movement. Many bands who were going to break up because they couldn’t create any new material discover new songs when they go on the road. So, do you create when you move, or in stasis? I do both. Notes in movement, stasis to transcribe and tie them all together by writing them down and feeling my way into imagination and inspiration.

Then there’s the process of retreating. Do you need to retreat into the woods for three weeks, or into what Virginia Woolf called a literal, and figurative, “room of one’s own”? Some people can write in a coffee shop, others need to have absolute silence and be staring at a blank white wall. Nabokov liked writing in hotels. Certain artists need to be in their studio, others need to be outside, as with the Impressionists.

Of course I think it a great idea to go away or retreat to a space for a specific amount of time to create. You go into the “wilderness” like a Thoreau or any of the people who go on retreats to places like the one we created – La Muse. A lot of those creators do this every year. It doesn’t have to be completely isolated. Thoreau went home to his mother’s for meals.

So you bring your idea, your talent and your intention. A retreat gives you space-time away from the real world, and a support system to make the most of your stay and get a block of work done that would have been impossible at him. The thing with a retreat though is that you will be doing your “work” with a group of people who have went there too for the same purpose, a group of people who understand what you are going through. If we are talking about a sustained amount of time to really get into your project without interruptions then a retreat can be very productive.

Ultimately you have to have the right conditions to be able to make the effort to get inspired. Inspiration and genius are in all of us. However, we are not all truly receptive all the time as it takes a huge effort when surrounded by the vicissitudes. It takes courage to be receptive and to create. Places like La Muse, the retreat we created in France, are spaces designed to reduce these “interruptions.” “Quiet Hours” and the natural, tranquil setting allow for creative ideas to seed and grow.

Sure, you can optimize those conditions in your own life whether it’s with meditation or a non-negotiable writing routine, but it does help to get a boost, to say the least, by going on a retreat. Just creating those conditions at home can take years. Establishing them in a retreat and then bringing them back home with you would be even better. As opposed to having to fight through your routine to form a creative schedule you can retreat and establish your process and be encouraged by the example of other creative individuals so you have no excuses to not do your work, because they’re doing theirs, by practicing their process.

If I need to get a big chunk of work done, I retreat. It can be a week. Three days, a long weekend. As much as four weeks. I’ve been doing them for years.

I recently found out Kazuo Ishiguro does retreats, but instead of a retreat, he calls it a “crash”. He only writes. All day. Six days a week. He takes an hour off for lunch, two for dinner. No email. No phone. No guests, visitors. This way his fictional world becomes more real than his real world. He immerses himself in his creation.

Retreat means to withdraw, detach from the world to find your inner world. Retreats do not have to be weeks long. They can be a weekend. Also, you can have regular short retreats, short withdrawals to create in notebooks. I used to retreat in the truck waiting for writers and artists to get their shopping done. I retreat waiting for the kids to finish school, sitting outside the conservatoire for them to finish their music, on trains, planes. I write. It could be notes on a character. Half a chapter. Backstory. Some dialogue. This is what I call regular creation.

Of course, you’ll need support to get away. Others will have to give up time so you can take time. But this is an opportunity for those you love to support you, and it is something you can then offer them.

The whole idea is to resource yourself, and really get into your creation. In French a “source” is a water source, like the one at La Muse, where people get fresh mountain water, but it can also mean something deeper. On retreat residents go out every day to re-source themselves by filling up a glass bottle. When it’s empty they know they have to go back out again, and each time they come back refreshed to their work, inspired.

This is what a retreat can give you. It can re-source you, give you the time to decompress from the stresses of contemporary life to actually figure out what you want to create. Peers, other creators, people on the same wave-length, and sometimes on the same path creatively as you, are another benefit. Retreats can give you large blocks of space-time to create. The thing with La Muse and places like it is that you will be doing this “work” with a group of people who have come for the same purpose, a group of people who understand what you are going through.

Retreats are spaces designed to reduce distractions and walls, but they’re not the only places to go. There are residencies and fellowships too. The idea is to allow yourself to see the big picture of where you are, but more importantly your creative future. A lot of the time they can also house professional creators who host workshops to help you learn your craft better. And again, there is also regular creation, taking moments and minutes to document or create while waiting for the kids, the spouse, until you can find the time to get away for longer.

So, need to really focus on a specific project? Then get rid of all distractions. Movies. Books. Phone. Everything. Find space-time, and if you need a really focused block of it then retreat. We’re all different. Some people can retreat in their own house, in a library, a writers room. You have to have faith in your own process, but first you have to find out what your process is.

And another thing, another fundamental part of process: what I call the Dark Night of the Soul. And what is this? Well, from my own perspective, when I write a book I always want to give up at the end. When I’ve spent months and years writing a novel, and I’m sick of looking at it, I want to stop. If I have to edit it one more time I’ll literally want toburn the whole thing or chuck the computer out the window. I just can’t do it any more. All is lost.

Well, it’s not. This is when I know it’s nearly finished. When I can barely stand to look at it any more. Like every movie, the hero finds a way of beating the bad guy, no matter how lost they feel near the end. They get up out of their wallowing and finish the job in the final act.

You’ve nearly finished a book, a chair, a business plan. This is what they call the “All is lost” moment in screenplays, which then turns into the “Dark Night of the Soul” or wallowing. It’s the nearly done moment. This is what divides the creatives from the creators. Finishing. Entering the third act.

It doesn’t matter how crap you think your chair, book, business plan is, you have to finish it. It’s the only way to go on, to create another one, a better one. Only by doing, do we get better. But the mind/ego, the walls, they’re always highest near the end of a project.

Like the Romans when they hit Scotland. They couldn’t kill all the Scots in the Highlands. So they built a wall to keep them out of the South. Basically, they failed. They gave up. They didn’t finish the intended project of conquering the Scots, but finished another project instead: Hadrian’s Wall. It’s beautiful, and it’s still standing, even if the Scots are still there, and the Romans are gone. The Romans finished their creation. They couldn’t achieve their complete goal, beating the Scots, but they kept them out of England.

In France, they have an expression: “A house is never finished.” Creation is a house. It’s never finished because you could go on renovating your creation forever. There are many rooms in your creative house. Each room has specific purposes, but each one needs to be functional. It’s better to have a functional kitchen, than one without a sink, or a bathroom without a shower. Everything else could be perfect, but one important part is missing. You have to walk into each of your creative rooms, and not allow the walls, the negative voices of self-sabotage, fear, myths, ageism, elitism, perfection, stop you finishing them.

Basically you have to allow yourself to accept that what you are creating is not perfect. It’s simply a room. Then self-sabotage won’t have as strong a hold on you. Nothing is perfect, something I talked about in episode 10. Every masterpiece has its flaws. The chapter that just goes on for ever. The skirt with the unaligned hem. That one actor destroying a scene of an otherwise amazing film. You wrote the screenplay, but you can’t control the direction, the acting.

This is what Beckett meant when he said fail better. Do your best. Put it out there, and then let it be. Jump of the cliff as Vonnegut put it and learn how to fly on the way down.

Of course people like Nabokov can’t help themselves. They come back and re-write novels that have been out for years, decades. But this is not the point. The point is to know that no how matter how great someone is at creating in a field, we all think what we do could be better. But, at some stage you have to stop, and a lot of the time if you don’t, if you keep revising, changing your creation, it can turn into a real failure, something over worked.

Know that it’s okay to let go of a creation. Work on a different project for a while, or move on to the next one. We learn from each thing we create. Each thing we finish allows us to get better at what we create. Empower yourself. Get better. This way you’ll continue to enjoy what you’re creating. Get past the dark night of the soul. Finish, and move onto your next creation.

And before sending something out into the world, wait, rest. You’re not on a “deadline”. Forget the capitalistic deadline orientated culture of instant gratification. Creation is as natural, as organic and essential as breathing, every hour, every day, a lifetime. We don’t have to finish the creative process. We are not going to die if we don’t get over the “line” of some imagined deadline. Think of what you have created as a due date. The baby isn’t always “cooked” on the due date. Nothing is ever perfect the second it comes out of you. It gets revised, edited, redone, changed. This is part of the process. It is born, but it needs time to open its eyes, for you to see what it is with clear eyes.

Writers do this all the time. They leave a novel, essay, poem for a period of time, say two or three months, then come back to it. They leave what Anne Lamott calls “the shitty first draft” alone and go work on something else.

This also goes for artists, business people, musicians. There will be parts of what you have created that are wonderful, that barely need any re-working, but there will be a lot of it that needs to be re-visited.

Let the dust settle. Rest yourself, but more importantly, let the work rest. Give it time. Then return to it. By resting the work a creator is not in the creation any more but allowing the process to continue of its own volition. Creators get out of their work so that they can make it better when they return to it. If you give a creation to people before it’s really ready you do a disservice to the work, but also to the person you’ve given it to. You’ll be forcing them to judge something underdeveloped, and to have to tell you it is too when they won’t want to. It makes more work for them. Rest with your work. Wait.

So, the question is: what’s your process? What rhythm is best for you? Night? Daytime? One hour? Two hours? 12 hours like Flaubert? When is your most productive time? When do you come up with new ideas? Knowing “your time” makes you consistent. It allows you, helps you to show up on time to work, every day. You have to ask yourself the question: how do I process ideas, words, images, reality best? When is my best time, to process? Words in the evening, or words in the morning? Ideas in the morning and evening? Well, then that’s your process. For me deep creation, inspiration, happens in the mornings. The afternoons are good for communal creation, left brain creation.

T. S. Eliot wrote poems and plays partly on a typewriter and partly with pencil and paper. He always kept to a three hour writing limit. In the beginning he wanted to go for longer, but then when he looked at his stuff the next day, what he’d done after three hours was never good enough. He thought it better to stop and think about something completely different to return to the work fresh the next day. Da Vinci would spend an hour in front of “The Last Supper”, add one paint stroke and leave.

Process is not a straight line. You don’t sit down and write a whole novel, day by day, from start to finish, unless you’ve written a whole lot of them already, like say a John Steinbeck. (If you’re to believe his diary about the writing of “East of Eden”, he wrote it straight.) Most people aren’t that lucky. Most of the time, in the beginning anyway, it’s disorganized, messy, and you have to know about parts of the process, like the dark nights of the soul and the waiting and resting, every creator has to go through before they finish any creation.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a great French writer and philosopher, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. It literally means:

However long the day, the evening will come.

Dá fhada an lá tagann an tráthnóna.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced 

and coordinated 

as birds’ wings.

That’s part of a poem transposed by Coleman Barks in his book The Essential Rumi, written by the great Persian Sufi mystic and poet Rumi back in the 13^th century.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 23 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about Limits, Genre and Numbers but today I want to talk about balance, health and a bit about notebooks. I would ordinarily split some of this up into several episodes but I feel like they’re all very interconnected so please bear with as I ramble on a little longer than usual so I can unpack what I see as the connections.

There’s a poet who goes to La Muse every year, a very wise soul. To her, poetry is a sacred practice, one of self-actualization, self evolution. When she’s stuck on a poem, she walks. When there are no poems coming, she walks. One morning she came back from a two hour hike, what she calls her “walking meditations”. She was glowing, joyful.

“Looks like you had a great walk?”

“Oh, John, it was wonderful.” 

“Did something come to you?”

“Oh, yes, a whole poem. It just dropped in.” She tapped her pocket. “It’s all in my little notebook. I wrote it sitting on a rock looking at the Pyrenees.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“No,” she said, “it’s wonderful.”

She walked in the main gates of La Muse.

To me, she’s a classic creator. She gets inspired because she’s taking care of her spiritual and physical needs, which in tandem help her mental health, but at the same time focuses her consciousness on creation, and then when it comes, she has a pen and notebook on her to get it all down, in the moment. 

Michelangelo, DaVinci, Picasso, Tolstoy, they were healthy creators like that poet. They created a space for inspiration, and created. I don’t mean they did yoga, meditated, ate well or had some kind of spiritual superiority complex. Maybe some did and some didn’t. It’s just a different way of looking at health. By creating, they became healthier, like my friend the poet. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as you create something, and for the majority of creators I’ve met this leads to a daily mental health regime of walking, meditating, and eating well – balance. The psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex doesn’t want you to have this balance. It wants you to think despair, suffering and having a bad day are some form of mental illness that should be solved by a pill they’ve made. Someone in a clinic said it’s so so take a pill. 

This is not schizophrenia or chronic illness but natural Walls we create to stop ourselves creating. Balance is not easy. We have to navigate the pain to create, and at times use the pain to create and feel the pain of others.

There are many ways to help balance mental health. Personally I do yoga and do some Wim Hot breathing and jump in the ocean most days. For the Irish writer and podcaster Blindboy, he runs, does weights and talks about how CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy, has helped him and so many others enormously. Then there are programs, like the 12 step program of addiction.

There are many of ways of not allowing the mind to take over. A lot of people adapt Buddhist principles to suffering, or even stoic principles. They adapt to life by not trying to control what is outsideand focus what is inside. Anxiety is natural. Good and bad feelings: nothing’s that simple. Buddhism sees life as pain and suffering and that we have to sit with the suffering. Watch it. By watching it we “see” that Happiness is an illusion. For example the future of buying something to make you happy is only transitory. So, as the hippies used to say and what many have scientifically proven since, find something that allows you to: Be in the now.

Generally, not really completely down with Buddhism and stoicism as they can ironically lack christian charity, that whole Good Samaritan thing. They see kindness and community as a bit out of their world, because it’s seen as a strength in not having to reach out to others, or trying to discover meaning or purpose in the Viktor Frankel sense of meaning. One has to remain detached and yet be in the world. Basically, what I’m trying to say is to consider that stress and daily life leads to suffering, so we all need tools to counteract that suffering, a personal mental health regime. The thing is to discover some avenue for transcendence. That word transcendence actually comes from the Latin trans which means “over” and scandere “to climb”. So what is going to help you climb over, step over, transcend all this suffering? 

Meditation, exercising and eat well don’t simply benefit the body. Many writers, like Haruki Murakami or Mohsin Hamid, run or walk as part of their creative practice. Gandhi’s activism created a whole new world by focusing on his own diet, meditating, believing raw food was liberating as well as cleansing, nutritionally as well as monetarily. I’m not advocating only eating raw foods to write or paint a canvas. I’m simply pointing to the fact that creative humans need balance, discipline and a health practice in order to create. Ever growing urban environments and modern technology effect our mental health even more today so that we have to pay attention to this balance. At times, this attention to balance can drive you a bit crazy, when you have so many people advising us on how to live in the world, psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually. But, in the end we do need out own personal balance mechanisms else we can’t create consistently.

I also want to look at balance from a different perspective, the act of creating itself. For example, if someone is not creating something, well… then they’re probably destroying something, maybe even themselves. As I said in an earlier episode Hitler stopped painting. Look what he got up to afterwards. He literally starting burning creations, books, and then people. Destruction is the complete opposite of creation, when the mind takes over, when thought structures compound against creation, into fear, then hatred. Again, mental health falls apart from lack of balance and balance comes from a healthy personal regime and creating. The word often used today, holistic. So I supposed I’m talking about a holistic way of creating.

Just look at art therapy. It actually helps with trauma, helps improve the health of so many. Professional art therapists actually exist out there, which is a beautiful thing. It allows people to imagine possibilities, to see a future that isn’t the present moment of depression or despair. The imagination can actually lead to healthy path. My good friend Tom, a Texan artist living in the south of France, talks about this, the importance of taking on a daily creative practice (for example keeping a sketchbook or coloring with your kids) and how just the simple act of creating something filters into how you approach everything else. It’s more about maintaining your “creative health” than producing something original and earth shattering. He says it’s like an athlete who trains regularly to eventually maybe win a race; the point is staying in shape and striving to improve.

I saw many creators at La Muse who came to work on a series of paintings, a novel, a memoir, but what they were really working on was trauma, trying to find balance. Creators who were abused, broken from divorces, others who had lost someone close to them. Their way of dealing with this loss? Retreating, away from the world, to a safe space, towards creating something out of the imbalance so as to try to recenter themselves, to rebalance. It didn’t matter what they were creating because whatever they created it was about the healing they found in painting, or trying to paint, or writing, or taking photographs, or simply reading and meditating on creation. So, the path of creativity can often be one of healing, and if you ask most creators, many of them will tell you that creating helps them feel better, helps them feel good, kind of like when I was talking about catharsis in an earlier episode.

Being creative makes you feel replenished but at the same time it can also exhaust you, but in a good way. Jung talks about this in his book “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”. He talks about a capital of energy every individual has, and if we are not careful we will deplete it. The creative force, he says, can drain you so much that your ego starts to create all sorts of negative qualities so as to keep your creative spark going. 

Again the thing is to be balanced, so as not to expend all of our energy in one direction at the cost of the other parts of our lives. This is why it’s important to replenish yourself in a different way after being creative. 

So, the two important aspects of balance?: 

⁃ Be active.

⁃ Stop, relax, daydream. 

Sound contradictory? They’re not. They’re simply two equal sides of a scales.

Be active: If you don’t move your body, you don’t move inspiration. Micro movements, as well as a daily practice, ritual unplug us from technology and move our body to reenergize it.

It could be walking for an hour. Aristotle walked with his students. Nietzsche got the majority of his book ideas after about three quarters of an hour hiking. Dickens’ friends used to worry about him because he used to walk so much. Kierkegaard got inspired walking the streets of Copenhagen. Then there was Einstein, and so many more. Beethoven was a big walker too, bringing paper and pen in case inspiration came, like the poet from La Muse I mentioned earlier. 

 Which touches on something else I want to take an important aside on as now I’ve given two examples of creators using them: Notebooks.

Da Vinci’s notebooks are still with us over five hundred years after his death. And how wonderful they are to look at. His “Vitruvian Man”, flying machines, anatomical drawings, and countless notes. 

All creators need notebooks. Keep one in the toilet. Put another in the glove compartment of your car. In your handbag. Inside your jacket pocket. Beside your bed. Everywhere you regularly spend time. The point is to have them, plural. 

When you’re not able to sleep at night, write your thoughts, your ideas into a notebook. They might be fantasies, but they could also be amazing ideas. They could be the seeds to a book, a gadget, an app, a song, a painting. Some people use their phone to record these seeds while they drive. Others have notebooks in their office. With time, and by a process of winnowing, you will hear the voices and thoughts, if you don’t ignore them. The quiet voice I talked about before is actually trying to inspire you.

I have a notebook for my novels. I write construction ideas into another. You want notebooks there for you, always, when you need to write something down. Why? Because they do four things:

One: they give you a daily practice.

Two: they don’t allow an inspiration to escape. 

Three: they make you a creator, not a creative. 

Four: they give you a safe space in which to have a relationship with yourself.

A notebook is a way, a daily practice, to create, to take the initial jump, to move from creative to creator. Some call it automatic writing. Julia Cameron in her book the Artist’s Way calls it “Morning Pages”. She writes into a journal whatever comes out on the paper, stream of consciousness, first thing in the morning, for three pages. It doesn’t matter what you write, the point is to get whatever is in you out onto the page.

The idea that you’ll remember what you thought this morning or yesterday is rubbish. If you have a photographic memory, perhaps, but first you need the photo, that is, you have to write it down or sketch it first to “see” it or remember it.

Whatever you’re into. Carnet de voyage. Bullet journals. Moleskins like Picasso and Hemingway used. I use small legal pads.

Over time, if you do it every day, you start to realize what notes are what. Some of it might be just rubbish. In the beginning it could be dreams, things that happened in the past, the present, something you read. It doesn’t matter. You just write it down. This idea I’m talking about right now came out of the notebook I used keep in my truck in France. Most of this book came out of my notebooks. Where do you think I got the idea for this chapter? From the notebook I was writing into.

Pinterest is an example of how powerful notebooks and journaling are. Why? Because it’s like being able to pry open the private journals and notebooks of countless other creatives and creators. 

Whatever comes into your mind, put it down. Don’t edit. Just write, sketch, document. Don’t investigate what you’ve created. Don’t edit a paragraph you’ve just written, a design you’ve just created. Just do the work. Questioning, editing, refining, can be done later. Be easy on yourself, and the work will come.

Write down things people say, or the things you see around you. Then look and read between the lines, later. The inspirations are there, hidden in those pages. Sketch. Doodle. Draw maps, bugs. Collect leaves, crushed flowers, pieces of your day.

Do it for a set amount of time. Soon, it becomes second nature to go into a notebook. When I’m waiting in a car, I go into a notebook. On a train, plane, subway, in the toilet.

Don’t get precious about them either. You can get precious about how they look, but don’t get precious about what you put in them. If you do, you’ll start editing yourself. Again, write, don’t edit. They’re there to catch your inspirations, not to analyze them. Oftentimes what we think is rubbish today is an epiphany in the weeks or months from when you wrote down your idea. If it’s relevant to a construction project then write that. If it’s relevant to a novel, poem, invention write that. Why? Because in a couple of months when you come back to write up all those notes you’ll get inspired again while inputing them. The most important thing is to just write down your idea, phrase, words, when they come to you. If you don’t, they’ll fly away. You won’t remember them. Don’t think, just write. If you think too much you’ll forget what it was you were about to write down. Don’t let them escape.

So, go buy some notebooks, now. They are your space-time for creation. That’s all it takes to get started.

Right, getting back to my point: balance,  consistent balance, and how personal health and balance can make your creative world consistent. If you sit at a computer all day you’ll lose your mind in the wrong way, and your health and balance. 

So stop, relax, meditate but also daydream: Archimedes discovered the displacement of water when he stepped into a bath. He was relaxed, not thinking, when inspiration came. In his excitement he ran through the streets of Syracuse, naked, shouting “Eureka!” “I’ve found it”, a word now synonymous with discovery and invention.

Einstein sailed. But, he always brought a notebook! Like Archimedes, it was his way of relaxing, letting go, so inspiration could come. Some creators like Henry Miller paint when they can’t write and write when they can’t paint. He even wrote about this in: “To Paint Is to Love Again”. Painting is just another form of recharging your batteries. Using a different part of your brain allows other parts to rest, and replenish. Miller’s creative energy was replenished by a different form of creation, painting. 

Sleep helps too. I take a fifteen minute “sieste” nearly every day after lunch, like most of the people in the south of France. I always wake refreshed. This makes complete sense if you research sleep, the first fifteen minutes being quiet sleep, not the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) or active sleep which occurs afterwards. 

In his book “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”, Salvador Dali writes about this magic of napping. He said it was a secret of his greatness. The man called himself a genius quite often. He called his method “slumber with a key.” He would sit in a chair in the afternoon with a big old key in between his thumb and his forefinger, a plate on the ground underneath, and fall asleep. The key would fall out of his hand, hit the plate and wake him up. He writes that this brief nap was all he needed for his physical and psychic being to get replenished.

World leaders stop in the same way, as do inventors like Thomas Edison. Ronald Reagan was famous for his naps. John F. Kennedy napped every day after his lunch. His wife, Jackie, actually got Lyndon Johnson to nap too. Winston Churchill napped daily. Napoleon, and generals like Stonewall Jackson, napped, even amidst a war, because they believed it helped them regenerate and be able to think creatively. 

If you think about it it makes sense. After eating a meal your body needs to relax and use its energy to help digest your food. Also, by decreasing your heart rate and allowing sleep spindles to occur you get to replenish yourself mentally. Your head becomes more clear, balanced.

“Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream. When we sleep we imagine, literally. Images come to us. Intuition comes. “Frankenstein” came in a dream too, as did the general theory of Relativity. Mary Shelley woke in 1816 with the images of a man in pieces being put together. Einstein dreamed of cows getting electrocuted and arguing with a farmer. 

As I said before, I do yoga. I meditate. Why do I waste my time with an hour and a half of yoga and meditation every day? Why do I waste half an hour going for a walk? Because it’s not a waste of time. It’s an investment in time. The benefits come when I sit down to write. I’m clear. I have energy. I feel more balanced. And I get inspired more often. On my walks, characters, scenes, phrases come to me. Doing yoga I write into my notebook. This very idea was written on a yoga mat.

When writing, every twenty minutes I get up, take off my glasses, walk around my office. Well, I try, and am successful most of the time, enough to keep me clear. This is not my advice, this was the advice of my osteopath. I kept putting out my neck and hips because I didn’t move from the same position for hours on end. Then when I moved I got “bloqué” as they put it in France. Because my body wasn’t supple I put vertebrae out all the time.

The body is needed, to get your work done. So, you have to take care of it, even if it’s only at the minimal level. It has to be balanced. So be active, but remember to daydream or take a “sieste” at the same time. Get bored, take some downtime. 

When we were kids growing up in Ireland the national TV station didn’t come on until the afternoon. There were no iPads. No iPhones. No kids said “I’m bored.” Because as soon as you said you were bored you were told to weed the garden or get outside and school through the fields. So we’d scale trees and jump ditches and chase cattle and go on adventures. We’d get creative. When you’re bored, you get creative. You start to doodle, again, into a notebook! You start to play, like we did when we were kids. 

In my earlier episode on School and Education I mentioned an interview with the Irish writer Alice Taylor, when she talked about children and the Imagination. Here’s that quote again:

“The glory of childhood. Children have their own magic. I have my own grandchildren… [We] have to give them time to be children, not to cram their lives with too much activity. I don’t mind them getting bored. I think it’s good for them to be bored. They start exploring then, poking around, and using their imagination. I think that’s our greatest gift, our imagination. As Blake said “Imagination is evidence of the divine”.

Now kids have 24 hour cable news with all these gross reactive emotions being continually foisted upon them, storm of the century, another war coming, someone killed. Jesus, when I was a kid I’d no idea what was going on in the world, I was too busy creating my own worlds out in the fields. Even when a kid goes into their bedroom they can’t escape the TV. Their phones start pinging them with notifications about banal rubbish, which is now seen as the natural human weather. All the time has to be filled in, instead of not being aware of time, out in the fields hanging from trees. Yes, we were bored out of our minds in those fields, but they made us work our imaginations. We had to be creative to keep ourselves preoccupied, to play. Now being bored is seen as somehow unhealthy, unbalanced. This is bullshit. I think boredom is wonderful. But when does it happen now? Does it? Are we allowed to get bored, to daydream now? It’s almost impossible. If we’re not on the internet reading about the internet or whatever the hell we’ve been directed to from some feed, then we’re checking the weather app on the phone to see what the weather’s going to be tomorrow, or how far away we are from the store on google maps. It’s a farce when you think of it. You’re not allowed to get bored, not allowed to daydream. You almost have to make a concerted effort to get bored. Perhaps there should be classes, workshops on boredom! How to get bored. How to get in touch with your inner boredom. It sounds mad, right, but isn’t that where we’ve gotten to? When’s the last time you stared out the window like you used to do when you were in school as a kid bored out of your mind by a subject or teacher that didn’t inspire you? Or is your daydreaming and boredom being taken up by blue screens? How are we supposed to get inspired if we’re not taking the time away from devices, and this whole getting busy being busy activity. What’s wrong with staring at the clouds, without taking a photo of them with your phone? Unless you’re taking a photo of them so you can paint them because of the way they look in the beautiful light. 

Daydreaming is important. It’s another ingredient to balance and health. Because daydreaming is to your brain what sleep is to your body. Daydreaming allows you to synthesize what you’ve already created, allows it to cook. Also, it allows you to start the process all over again, creating the space to get inspired again. So at the end of the day, relax. Pause. You worked. Enjoy a hike, a glass of wine. Play the violin like Einstein. He actually said some of his greatest physics breakthroughs occurred when he took a break. He saw it as connecting different parts of his brain in novel ways. Walk like an Auden, or fish like a Hemingway but stare at the stars like Wilde said in his oft used quote: “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a  Persian mystic, but as always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one is well known in English too. It literally means: 

Health is better than wealth.

Is fearr an tsláinte ná na táinte.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several genres. There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They’re what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader — and the writer. But when the characteristics of a genre are controlled, systematized, and insisted upon by publishers, or editors, or critics, they become limitations rather than possibilities. Salability, repeatability, expectability replace quality. A literary form degenerates into a formula. Hack writers get into the baloney factory production line, Hollywood devours and regurgitates the baloney, and the genre soon is judged by its lowest common denominator…. And we have the situation as it was from the 1940’s to the turn of the century: “genre” used not as a useful descriptor, but as a negative judgment, a dismissal.

That’s a quote from a conversation the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin had with another American writer Michael Cunningham back in 2016 for Electric Literature.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. 

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 22 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. 

Last time I spoke about keeping the non-essential behind the damn bushes, and how it’s important to remember, focus doesn’t have to be an eight hour work day. It can be as little as fifteen minutes a day. As long as they are fifteen focused minutes, every day.

So today I want to talk about limits, limits and limitations, how something doesn’t have to be generic because you are aware of genre, so it remains useful as Le Guin called“genre” a descriptor, and not “a negative judgment, a dismissal.”

An American novelist came to La Muse ten years ago. He was just starting out, and he was lost. The structure of his novel was driving him crazy. He asked me to help him. It was a historical novel and he’d been researching for nine months, all over the south of the United States. We talked about the main acts of the story, his flawed hero, a little about the stages of each act and then I got him to put it on a wall, visually. 

Faulkner used to do the same thing. He’d actually write the outlines of his novels onto the wall, much to the dismay of his wife, to “see” the book, to look at it in a different way. Screenwriters do this when they beat out the acts of a screenplay by putting all the major scenes on cards, and then onto a cork board. I’ll never forget the first time I went into a screenwriter’s room a week into a retreat. It had post-its everywhere, each act in different colors.

Anyway, I listened to the American novelist and tried to figure out what he had so far, what the ingredients of his genre he already had. After about fifteen minutes, he stopped talking.

“Where’s your midpoint?” I asked. 

After a moment, he said “I don’t know.”

“What’s your inciting incident again, your catalyst?”

Again, after a few moments, he said, “I’ve no idea.”

Thirty minutes later he realized what he thought was a whole novel was only half a novel. The ending he had in his head was really only the midpoint of the novel. Instead of a heroine who was going to evolve he was going to have “an emotional crazy person” (his words) at the end.  It was all in front of him, on the wall, staring back at him, on post-its, not on his computer screen. For the next three weeks he changed, edited and added to his wall. 

When he was leaving he said, “You know the best thing I got out of all this?”

“What?” I asked.

“Limits. And better, to know what bits were missing.”

If everything is limitless, we can’t create. Creation needs form, or forms. We can de-form, con-form or trans-form through our creations but you still need form, limits.

Shakespeare not only wrote plays with stories, but he also wrote in iambic pentameter. To read his plays you would think it’s simply characters talking in beautiful prose, but behind those words there are limits, each line couched in a five-feeted poetic structure. 

However, creation is not always maths. Giving creation “axiomatic” interpretations and definitions, as in maths, is like saying a sonnet is a sonnet only if it’s a,b,a,b,a, etc., as in a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. But this would mean Dante’s creation of an a,a,b,a,a,b, etc. sonnet is not the true form, or, is incorrect. And if the sonnet had stayed “axiomatic” then we would never have had the Occitan sonnet, or the Shakespearean, or English sonnet, never mind the Urdu sonnet or contemporary free verse sonnets.

Everything has limits, but a lot of limits are invisible. Poetry is a great example, from sonnets to villanelles, with structures and limits in words and lines. 

A business plan starts with an introduction, thesis, anti-thesis and new thesis. A car has an engine, wheels, seats. A screenplay has an Act One, its Catalyst, an Act Two, a B Story, a midpoint, an All is Lost moment, and a Third Act Finale. Novels have limits too, and specific novels have specific limits, or ingredients like that American novelists’ historical novel. For example, if you’re writing a detective novel then there are certain ingredients — an unusual detective, a femme fatale, some red herrings, and of course a murder to be solved. These are basic ingredients, or limits.

I like to think of it like a recipe. An omelette without eggs is not an omelette. Everyone knows what a cheese omelette is. You could call this your Sherlock Holmes detective novel. Then there’s a western omelette, with different ingredients, say an Agatha Christie whodunnit/whydunnit, which is a different kind of recipe. Now take that omelette and put it in an oven with even more ingredients and you have a “frittata”, a Leonardo Sciascia detective novel. Put a base under your frittata omelette and you get a quiche, say a “quiche Lorraine”, and you get a completely different kind of detective novel, a Maigret or Raymond Chandler novel. 

The point? You start off with the basic ingredients. Eggs or eggs and milk. With a detective novel, you start off with a detective and a murder. If you start writing a detective novel without an unusual detective, without a murder, then you’re creating something completely different. So, you have to know your genre even if it’s only at a basic level. If you’re writing a horror movie, you better know the limits, the basic invisible recipe of the genre before writing your own. What you add to it afterwards is up to you. But you have to have limits.

What I’m trying to get at is that this applies to nearly any creation. You could start a business, like we did with La Muse. But how much easier it would have been if we had created it with a recipe – a business plan – with market research, a marketing campaign, financial projections. It would have alleviated a lot of stress, and we wouldn’t have had to learn the hard way, by making mistakes, and having to pay the consequences, literally, over the years. 

I’m reminded of an old Classics lecturer of mine who used to talk a lot about the Alexandrian idea of “beads on a string”. When someone would go on retreat to La Muse to write a book of non-fiction, a memoir,  or novel, and they were stuck, but were also resistant to talking about recipes or genres or plans, I usually ended up talking to them about beads on a string. Oftentimes, they’ve been writing their memoir for years and they were stuck because they didn’t know where it started, how it finished, what to leave in, what to leave out. They had the voice and all the key moments, but they didn’t know how to organize it all.

As opposed to talking about acts and beats and genre we talked about whether a passage about childhood would be a red bead. A chapter about being an adult, what colored bead? A paragraph about growing old, what different colored bead? This way they engaged with limits and genre without getting “overwhelmed” by what they saw as “over technical structures”. They started to see their story visually, like how I just described Faulkner doing. They realized they had too many red beads, or that some yellow beads are at the beginning when they should be at the end. And eventually, by the end of the process they’d worked out how their book should be constructed, and how all the beads are threaded together to make a beautifully symmetrical necklace, like Vergil’s Eclogues, Shakespeare’s plays Beethoven’s symphonies, organized, with highs, lows and an ending.

Your book, business, goal, will fail if it does not have a plan based on a recipe, genre, or beads on a string. It saves you so much time when you know the limits, the basic ingredients of your creation. You don’t have to get into the minutiae but if you have limitless avenues, you go down all of them. If you’re focused, like the examples I gave in the last episode, and learn one thing really well, change it or adapt it into your creation, then you will get there a lot quicker. Everything has a structure, ingredients. Know the structures of your field. Know the limits of your field but don’t get bogged down in the numbers.

Which leads me to another thing. Some creators love numbers. But a lot get anxious and frustrated by numbers. An example I used to hear at our retreat all the time: “I wrote my 3000 words today.” 

This drives me crazy. I have enough numbers in my life without stuffing consumerism in the creative part of my life. I want the right side of my brain, the creative side, working. The left side of my brain does enough counting the rest of the day. Adding up bills. Looking at the bank account. Counting how many liters of milk we have left in the fridge. 

The only numbers I look at are the clock. Every twenty minutes or so, I get up. Move the body. Take off the glasses. Right my vision again, by looking at the horizon, not the blue screen. When I’m working on a project, away from the day job, every three to four hours, I eat, or go for a long walk. I get diminishing returns if I stay seated for more than four hours. I find it harder to return to the desk. I feel more tired the next day. This way I know I’ve done my work, irrespective of whether it’s 10 words or ten thousand, and this relives a lot of anxiety.

This is my process. Everyone has to find their own. Some people like word counts, but not me. I think it creates stress. What I think is more important is to know your time process. Some people work early in the morning, like Auden. Others are like Dostoyevsky. They work late at night. Some work eight hours a day, others one hour a day.  Again, we’re all different, but if we’re consistent with our time, focused, then the numbers will not create walls of pressure and stress.

Forget numbers, discover your time process instead, and set yourself goals. My goal is four hours a day when working on a new project. Sometimes this is not possible. Life can get in the way. But I don’t stress about it now. I wait, and the new goal is to set my process up again, when the move, relationship, change has transitioned into a more stable time.

Benjamin Franklin used to set a goal for each day and at the end of the day he would ask himself had he achieved it. If not, he would analyze why he hadn’t achieved it. The next day he would start all over again. Many other creators do the same thing. The actor Matthew McConaughey does the same thing. 

Another part of this is by forgetting the numbers I’m able to be always working on the next goal. While one book, house, project is being created I’m already taking notes for the next ones. Goals create focus and positive thoughts because as the years pass you see what you’ve achieved. Again, as with focus, there has to be limits, some kind of a plan because no plan ever works out the way you wanted it to, but if you don’t plan you’ll never achieve any of your goals.

A long term goal is when you see far off into the horizon. Everything you are doing today is a part of getting to that end target, away from the limits of the reality around us. It’s like a game of soccer. You keep making passes until one day at the end of the field you score a goal. The amount of goals you score is up to you, fate, and it’s never a feat done in one kick. It’s about looking into the future at where you want to be. 

What age are you now? Add ten years to it. Where do you want to be at that age? How many books, paintings, clients, do you want to have by then? Now, go out in years. Year 1, 2 and so on. “In five years I’ll have this done.”

Lucas, Gehry, Musk had goals. As opposed to seeing problems they look for solutions. Lucas: How do we make the special effects for “Star Wars”? There’s no company that does it. Create one to do it. Gehry: How do we make a building bend? Use different materials in ingenious ways. Musk: How do we get off fossil fuels? Create inter-related businesses to supply houses and transport with energy using the houses and the sun. 

None of these creations came out of thin air. They were planned and these creators looked at the limits in their field and changed their genres. They created long term goals that were realized. Most people believed these creators would never achieve their goals, but with time, they did. 

So, have patience. “Instant gratification” does not exist, only moment to moment “joy” in creating. Plan long term, and work short term on understanding the limits of what you create to understand the basics so you can add, enhance the genre, the field that inspires you.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American writer, but as I always I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means: Practice makes mastery.

Cleachtadh a dhéanann maistreacht.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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“Always remember, your focus determines your reality.”

That’s a quote from the character of Master Qui-Gon, in “Star Wars, Episode I, The Phantom Menace, written by American writer, director and producer, George Lucas. More on that later.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 21 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about doing the work, about doing the same thing every day, over time, can be very productive. Which brings me to what I want to talk about today, focus. As I said last time, if you’re focused on the work, and work consistently, then the book appears, the project gets done, the Imagination mysteriously steps into reality in front of you as a creation.

The best way to talk about pig headed stubbornness would be my own path because my own background had nothing to do with creation. There were no books in our house, no music, no creators in the family or extended family. My schooling had nothing to do with creation. So, what did I do? I did it anyway. Again, I’m stubborn. I got involved with writing anyway, irrespective.

I asked people who came into the coffee shop where I worked in the East Village how they got their work out there, when they hadn’t gone to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or Harvard or Yale. They told me I had to get an agent.

I finally got a wonderful agent, at one of the biggest agencies in Los Angeles, when I was working as a copy writer for an insane advertising agency in Alaska. Myself and my wife went out and partied. Finally, one of my novels was going to get out into the world. Two years later: my agent had sent the novel out to over sixty publishers. I lost count. We got answers back like: “Fanning’s work is very innovative, fresh, talented, but we have an Irish novel on our list already.” I told her to stop sending me the rejections.

Years later I got a second agent, for a different novel. He was a former publisher turned agent working for one of the biggest agencies in New York. His friend, then a deputy editor at “Vanity Fair”, had recommended my novel. What happened? Myself and my wife went out to celebrate again. Two years later, I had lost count of the number of rejections after thirty. After returning to publishing, my agent went on to work in politics in DC. I still like to think it’s because he was so disillusioned with the publishing industry.

What did I do? I stayed focused. I kept writing. What some might call pig-headedness, kept me going. My first novel was published when I was 45.
To make matters worse, we created a place for people to do the same thing, create, in a foreign country, where I didn’t speak the language, in the middle of nowhere, on credit cards, with again, no experience. And of course, now we’ve created another place, where people can get their writing out into the world.

Sometimes you’ve got to take matters into your own hands. Creation is not just about creating something. It’s about your mind, your mentality, your focus. You change your mind and you can change your life. Change your mental attitude: It’s not if, it’s when.

You loose yourself in what you love creating, by keeping focused. It’s easy not to create when you say you can’t create. You have to keep your focus. Keep moving forward. Stick to it. Especially when it’s not going well.

A friend of mine once told me she wasn’t creative. I asked her why she thought this. “Because I tried to paint when I was younger,” she said. “I was useless.” I asked her how long she did it for. A day she said.
This is not focus. How can you say you’re not creative after a day? That’s crazy. She didn’t understand that she is extremely creative, in her businesses, or that she could be both, a painter and a businesswoman. Both are creative. If she’d give even five percent of the focus she gave to her businesses to painting then I’m sure her paintings would be on walls.
So, by being focused, by doing, repeating, we find out the how of the question “Can I create?” The response is always going be yes, if you allow yourself to focus on what it is you want to do.

Which gets me back to the quote I started with: “Always remember, your focus determines your reality.” George Lucas, a self described introvert, wrote those words. “The Star Wars” movies, and franchise, has made over $47 billion, and counting. But what is the story behind the story? Well, most producers didn’t like Lucas’ story idea. They said it was for kids, that nobody wanted to watch science fiction movies. They said it was “a little strange”. When Lucas did get a budget, it was drastically under what he needed. The producers didn’t go for it because of the story idea, but because one of them, Alan Ladd, believed in Lucas, not the movie.

Lucas started writing, eight hours a day, and ended up taking a huge pay cut to direct. Then there was the fact that there were no special effects back then. Did that stop him? No. He created the motion picture visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. (He later sold this company for over $4 billion — yes, not million — to Disney).

It goes on. He had to reuse props and costumes from other movies because he had no money. The actors wouldn’t do any overtime. Seemingly, they all thought it was going to be a failure. Then he resigned from the Director’s Guild in disgust because they didn’t want him to have the title sequence he wanted. They made him pay a fine. And, when he finally finished editing, he didn’t like the finished movie. Yes, he went back and re-edited it, even though it cost a fortune. And did it end there? Of course not. When they released the movie, they hardly distributed it.

That’s focus. That’s discipline. You go deeply into the creation, ignoring all rejections, all failure, all distractions. No matter how hard it is to persist, you have to persist. No matter how hard it is to leave everyone behind, you have to leave them, to a point.

People check their smartphones about fifty times a day in Ireland, even more in America. You can’t splinter your focus. Any great creator you respect was, is focused. They’re not on their smartphone. Would Lucas, Musk, Gates stop creating if their phone pings? They turn the thing off. They put it in a different room, space. They mastered what they mastered by being dogged. They didn’t work on the surface, they dived into what they loved. Nothing distracted them.

And what happens when you do this?

You might be seen as a weirdo, like the black sheep I mentioned earlier. “What do you mean you want to repair old cars on the weekend? But you’re not getting paid to rebuild old cars.” “Your three hundred and fifty page novel is more important than going to the beach?”
Nobody who ever created anything to a high level has ever been seen as “normal”, while they were trying to get their creation off the ground, and even afterwards. When we were starting our retreat in the middle of nowhere nearly two decades ago, people thought we were mad.
“You’re crazy. You don’t speak French.”
“What do you know about the hospitality business, about composers and artists and directors?”
“You’ve no family or friends there. Nobody you know.”

It’s only now that people see our retreat as a success, after the fact.
You have to stay focused. Don’t let people make you think you’re selfish, ruthless. You’re not. You’re just being focused on your craft. You’re into what you’re doing, what you love.

DaVinci was a near recluse. He was compulsive. Did it stop him inventing, painting? Does Gates still look like a nerd? Yes. Did that stop him creating Microsoft, his foundation? Did wearing the same clothes every day stop Einstein coming up with the General Theory of Relativity? Flaubert was still living with his mother at the age of 35, hardly going out. He was obsessed with writing, or more, re-writing “Madame Bovary”.
To use a made up phrase found in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”: “nolite te bastardes carborundorum” — “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

So what if you miss watching TV and playing video games. So what if you stay up all night writing your screenplay while the kids are asleep. So what if you forget what time it is, where you are, when you’re creating something you love.

You focus because you have to. And because of that focus you put something out into the world that will benefit you first, by enjoying the process, and then your community, and hopefully the wider world.
How do you stay focused? One word: “No.” You can say it nicely.
“No, thank you. I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I’ve got work to do. If you say “yes” to everything, you lose your focus. You have to prioritize.
Which is more important, to create, or to try to please everybody all the time? It doesn’t mean you have to say no to the most important things or people in your life. It means you have to know what or who are the most important things in your life.

For me, it’s writing and my family. I’m not perfect. I try to carve out time every day to write. I also try to spend time with my family, individually, and together. These are the most important things to me. I focus on them.
Also, focus can be fifteen minutes every day. It doesn’t have to be eight hours a day. Fifteen minutes adds up. To hours, to days, to weeks and months of creation. That’s how this book was written, over years. Writing in the car waiting for people. On planes, trains. On a hike. In the morning before breakfast. After yoga. During yoga. And with time, those fifteen minutes become very valuable because they give you time to really ponder, meditate on what you’re creating.

A good Australian friend of mine read a draft of one of my novels. He loved it. Yes, I was very happy. Until he got to the parts he didn’t love.
“What the hell is this?” he said. “You, you’re not focused! You’re jumping out of the bushes. You can’t do that. Stop. I want to read the story. I don’t want to read your beautifully written opinions or hopes for the planet and humanity. I’m a reader. I want to know what the hell is going to happen to the protagonist, not have a cup of tea with Fanning, who’s just jumped out of the bushes.”

He advised me to go over that chapter again. It went from nearly forty pages to seven. Ever since then, we call each other out, although 98% of the time it’s him calling me out, for bushjumping — when I lose focus, get in the way of what I’m creating.

You have to know how to hide yourself from your creations. The reader, watcher, client, buyer doesn’t want to know your life story — unless you’re writing memoir, non-fiction, or a book like this. They want focus. They want to buy, watch, use, read the thing you’ve created. The creative doesn’t care about your “opinion”, unless it’s in some way related to the work, the building, the painting, the software, the novel. They care about the protagonist, the colors, the movement of the building, the facility of the program, how much the business will make.

What can you do? We’re all blind a lot of the time to our own opinions. It’s part of the job. That’s why we need beta readers, focus groups, curators, editors, other creators to help us focus. We need feedback.

So, keep the non-essential behind the damn bushes, and remember, focus is not an eight hour work day. It can be as little as fifteen minutes a day. As long as they are fifteen focused minutes, every day.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American writer and director, but as I always do I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There is no prosperity unless there is discipline.

Ní bhíonn an rath, ach mara mbíonn an smacht.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

That’s a quote from The Analects attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 20 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Mentors and the idea of how Talent Borrows and Genius Steals. How mentors, even dead ones, or especially dead ones, can be a Door to inspiration by copying and learning, again and again, from those who’ve gone before us, to embrace the Imagination, and move towards creation, not away from it. As I said before, you may not find too many mentors, but when you find even one they can inspire you, enthuse you with passion and positive madness, because in the end mentors are friends – they’re there when you’re dejected and down from rejection, or whatever other Wall is stopping you from creating.

So today I want to talk about something that’s very much attached to apprenticeship to a creative practice, to the journey of learning your craft, and that’s work, because if you don’t work at what you’re into, moving the mountain, stone by stone, then you can never thrive at what you love, or strive to mastering what you love, things I talked a lot about in the last episode. Works and work become one because the works will not come without the work. When we create, when we first draft our creation it is most of the time not fully formed. It needs to be worked on, because it has come out of the enthusiastic madness and blindness of seeing inspiration. The creation comes out of the ether, unconscious, emotions, impulses, spirit, whatever you want to call it. One thing leads to another, for me it can be one word leading into another, or one phrase or sentence into another. For an artist she could be simply following the movement of the brush on the canvas. This primary flow state brings joy. It is seductive. It is oftentimes the fun part, the healing part, of our imagination. It’s mysterious. Out of nowhere the book, painting, sculpture has appeared. But when it appears then the other work starts. The work of thinking. The work of reason. The questions arrive. Do I need to work more on this, or that. Does this need to go or be expanded upon?

So, there’s something I want to clarify here: Work is work, not a job. A job is what you do in order to do your own work. A job earns money, pays the rent. Your work, your creative work, will not always pay, depending on what it is you’re into – that will not happen after a few days or weeks. Most creators only start to make money creating after years, and oftentimes decades. The contemporary myth that you can make money from your work after a degree or a few years creating is simply not true. Yes, there are those that win the literary lottery and get high six figures for a novel, or sell out their first show on Manhattan, but for most creators this is not the case. To get a living wage from the arts, from creating, will take time, a lot of it. So, your work, again, not your job, is what feeds your soul. By apprenticing yourself, as I said in the last episode, either to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours or a Guild of old’s 7 to ten years, by becoming a journeyman, then some day you will become a Master, the one that makes the money.

So, in the interim, make sure the work is the reward itself, that whole idea of the journey and the destination. If you only think of the destination then the creative journey will be lost to you, the ten to twenty years will be lost to you. Your work will test you. It has to. Otherwise, how would you be learning, getting better. Again, the work is not your job, but this doesn’t mean you can’t be creative in your job too. I love renovating old buildings. I think it’s fun. Some people love it even more than I do, that’s their primary work. The important thing is to understand the distinction between your work and your job. You can love your job, but it’s not always your work and vice versa.

We were inspired by so many of the people that came to us at our retreat in the south of France about this idea of work, and how to approach it. One former Muser, a landscape architect and photographer from Oregon, approaches his life like any of the large gardens he creates: He talks about how he turns the dirt over here and spreads compost over there. He trims the hedges on this project and spreads some seeds on that one. He does a little watering over here and weeds a bit over there. Over a period of time, he enjoys watching his projects, his works, grow. He organizes his life in the same way. He says different facets of his life are consistently tended to and allowed to take their own shape.

Stephen Pressfield, a writer I enjoy has written a book called Do the Work. I completely agree. You have to do the work. Like this podcast. I have to put in the work, over time. I have to be consistent. I have to put the research in. Plan it. Edit my thoughts. Change. Evolve. Because the work always evolves, but the time spent on it does not change. It is consistent. Pressfield would never have finished a book if he didn’t plant his posterior at his desk every day for a specific amount of time, to do the work. For myself, I wouldn’t be up to this episode, number 20, if I hadn’t planted my posterior on the seat too, entered the private space to get inspired and work on what comes to make it better.

I love the way work ends at 4 for a lot of places in Maine. Yes, they might start at 6 or 7, but they end at 3 or 4, so they have time to live. That’s a work ethic. I’m not saying you have to create for that long every day but there has to be a work ethic, otherwise the creation literally cannot come. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. The American artist Chuck Close has the same kind of understanding, what he calls his “way of operating,” equating creativity with work ethic. He says:

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.

When my daughter was 9 years old I was listening to her play her cello, until she stopped. She surprised me by pausing for a moment to look out the window until she said this: “Dad, you know, Mozart wrote his first symphony when he was my age.” She was smiling, all excited. I was making crepes. She’s addicted to crepes. How was I to approach this? Mozart was a workaholic. When he was 28 years old his hands were deformed. He was completing works right before they had to be performed to keep his family fed. I told her, “He was a very hard worker. Sometimes you have to work very hard to get things like that created.”

Again, this might sound facile, but you’ve got to do the work. You want to be a painter. Paint. You want to be an architect. Design. You want to be a mechanic. Repair.

Do the work. Make mistakes. Repeat. Until some day, there’ll be a painting, house, car, standing in front of you you’re proud of, until you do the work again, and create another one, hopefully a better one.

Creators use inspiration but for the most part it’s Edisonian perspiration. You have to put your ass on the seat or in front of the easel. Prodigies like Mozart are rare, but even prodigies work hard. Your work ethic doesn’t have to be like Mozart’s, but there has to be one. We can be just as persistent as long as we remain balanced, allowing ourselves to daydream and play too.

Yes, we all have to work for the man, at some stage, unless we’re independently wealthy. Yes, it can be exhausting. The treadmill. But, what you create can also help you through your day job. Don’t let your day job define you. My wife, Kerry, didn’t want to be defined by her job at a style magazine. She didn’t want working until very late at night to stop her writing, so she’d get up at five in the morning, write, and then run. She chose not to go to parties, and when she did she was very selective.

You don’t have to create what you love all day long. It can simply be a couple of hours out of every week.

This does not mean you work all the time. A wise business friend of mine once told me a story. An acquaintance of his, the CEO of one of the biggest companies in France, was once asked, “How can you take the whole month of August off and still get so much work done?” He said, “I do thirteen months of work in eleven, but I could never do thirteen months in twelve.”

Our work is better if we play, if we have down time. Google and 3M, as well as many other companies understand this now. So, make sure you have down time, but do the work too when you’re supposed to be working. Be consistent.

And another thing: can you allow yourself to be joyful? Sound crazy? Think about it for a second. What are you going to lose by doing the work for you, too? It could be a laugh to respect your dreams, and value your own feelings. Thirty years from now, will you be more upset that you didn’t make the effort to at least try to create what you love? Potential is one thing, doing is another. We learn by doing. By making mistakes, and with time we get better. That’s work.

As I said so many times in the first half of this podcast, we build many Walls not to do creative work, one of the biggest being: “I can’t abandon my family, my job, etc.” It’s not about one or the other. It’s about routine and starting small.

An example: Alice Munro wrote in her laundry room in between washes, meals and raising children. These moments and minutes added up to stories, and books and a Nobel prize. She created what she could, with what she had. You don’t need a recording studio to record your songs. The Walls want a recording studio in Nashville or a writing office at the end of the garden, or a huge white studio in the garage. Creation wants consistency, to allow inspiration to appear, and to allow that inspiration to be worked on again the next day or the day after that.

A distinction: Work is a frame of mind. The carpenter or mason who goes to work as a drudge are not the same as the carpenter or mason who goes to work because they love their job. Then it’s not a day job. Then they’re being creators. When they build a house, a chair, a wall, they’re creating, not working.

There is no set amount of work that has to be done, X amount of plays or poems. Shakespeare didn’t say, I’m going to write X amount of tragedies and X amount of comedies. He just wrote what he wrote. He did the work. He wrote nearly every day. Blake didn’t think, Oh, I’m going to write “The Songs of Innocence and Experience”. He wrote the poems. They became the collection. He did his work and it became what it became.

Doing the same thing every day, over time, can be very productive. So, work every day. Be focused, something I’ll talk about in the next episode. If you’re focused on the work, and work consistently, then the book appears, the project gets done, the Imagination mysteriously steps into reality in front of you as a creation.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Chinese philosopher, but as I always do I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Work is better than talk.

Is fear blair ná caint.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.