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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.

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“No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius.”

That’s a quote from Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova from the 1956 book “Pavlova: A Biography” edited by A. H. Franks in collaboration with members of the Pavlova Commemoration Committee.

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 19 of my series of episodes on creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Enthusiasm, Passion & Madness, about looking for mentors, peers who are enthusiastic, inspired, passionate, mad! Black sheep. How they can help dissolve the Walls of lexical prisons by being enthusiastic, passionate, mad, by embracing the Imagination, moving towards it, not away from it. You may not find too many of them, but when you find one they inspire you, enthuse you with passion and positive madness, because in the end mentors are like 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 get into this more, this idea of mentors, and how talent borrows but genius steals, and how mentors don’t have to be alive to inspire us. Their works, their creations are always there, if we only take them up to read, listen to, enjoy and get inspired from.

Influences. Who or what are your influences? When I’m down, when I can’t create, I read. Who do I read? People I love, the masters in my field. Why? Because these other writers are my greatest mentors. They effect me deeply, and when I’m effected deeply the need arises in me again, to create. They make me want to create art again.

Malcolm Gladwell has a famous book, Outliers, where he writes about how it takes the “ten-thousand-hour-rule” to begin to master your craft, your creation, that being about the amount of time it takes most of us to get good at something. Everyone sees Gladwell’s idea as innovative, new. Well, in truth, it’s been around for thousands of years.

Today, before you become a master electrician you have to become a journeyman first. The word journeyman has taken on negative affiliations today, mainly because people are unaware of what a journeyman really is, and was.

Before becoming a journeyman you become an apprentice first. This language comes from the time of the guilds, especially the Florentine guilds of the 12th century and later, but hasn’t stayed on in arts as it has in some building trades. Artists were actually part of other guilds, but the point is the idea of apprenticeship. For example, in Venice, after two years you could move on to becoming a journeyman whereas in Padua you had to do three years. Your master – basically an old school word for what we call a mentor today, begrudgingly – took you in when you were young as an apprenticeship into what they still call a shop in the trades even today. Michelangelo entered the shop, or workshop of Ghirlandaio when he was thirteen. Like all the other apprentices he was a “garzoni”, workshop boy, an apprentice, starting at the bottom, preparing panels or grinding pigments, growing his skills with the years. Then they would draw, create works, but not from life, but by copying, learning from the masters. Michelangelo would copy the paintings of Giotto in the Santa Croce church in Florence and he would have been told to go elsewhere too to copy when commissions brought their masters to other cities, especially to Rome where so many masters had left their marks.

Here in the states an electrician, machinist, carpenter, or plumber usually needs a state or local license as a journeyman or master. The license means they’ve put in their time, what Gladwell calls 10,000 hours.

So, to become a journeyman of a creative pursuit, just like an electrician, or the schools of centuries ago like the Italian shops or bodegas we have to first apprentice ourselves to what we are passionate about. We have to put in the time, until we become a journeyman, and hopefully, one day, a master.

The word journey actually comes from the French word for day, journée. To a journeyman it meant you could charge money for a day’s work. An apprentice however, usually doesn’t get paid a days wage. Instead they got lodging and food and maybe a small stipend for about seven years or so, from a master, because a journeyman wasn’t allowed to employ others. So the title “journeyman” refers to the right to charge a fee for each day’s work.

Of course journey man also meant you moved. From place to place for work. These ambulant artisans are called “compagnons” in France and since the Middle Ages they’ve been traveling all around France as the Compagnons du Devoir et du Tour de France. Their technical education means they have to take a Tour de France, apprenticing to masters to learn a trade but also being part of a community of artisans.

So, talent is nothing if you don’t put in the time, 10,000 hours as Gladwell would put it, or 7 or 8 years like an apprentice. But even after we’ve put in the time of the apprenticeship we have to become the journeyman. We have to find masters to work for, day to day, so we can master our art, all the time learning our craft from the dead masters, who’s work, creations are on the walls of churchs and buildings wherever we go, if we look.

This is not something only for artists and sculptors. The Beatles found a mentor, a master very early in their career. People say it was their business manager Brian Epstein that catapulted them into success, but this is ignoring probably their greatest mentor, George Martin. Early on, The Beatles put in the hours, apprenticing themselves to Martin but also by learning from others, or learn by doing, and journeying to Hamburg. The 4 young English men in a band who played every night in Hamburg came back not as a band, but as The Beatles. Their apprenticeship was put in over in Hamburg. It’s hard work. It takes a long time. Like Shakespeare with his plays being tested in the provinces before being put on for the King, the Beatles were tested and changed in front of an audience, night in night out, until songs like a “Hard Days Night” came out of the actual act of creating to an audience, learning on the job. In an interview on Desert Island Discs later in life George Martin said he didn’t really think much of them musically when he first met John, Ringo, Paul and George. But he still signed them to Parlophone because he taught they were funny, and that he’d just give them a chance because he could. And from there on out they had one of their great mentors. He taught them so much and added so much classical music to their songs to create completely new kinds of songs. So, a mentor can literally pull you out of obscurity and evolve your talent.

Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway had the same thing in Paris. Instead of a stage to learn on they had the salon of Gertrude Stein. Hemingway always talked about being in his room to do the work, but never mentions the community he had to get better by discussing his work, like people do in MFA programs, or Improv sessions, or workshops. When we get honest constructive feedback, we get better.

So, until recently people used to apprentice themselves to a guild, to be mentored by a skilled artisan. In France I know a master carpenter who can draw a straight line to the centimeter, by eye. He learned this, being mentored for fifteen years until he begun, his verb, to get what he called the “sensation” of the work. He got mentored by craftsmen skilled in the art of carpentry. As he put it, it takes so many years to get good at something and even then many people don’t find success, or the sensation for it. One of his friends who he saw as one of the great master carpenters just lead what he called an unlucky life. Just because he created amazing furniture doesn’t mean people bought it, or that he was able to sell it, or that he had a supportive family. He didn’t. So he failed, even though he was the most talented carpenter he ever met. He also said to me once, sometimes people are just bad at something and it takes years for them to realize because they got it into their heads they were great.

If you were to see any of his many ateliers you’d think he was mad. He throws nothing away. It drives his wife crazy because their second little house beside the one they live in is literally stuffed with stencils, and tools going back to the middle ages that he actually still uses. The first time I went into this atelier I had to sit down I was so blown away by the sheer immensity of stuff in there, everywhere. A museum within a museum and on and on. He handled each tool as he explained its use to me as if it were a baby, gently caressing it and pointing out how it was made, not by a machine, but by a human being, what he called master artists. You can’t hide imperfections in this kind of tool he’d say. They had to be made exactly, perfectly, artfully, with sensation.

Today we’ve lost this appreciation of craft as art, that is, having to put in our time to learn. It’s become demeaned by speed and lack of respect and carelessness. People literally aren’t careful. They don’t care enough to look at how an old tool is an actual work of art in itself. My neighbor back in France would never see himself as an artist. He’d frown upon being called an artist. To him, what he created was the most natural thing in the world. This natural creative appreciation goes all the way back to the Renaissance guilds in Europe. If you didn’t get into a guild you couldn’t get paid for what you created. That simple. You had a hobby, not a metier as they say in France. Even back then competition was harsh. Some people say unions are the same thing today. I don’t agree. People in unions are not thought to think, or sorry, feel the same away about wood or electricity the way my old friend does. And it makes sense because the union is there to protect the rights of the worker not to inspire them to create. It’s economic, not creative. It became more about how quick you can produce something rather than how good you created something. Now, with technology this has reached its zenith. Guilds are good and so are unions but they need to be seen for what they really are as opposed to conflated when one is more a mentoring of creation where the other is a defense of the creator. If I were to enter into the Author’s Guild it would be akin to this, but a very much watered down version of the Renaissance version, or the mentoring my friend received. Presumably I’d have to enroll in an MFA or enter through the gates of the culturally accepted avenues for that is generally the way for writers to get what I call the rubber stamp of approval. However, even though I’m not a member of the Writers Guild, I still register all my books with them, because that’s what they’re there for, to protect the writer, to strike, to defend the payment of the writer.

So, as opposed to learning how to create in my field from a guild, which no longer functions the way a guild used to, in a concrete and effective way, I learn from a very small number of living mentors, but even more so from dead ones, from the creations they created that are still alive in books and films and especially autobiographies of people in my field. Which leads me into the other thing I wanted to talk about today.

“Talent borrows, genius steals.”

There are many attributions for this “quote”. There’s even a well-known book, “Steal like an Artist”, by Austin Kleon. The main idea, that one should copy, or imitate other creators, is an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato. They even had a word for it “mimesis”.

I read Kleon’s book, after writing the shitty first draft of my own book. One of our writers on retreat gave it to me saying, “You need to write a book like this, John.”

So, what you’re listening to was inspired by books like Kleon’s, but also Aristotle’s “Poetics” and other books that focus on creating. But the main inspiration are the many creators I’ve met at our retreat over the years. Even though Kleon’s book wasn’t where I first learned about “Talent borrows, genius steals”, I give him credit. Why? Because it’s important to give credit. If you don’t, you’re stealing in the wrong way, plagiarizing.

So, this quote: Was it Oscar Wilde? T. S. Eliot? “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism” has this: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” Picasso? Stravinsky? “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” To tell the truth who cares? It’s the idea that’s inspiring, because it’s about inspiration, influence as inspiration.

People confuse this idea. They think you’re plagiarizing another creator when you “steal”. They see it as negative. But that’s not the point. The point is to steal the right way, to take an idea, image, and make it your own. To copy, borrow an image, idea, sample of music, is to simply imitate. There’s nothing wrong with being a copier. Just like Michelangelo in that church in Italy. Just don’t duplicate a creation and say it’s yours. No. Learn from other creators, like Michelangelo and every other creator before and after him has done.

Picasso, who supposedly said great artists steal, copied Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe”, over twenty times. Haydn taught Beethoven. Is it any wonder Beethoven’s early work sound like Haydn? Does that make Picasso a bad artist, Beethoven a bad composer? Were they plagiarists? In art courses they call it “Learning from the Masters”. You copy great works of art to see how the artist did it. Eventually you break away and find your own style.

The point is to “steal”, absorb from other creators. You have to learn from them. They will inspire you. Inspiration comes when we combine old ideas into new ones from looking at them in a different way, seeing different relationships.

This is why writers say if you want to learn how to write a book you have to read a lot of books. Musicians? Listen to a lot of music. Business people say start your own business after interning and studying others. Architects? Intern at an architecture firm.

Business people do it every day. They study the “competition”, then do what they do, but better. However, they only study the competition they’re really interested in, what they call niche markets. It’s the same with creation.

What’s your niche? Historical novels set in first century Rome? Read the competition. Soon, you’ll know your whole niche world. You then feel a part of that world. Put the amphitheater on your office wall, a centurion’s uniform, the list of emperors. Read the wonderful Marcus Aurelius every day. That world then becomes as real as the one we’re living in today. The fun is in the hunt for that world.

When I was a kid I used to copy out poems from books when I thought I wanted to be a poet. Try it. If you want to write a business plan you copy the business plans of others. Again, you don’t build a house without a plan. You can, but you’re probably going to end up with a few walls or windows in the wrong place.

Look at all the painters in museums copying the masters. There’s a reason they’re there. You have to find out how they did it. The best way to do that? Copy. Soon enough the copying will disappear and you will appear, your creation will appear. When you were sitting in a classroom they made you copy the letters off the blackboard.

As I said before, Shakespeare only wrote his first play after acting, directing, and managing a theater for over ten years. He learned by doing, like every musician and school kid since. As Emerson once wrote of Shakespeare: “Genius borrows nobly.” He said Shakespeare was more original than the originals he copied. “He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.”

Who you copy is your decision. It’s easy. Who do you love? Now, what thing have they created, what book, business? Study it, copy it. Repeat it for other creators you love in the field you love.

You become what the Muses called “possessed”, by the new possession you’ve stolen, to create new work, new creations. Take inspiration from everywhere. Bits and pieces of things you see in magazines, books, online, stuff in the street. Put it all together to create your own work. Or be like Truffaut with Hitchcock. Interview your idols if you can, or other creators in your field. Learn from them. Cameron Crowe did the same. He interviewed the great Billy Wilder.

Be curious. Again, as curious as a child. At first it may be confusing, but with time it will make more and more sense. Don’t trust me, trust the masters who went before us.

We didn’t become retreat directors in a foreign country after doing a three year course in the hospitality business. I had no skills. I had no idea what it all meant. I, we, just did it. We renovated, marketed, hosted, created it all by doing. We got out of our comfort zone. Your skills have to get better to get to a new level of competency in what you want to do. Are you stretching yourself?

There’s an old Roman proverb that goes something like this: “If a man were able to see his whole life he’d never live it.” If I’d known how difficult it was going to be to create a retreat I would never have started it in the first place. I would probably have decided to keep working at “Vanity Fair”.

You always have to be challenging your skill-set. If you don’t know how to do something, learn. How do you learn? Copy, read, steal from the masters. Get their skills, to the best of your ability.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Russian ballerina, but like last time, I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Don’t show your teeth until you can bite.

Ná nocht d’fhiacla go bhféadair an greim do bhreith.

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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.