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For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

That’s a quote from John F. Kennedy’s Commencement Address at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut on the 11th of June 1962.

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

How’s it goin out there? Hope yis are all well.

This is Episode 11 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about perfection and Shakespeare, and today I want to talk about myths and lies.

Myths can move us towards Imagination or they can move us away from it. So, it’s important to understand the difference between positive myths, and negative ones, because they work, whether it be understanding common universal stories or reinforcing common lies, Walls. A good example would be so called urban myths, which are basically falsehoods, masquerading as truths. There are many of these types of negative myths when it comes to Imagination.

If you read Clarissa Pinkola Estés or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, myths take on a positive role in society. We can also watch Campbell talking to Bill Moyers about “Star Wars”. Or George Lucas talking about Joseph Campbell. They’re fascinating readings of our historic stories, although many would say we’ve been creating some very different universal myths in the last decades what with Climate change and the Doomsday Clock prognosis.

It took me a long time to discover the truth of myth the way these people did. They helped me understand that we are surrounded by myths, of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Celts, Upanishads. And that there are modern ones too.

All these mythic viewpoints look at faith from different parts of the same animal. It took me a long time to see this too, and to understand that many of the myths I was fed as a creator are simply incorrect. Like Roman Catholicism, I was indoctrinated up to a certain age. Then I found, or more created my own spiritual myth of reality. And of course when I realized this I understood how the myths we’re told could be negative, counteractive to creation.

One of the first myths I was told was: All artists are broke. After my grandfather had anxiously wheezed, “Oh no … not that,” to me when I told him I’m going to be a writer, I asked him why? He hissed, “Artists never make any money.” Well, I say bulls**t.

Shakespeare was minted. If he were alive today he’d be in Hollywood driving around in a flash car. Picasso and Dali were filthy rich. Look at any “successful” artist. Are they broke? An artist I know makes 50,000 Euros a painting. It wasn’t so long ago I remember him not having enough money to pay for the nappies for his baby boy, and he and his wife were pregnant again. If I told you his name you wouldn’t know who he is. Is he not making money? Also, who gets paid to act, write, produce, and design all those Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu movies and TV shows?

Another one: All artists are drug addicts, drunks. Again, bulls**t.

Some of the hardest working people I know are creators. Some of them work ten hour days, a lot of them at least six days a week. They don’t have time for drugs. And they’re not stupid. They know drugs today are laced with all kinds of brain destroying chemicals. They want their heads together, so that they can get up the next day and write, paint, produce, build.

All creators are crazy. Bulls**t.

So, the Goldman boys on Wall Street, the people selling guns to countries to blow up other countries are not crazy? No, they wear tailored suits. They have luxury cars and watches and a woman half their age on their arms because they left their wife and kids. No. The artist in the garret, the inventor in her garage is crazy because she’s doing something she loves?

All creators are irresponsible. Bulls**t.

What, they all have multiple wives and don’t care about their kids? So do business men, teachers, any group on the planet. I’ve known many writers and artists who sacrificed decades of creative energy to raise their kids, the majority of them women, not that it ever stops them. It’s disrespectful and annoying to label these creators irresponsible. I left France for my family. My kids got into a wonderful school, and my in-laws are getting very old. I could have stayed in the mountains writing my novels like a true clichéd narcissist writer and running a successful business, but I left. It was very difficult but I don’t see it as a sacrifice, just that it’s the right thing to do.

One of the only persistent ways I’ve seen most creators being irresponsible is when it comes to representing their work, after it’s finished. A lot of them don’t. That’s irresponsible, or more, dishonorable, as it doesn’t honor all the hard work they put in to create their work. But each to their own. Everyone’s different.

Next: Artists are recluses. Bullshit. I ran a retreat. Creators go there from all over the world. If they didn’t need community, in a peaceful, inspiring place, then they wouldn’t go there. Creators are social. Again, this idea of the artist in the garret starving to death alone is bullst. Joyce had Beckett, Beach, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. Then there’s the Bloomsbury Group. John Lennon had the other Beatles. Shakespeare had all his actor friends and business partners. Creators cannot function in a vacuum. They always need other creators to bounce ideas off, read their work, help them out on the set of their film, build their website.

Creators are all depression sessions. I won’t use that bad word again, but you get the message. I can’t remember the last depressed creator I met. In fact, most of them are the happiest people I’ve met. Why? Because they’re doing what they love.

How we see the world can change when we create our own myth, by asking questions about the positive and negative myths we are told. Today, ideas of progress and more and more as somehow beneficial because these ideas are beneficial to economies, are old myths. We can create new myths, positive ones, by questioning. We can question whether more is in fact positive. Whether progress is in fact progressive or simply a tool for the elites to push out what Plato called their noble lies. We can create new stories, where compassion and service to others become our new myths. Instead of slaying the dragon he or she can become our friend. Instead of heroism, something which only serves the kings and queens and the 1% of 1%, why not have new myths, stories based around compassion and service, amplify stories like Malala Yousafzai or Gandhi.

Is progress good for the planet, the forests of the Amazon, the animals disappearing because of the mass extinction occurring right now? Are we really profiting from all this loss? Our cultural mythologies of progress are not progressive. The insistence of more and more is costing too much, literally. Does all this new “wealth” everyone says our generation has — at least the white Western populations — make us happier? Are all the mass shootings a happy story? Do the mental health statistics paint a story of happiness? Is the myth that we are better off than our grandparents really true?

More importantly, does this myth of progress and more and more inspire us to live an inspired life? Does it really nourish us? Or would stories of compassion and service inspire and nourish us more? But do we look at myth like this? Do we see our stories as having meaning? Aren’t we simply relying on the myths of previous generations for our sense of meaning?

If meaning comes from the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we tell ourselves, then why can’t we create new stories instead of simply rejecting or accepting the old ones? Stories can open the Door into a new mythic world, one where we come together instead of apart, especially if we want to survive as a species. Yes, we have to know the old myths, and more importantly the negative ones, but we also need to create new ones, new Doors towards Imagination and creativity.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There’s no truth to story without an author, which basically means how can you trust a story or myth if the person telling it is not there.

Ní fiú scéal gan údar.

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.

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Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: ‘the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life… for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’.

That’s a quote from Will Durant’s 1926 book The Story of Philosophy, when he writes about Aristotle. And I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

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

This is Episode 10 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about genius, talent and originality but today I want to talk about perfection, another Wall away from Imagination and creativity.

First, there’s the idea that everything comes out perfectly.
Well, I’ve never written a chapter I didn’t have to change. Maybe that’s just me, and every writer I’ve ever known. Maybe there’s a writer out there who’s written a whole chapter without changing a comma. I doubt it.

Also, do you think Frank Gehry’s buildings always go up the way he first designs them? Did George Lucas use his first cut of “Star Wars”? How many times did Elon Musk have to test his Tesla cars before they went on the road? And even then, was that the end of it? Was every Shakespeare play finished when it was finished, perfect? Look at the iPhone. Every year there’s a new one.

Second, there’s the idea that every great work is perfect.

Well, what about all the times Shakespeare performed his plays in the provinces before showing them to the king and queen and court? Do you think he didn’t change a line here, a scene or character there, when the audience in the pit started booing or shouting at the actors on the stage, or flinging rotten fruit or eggs at them? Of course he did.

Another example: Leonardo Da Vinci. Would Da Vinci have called his Saint Anne perfect? He worked on it until his death, that is, over twenty years, consistently changing it.

Back to Shakespeare. When he was creating he had to bear in mind two audiences: the gallery seats, an educated audience who appreciated character development and subtlety, and those in the pit who wanted to see sex, action, fun. Do you think it a coincidence that after nearly every soliloquy, every quiet scene, there’ll be a scene that’s comic, or violent, a sword fight, a murder? Do you think Shakespeare didn’t change a line when one of his friends, the people he acted with, owned a theater with, suggested it? They were giving him advice as creators (actors) as well as creative business people.

Every time he picked up his quill, Shakespeare knew, in the coming months, by the time it was seen by the king and queen, his words, his scenes, maybe even whole acts, would change, countless times. That’s why he was such a great creator. He surrounded himself with great creators, learned his drama craft for ten years before he even started writing, then changed his work as often as he thought it would make his creation better, knowing it was never perfect, only ready when it was ready.

A famous contemporary example: the often told story of Jack Kerouac and his novel “On the Road”. The story goes that he wrote the novel in three weeks. It’s used as a quintessential example of a beat generation creator just spontaneously banging something out in no time, perfect.

Well, it wasn’t, and he didn’t. Yes, he typed one version of it out in three weeks, but he had worked hard on his craft before that. He had reworked “On the Road”, in his head, in his journals for years, and then on the typewriter. Then in the fifties he reworked it again, for about seven years. So, the three weeks of a perfect manuscript really took him about ten years.

Perfection is the enemy of creation. Creation is not immediate, it comes in bits and pieces. In the south of France they have a wonderful expression: “Petit a petit l’oiseau fait son nid.” Bit by bit the bird makes its nest. A nest takes time, effort, and patience.

Nothing comes out perfect, especially at the beginning. You have to go looking for the bits like a bird, and assemble them, piecemeal, into a nest. It’s a messy, rough process. It looks rough and weird at first, but by the end the nest works, practically and aesthetically. This is the joy of creating, when you connect unrelated things in an inspired way. To use Wordsworth, you become surprised by joy, because you experience the connections that make us stop, pause, then think: Wow, that’s a creative way of looking at it.

If immediate perfection comes, it’s from years of practice, years of gathering, from creating other creations, to arrive at the creation that “came out of nowhere”, finished. Picasso was once asked how he could charge so much money for a drawing he did in a few minutes. He responded that it hadn’t taken him a few minutes, that it had taken him 80 years to draw it.

Your focus has to be on growing, mastering your craft, mastering what you create. Theory gets you nowhere. Create. Repeat the messy process to find out the work you want to really get into. You don’t, won’t know, what that is until you’re in it, doing it, lost in it, like Shakespeare. And don’t think you’re only going to have one go at it either. Imagination leads to more imagination. Creativity leads to more creativity. As Maya Angelou once said:

Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have.

Hemingway never knew whether he was writing a novel or not. He’d start writing a short story and when it got longer it became a short novel, like “The Old Man and the Sea”. When it got longer again it became a novel. He kept working, kept creating. He didn’t try to create the perfect novel. He wrote. He created. Then he moved onto the next one.

Perfection kills creation. If you think what you’ve created is awful, so what. Nobody ever has to see it, read it, know about it. Let it be awful. If you don’t create, you have nothing. You can’t change a program with no code. You can’t change an un-carved block. You can’t change an empty page.

In the future, you can. You can make your creation better. If you create nothing because you want immediate perfection, then ironically you have nothing to perfect.

Change leads to discovery. You find out what you’re creating by doing, by making mistakes, and a lot of the time, you don’t even realize you’ve progressed.

Five years ago, we were in the truck going down to Carcassonne for groceries, from our retreat in the mountains of southern France. I asked the young Sydney memoirist in the front seat a question.

“How’s your essay collection edit going?”

Her answer was immediate.

“Shit. I’m just so full of self-doubt about the whole damn thing now.”

“Are they all bad?”

“No. One is really strong. Two are pretty good, but the others are really shit.”

“Sounds like you’ve made great progress then.”

“What?”

“Well, last week, when we were coming down you said all of them were shit.”

She stopped looking out the window to stare at me. “Shit, I’d forgotten that.”

The Wall of self-sabotage is the friend of perfection and fear, your natural enemies, negative structures we build inside our own heads. It can shelter you, make you feel safe and comfortable, happy to do nothing. It’s a fantastic wall. And there is not one creator on the planet that has ever escaped self-doubt.

And self doubt usually leads to self-sabotage. We all do it. So many false starts appear because of self-sabotage. It’s just the way it is. But you can’t give up. Self-doubt, limiting belief systems, fatigue, the shadow side, misery, are natural. Everyone gets stuck. The responses are countless. Everyone fails at some stage, but if you can’t accept failure you’ll never come up with a new creation.

The thing is to find solutions. Walls can be circumnavigated, moved through, with love for the work. And a lot of the time we don’t even realize we’ve progressed from where we were, like that Sydney memoirist.

Also, don’t compare your unfinished creation to someone else’s finished masterpiece, or any of your previous finished works. Months, a lot of the time, years of hard work have gone into those masterpieces and creations. Never mind all the changes afterwards, like Kerouac.

Yes, it’s hard not to compare, but it’s only because we can’t sit down and watch Da Vinci paint and repaint and repaint his masterpiece until he’s dead. We can’t see all the pieces of paper Shakespeare threw away as he rewrote scenes, again and again.

So, be gentle with yourself. Nothing is ever completely figured out at the beginning. Everything changes. It’s a process. Instead of pursuing perfection go after excellence instead. Like the Aristotlean thinking I quoted at the beginning. Excellence is an art won by training and habituation… these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. So try to get better at what you love creating.

By doing, again and again and again, the gifts of talent, originality and genius come naturally, organically in the next act of the Imagination.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Greek philosopher by way of an American one, but as usual I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There is no wise man without fault.

Ní bhíonn saoi gan locht.

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.

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The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.

That’s a quote from French writer Émile Zola, and I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well with this crazy Corona virus.

This is Episode 9 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about black sheep and difference but today I want to talk about a few Walls that build on each other, genius, talent and originality. In a later episode I’ll talk more about talent, but today I want to talk about these three ideas in an inter-connected way.

“I don’t know if I’m talented enough. I don’t know if I have a gift.”

Christ. The amount of times I’ve heard that one. Even from established creators in their fields. The mind/ego loves this I’m not talented I’m not original I’m not a genius crap. Again more Walls it throws in front of your creation.

In school I was convinced too, convinced I was talented at nothing. I was thrown out of classes, except a few like English. I never got good grades at English when I was younger, but when I was fifteen I wrote a story for a competition a bank held in connection with schools. I mentioned this before when I talked in an earlier episode about family. Anyway, I got third prize. My immediate reaction: they must have made a mistake. The usual imposter syndrome Wall. Then I went up to get my prize. Coming back down I still couldn’t accept it as reality. It was only when a friend started to say well done that I realized, there was no mistake. And that’s when the maybes started slipping in. Maybe I’m alright at writing essays, not school ones, but ones I like writing? I secretly started writing bad poems.

Everyone’s talented at something. Everyone’s gifted, original, at something. Again, artists and writers don’t own creativity. They don’t own Imagination. Some of us think visually, others through sound, others again through movement. However, what makes the difference is some people persist, keep doing that something, whether it’s writing code, novels, movies or painting canvases.

The fear of not being original, of being laughed at, of creating something awful, has crept into the heart of every creator since we first started putting hand prints on the walls of caves or telling stories around open fires, in the same caves.

Fact: Nobody’s original. This podcast is not original. I’m sure there are many like it. “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth” are not original. They were all plays before Shakespeare ever wrote his versions. Take up Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”. Look up Churchill. Nearly every famous quote attributed to the man can be found somewhere else, said a little differently, by someone else, usually by someone who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Look at the footnotes to his quotes.

Mozart in one of his letters says he never aims for originality. Mark Twain, also in a letter, to Hellen Keller, said all ideas come from other “sources” and that we color them differently because of our moral and mental character. He wrote that every great orator re-interprets centuries and the thousands who went before them when they write a speech, like Churchill with the ancients.

Steve Jobs, in a “Wired” interview in 1996, talked about this. He said creation is “connecting things” by creators with “very diverse experiences”, but that most people cut themselves off from these experiences by not being curious.

We all create from the past, what went before us, those sources Twain wrote about. Past is prologue. When I finished the first draft of my Create book I started reading other books on the same wavelength. Why? To see what I’d forgotten to talk about. To inspire me to add and take out things that made no sense. It’s a good thing to be curious. Instead of something to be frightened by we should embrace it, embrace new experiences, books, ideas.

Why? Because nobody has read everything, and every human being has a different way of expressing their “it”, because everybody is different. And new creations nearly always come from breaking with the past, by changing the way something used to be done, to form something new, a new individual clarity. Like Picasso said,

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

Einstein once said he had no real talent, just that he was passionate about being curious, like a child, and that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational one a faithful servant, where we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. At the same time he also supposedly said genius is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent hard work.

This is one of the key things I’ve seen over the years: the people who keep doing the work and evolve with their work, succeed. I’ll get into work more in a later episode, but when I say succeed I don’t just mean from a capitalist perspective. Creators who keep doing the work feel they succeed because they get better at what they love creating. The work makes them better at the work. They don’t let anyone or any amount of frustration stop them. When they see they’re comparing themselves to other people then they know they’re not in their work, but creating a Wall. They know talent is identifying their own talent and then getting into the work, for a lifetime.

You can be talented and never create a body of work. How many creative writing professors, art professors, CEOs have I met who told me the most successful people they ever met, the most creative people, were persistent, dogged hard workers.

The blank page no longer becomes frightening. You’re not the first to look at it. Find historical friends in your creative field. Then look for connections in other fields that inspire you. Oftentimes originality comes from seeing original combinations others never have. But be selective. Only stuff you really love, stuff your soul loves.

A friend of mine sees talent, originality and genius as gifts. She sees a painting as a gift, waiting to be born, not herself, not her being talented, original. Michelangelo liberated his creations from Carrara marble. He never saw what he did as creation, but more as gifts from the stone, gifts he had to set free. The mind/ego disappears and the creation, the gift comes through the creator. In a sense, it wasn’t Michelangelo who created “David”, but “David” who reveals himself to Michelangelo. The talent and originality come out of the creation. I see my books the same way.

Whatever it is you create, they’re all there, waiting, gifts. But, you have to be open to them. You have to switch off the self-sabotage of talent and originality and genius long enough to allow them to present themselves, a lot of the time in bits and pieces.

As I said in a previous episode, Rodin would make thousands of sketches of a model moving before deciding on the pose, “the” moment to sculpt. As with Michelangelo, the sculpture is held within the stone. Just like the chair is in the tree, the painting in the field, what the impressionists called the motif. We, the creators, have to discover these gifts. They’re out there waiting for us to discover them. As Henry Miller once said, everything is out there already, and as intermediaries we have to make use of what’s in the air.

One of the greatest Walls that moves us away from accessing these gifts is this one:

“Oh, I’m not a genius, like Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Rodin.”

Modern society has adopted genius as a noun for an individual. Certain creators are inspired to have many moments of genius, one after another. Mozart had many. Einstein too, although he said he arrived at Relativity by steps, work.

However, Einstein wasn’t a “genius” when it came to his social life. You only have to look at how he treated his wife as an employee or how he treated his sons. He’s not alone. Many famous scientists have had unhealthy personal behavior. Nobody’s a perfect genius.

Mozart was terrible with his money. They say it led him into an early grave. Is Warren Buffet a genius because he made so much money? Could he come up with the theory of Relativity or compose a symphony at the age of eight? What’s the criteria?

But again, what do these creators have in common? Work. They were, are, all passionate about what they love. They’re obsessed by what they love. But then someone says Warren Buffet only does a couple of hours of work a day, but what does he spend the rest of his time doing? Reading journals, financial statements, reports, newspapers, books. To some that seems like a lot of extra work. Not to him. He loves it.

There are no geniuses, only moments of genius. And genius comes with hard work, every day. Every so called “genius” worked consistently, and got better with each new creation they created. The word itself comes from the Latin verb “to bring into being, create, produce”. It’s not the person but what comes into being, the creation itself, the act of creation, which is genius. The ancient Romans saw it another way, that everyone has their own genius, even whole communities, but that genius is a guide. We create the conditions for it to bring creations, gifts, into reality.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a wonderful French novelist and activist and I’m going to end on another Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Deep is the hole of doubt. And of course this is relevant because genius, talent and originality can be deep dark holes when we let them be. So he hole of doubt is deep.

Is doimhain é poll an amhrais.

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.

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…for me – writing is less a business than a vocation, a calling. Not so much something you choose as Something that chooses you, not so unlike a drug, really, in that it’s hard to imagine quitting. Whether you’ll actually make money is almost beside the point. Viewing writing as a vocation doesn’t make you special, just different.

Richard Russo in his essay “Getting Good” from his book The Destiny Thief.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? Hope yis are all doing well.

This is Episode 8 of my series of episodes on creativity and Imagination, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about Lexical Prisons. Today I want to talk about other Walls, black sheep and difference and how they moves us away from creativity and Imagination.

When you walk out of Plato’s cave (your home, your country, your job, your social group) you become a black sheep. You leave the orthodox, conventional way of living. You’re no longer respectable because you’ve left the standardization of the workplace, education and culture you grew up in be by wasting “valuable” time by “playing”. Grow up, the world says. Who do you think you are leaving?

“A retreat? You’re going on a holiday, to work?”
“There are no shops? What are you going to do there all day? It’s so isolated.”

These are common reactions parents, lovers, spouses, friends, work colleagues have when they find out someone is going to La Muse to create. Why? Because everyone who goes there is a black sheep. When I say how wonderful it is that their family supports their getting away, they nearly all look back at me and laugh, or grow serious. Why? Because villains don’t think a holiday is a holiday when you’re choosing to work, unless you’re getting paid to do your creative work.
When I ask them why they think this is, they nearly all respond the same way.

“They’re jealous because they’re not getting away.”
“Me going away to create makes them think about the things they want to create. They don’t like that at all.”
“They don’t have the courage to create themselves. Otherwise, why would they criticize my needing to do it?”

When was the last time you came across a creator you admire who was conventional, orthodox, “respectable”? This is why the phrase black sheep exists. It’s what the parable of the lost sheep really means in the “Bible”. The shepherd leaves his flock of ninety-nine sheep to find the one that’s “lost”. The parable’s not just about redemption, about bringing a “sinner” back into the fold. It’s about the shepherd, God as Jesus, leaving the ninety-nine behind to search for the sheep who is like Him, free, outside the norm.

Jesus was a black sheep. That’s why He rejoices when He finds the black sheep. The black sheep was lost when she was with the other ninety-nine. The black sheep’s only “found” when she returns, a new creative being. She repents conformity, sameness, group-think, unlike the other, quote, “ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.” The black sheep is different. When you’re the black sheep, you’re not white, literally. You’re the sheep that gets away, doesn’t do what your family and friends want you to do, jumps out of the the enclosure.

In Ireland, so many of our writers had to jump the fence and leave. They were too different. Joyce left for Trieste. He called Ireland “the old sow that eats her farrow.” He had to publish “Ulysses” in Paris. Wilde left for England. Beckett left for Paris, was in the French Résistance and wrote “Waiting for Godot” in French first, not Irish or English. It was first performed in France not Ireland. Shaw left. O’Casey was basically run out of the country by Yeats. He ended up in England. And John McGahern, after publishing his second novel “The Dark”, was banned from teaching as a primary school teacher. He had to leave for England, France and the United States.

Then there are creators like Da Vinci. He was gay, left-handed, illegitimate, vegetarian, distracted most of the time by many different things, mainly his creations, but he jumped out of the enclosure, and now the “Mona Lisa” is considered one of the greatest creations of all time.

Being ostracized by your own generation can often mean being an inspiration to the following ones. It’s okay to be a black sheep, to be weird, to be different. A lot of the time people can’t stand difference. It makes them feel uncomfortable, but when you break out of the pen, joy appears.

Why does someone go out into a garage all day rebuilding a car when they could be inside watching TV with the family? Why does someone go up to their office to write a book about organic farming when they should be sleeping after a day on the farm bringing in the corn harvest? Because they need to create.

If we were all freely doing what we want to do, creating, we wouldn’t need terms like bohémiens or black sheep. And there are many other words like them, depending on what culture or country you’re living in. In France, as I said in a previous episode, they have an expression for the black sheep: “Il fait la poète.” Basically, it means, he’s crazy, “He’s doing the poet.” Or in Ireland, “Oh, he’s an artist. You know, he draws the dole” -unemployment benefit.

There was a New Yorker at La Muse once for two retreats, re-writing a musical. She asked me to read a draft.

“I can’t read it,” I said.
“Oh, you’re too busy?”
“No, it’s just I can’t stand musicals.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback.
“I could read it, but I won’t like it, no matter how well written it is. I’m your worst reader.”

A lot of people are just not going to like your stuff. Does everyone love “Macbeth”, “Hamlet”, “King Lear”? How many people have actually read them, much less watched them performed?

People like different things. We’re all black sheep. We’re all different. Some people hate tragedies, others thrillers, others comedies or musicals. If you write a wonderful musical with all the best actors, a wonderful director, the best locations, I won’t watch it. Never. I can’t stand them. They drive me crazy. It’s nothing personal, just me. Other people love them. It’s their favorite thing to watch. Am I supposed to see people who love musicals as black sheep in a negative way or do I simply accept that we’re all different with different tastes? It’s like saying you have to fall in love with people from a specific part of a specific country with specific skin color. No. We’re all different. We all like different things.

The ice-cream Ben & Jerry’s was created out of difference. Their unusual types of ice-cream were created taking into consideration Ben’s anosmia, his lack of smell and near lack of taste. Ben kept wanting bigger and bigger chunks in the ice cream to fulfill his need for feel, consistency in food. And now we all get to enjoy ice-creams with a completely different taste sensation.

Most people will never read my three hundred and fifty page novel, irrespective of how good or bad it is. Some people just don’t read novels, even less “literary” novels, and even less, if they’re over two hundred pages. Do I take that personally, or do I just keep writing? I keep writing. The reader, the person who will love my three hundred and fifty page novel, will eventually find the book.

It’s the same with Amazon reviews. I had an American novelist at La Muse who just didn’t get difference. She was pissed that people were one-starring her novel, bringing down her star rating. I tried to explain to her that they’re not her readers, and that they bought the book by mistake. She didn’t want to hear it.

William Blake was basically a pauper when he died, forgotten, save by a few creative friends. He was considered insane by his contemporaries, a real black sheep. It was only with the immense effort of one young biographer called Gilchrist that we even have access to Blake’s beautiful work. Blake found a reader, one, who loved his stuff so much that he pulled him out of obscurity.

It’s okay to be different. It’s okay to get outside your comfort zone. Actually, it’s a tremendous help when you’re trying to create something different, whether it’s an ice-cream or a poem. Think about how boring life is when you’re not pushed to grow, to become a black sheep. How can you create if you’re in a small container? You can only grow to the size of your container. You have to make your container bigger. Then you create larger, more expansive creations. Then you grow as your creations grow.

So, get up on the fence. Then, jump down to the other side, and go off into your wilderness, like Jesus, a Buddha, an Emily Dickinson, a Socrates, a creator.

So thanks for listening. I started with a proverb and I’ll end with again, to remind you, that it’s OK to be a black sheep. As the proverb says,

There tends to be a black sheep even in the whitest flock.

Bíonn caora dhubh ar an tréad is gile.

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.

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At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.

That’s a quote from Simone Weil’s essay Human Personality, written in the last year of her short but extraordinary life.

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

I used to be in a prison, the prison of Creativity, something I talked about in depth when I explained how Ursula LeGuin made me understand that Creativity has been co-opted by corporations and academia but that Imagination is still available to us as a relatively uncorrupted, or co-opted word. Imagination, which hasn’t been as coopted is one of the ways of breaking out of what I will be talking about today, lexical prisons. So, today I want to talk about lexical prisons, something Weil referred to at the beginning of that quote how “a mind enclosed in language is in prison”.

Last time I spoke about school and education, and how the industrial revolution and a utilitarian, way of educating can be detrimental to the imagination and inspiration of young people, leading them away from creativity instead of potentially opening Doors towards inspiration and enthusiasm.

For example, in this podcast I don’t curse. This is very difficult for me, or at least it was when I first started out, to not curse. Why? Because where I grew up we all curse. Most of my close friends who listen to this podcast are probably thinking, Why isn’t John cursing? That me speaking the way I am, the language I’m using, is not me, that I’m in a kind of prison by not letting myself express myself with curses, which is totally acceptable for Irish males, as that’s our reputation, part of our culture of craic, our maverick, iconoclastic buck the system. And don’t get me wrong. I love listening to the Blindboy podcast, and still curse when I’m having a laugh with friends and family.

So why did I stop? Because when I stepped back to look at my way of communicating I realized I was in a lexical prison. I noticed when I left my country for a long time that I was cursing a lot more than everyone else, but more importantly, the curses were taking up the space where adjectives, nouns, phrases should have been. I’m a writer. I’m all about words, how they’re arranged, which ones are left out, how long the sentence. But when I cursed I didn’t have as much control of what I wanted to express, because words I should have been there were absent. And I saw this as destructive, not creative. It moved me away from creativity, the imagination, using the right word, words, replacing them with expletives. I had placed myself involuntarily into a prison of language, and if we think of words as leading to our destiny, then this lexical awareness becomes even more important. As Gandhi put it:

Our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our character, our character becomes our destiny.

I had been thought to marginalize myself from the more eloquent people in Ireland, the better off, who hardly curse, the kids who were educated at Belvedere College and Trinity, because it wasn’t what they were taught. They didn’t have to curse to feel included with peers because their peers were hardly cursing.

In psychology they have what they call applied psychology, which basically means giving access to marginalized people the tools they need to deal with the anxiety and pain they are in. This access comes with language. For example, how can a person who has anxiety know how to deal with a panic attack if they don’t even have the words to express it? Just those two words, panic and attack, could help so many if they had access to that language. So language is a tool that can help them with the prison of their anxiety, to alleviate the anxiety. First, an individual can accept what happens, or is happening to them, as normal – that we all get panicked at some stage. That’s the first step out of the lexical prison, access to a new language that allows the individual to see they’re not alone. This reduces the suffering. Second, it helps the individual realize that there must be more language out there to help them understand what it is we are going through.

This is why we need to democratize creativity, democratize Imagination, just like we need to democratize psychology, because when we don’t have a language we can’t speak to other people who speak that language in the same way. If we don’t have a language of creation then we can’t speak to people about creating something without thinking we’ve no idea what we’re talking about. As opposed to simply having psychology in the universities and available to people of a certain socio-economic class, it needs to be available to everyone, democratized, applied psychology. We need an applied creativity, applied imagination, just like we need applied psychology. All the people need access, not just the few. The few is not democracy, the few is oligarchy. And oligarchic psychology and oligarchic creativity is simply not healthy for the larger population, only the few.

Which is the whole reason I’m doing this podcast, to democratize creativity and Imagination, even if at times I feel like I’m not using my real voice, by not cursing, because I want to practice what I preach, by using applied creativity, by not allowing the few to have access to expression, just because I came from a different socio-economic class when I was a kid.

I think every one should have access to creative tools, just like everyone should have access to psychological tools. What I am trying to say is that this podcast is my way of creating an applied creativity, just like psychologists create applied psychology, to help everyone, and especially those who don’t have access, to democratize creativity and the Imagination.

Just like with applied psychology, we need adaptive tools to unlearn negative or unhealthy behaviors, what I have called Walls away from creativity and Imagination. We need applied creativity, what I’ve called Doors towards Imagination, to unlearn all our unhealthy artistic behaviors, and lexical prisons are a Wall, just like the many other walls I’ve been talking about.

Again, to further this way of thinking: with awareness, by knowing our creative enemy, our creative enemies, the Walls again, we can reduce a lot of the anxiety about not being a creative person, or for example, feeling like a failure for not creating something perfect on your first attempt. Adaptive tools, adaptive and applied creativity help us recognize when we are falling into a trap, moving towards a Wall.

Another way to look at lexical prisons is to talk about cursing again. Podcasts. They have Parental Advisory labels on them. And this is the beauty of podcasts, people can step outside their lexical prisons and curse as much as they want to, like Blindboy, who I mentioned earlier. He curses a lot, but it doesn’t take away from how eloquent he is. It actually allows him to express himself fully. He lives in Ireland, permanently. It would be inauthentic if he didn’t curse, because of where he comes from. But for me, I’m an immigrant, and because of it I’ve had to look at the way I express myself, because if I say certain words Blindboy says over here in the States, people are disgusted and will judge me. So I’ve used this as away of analyzing my own specific lexical prison and adapted to the culture I’m living in so as not to upset people on the street, because I’m Irish and I’m American. I’m not saying I won’t be cursing in interviews I do later on though. No. Because then I’ll be with people I know, not out in the street, or in a store.

Of course, on TV and syndicated radio it’s the complete opposite. They have to rely on advertisers and foundations to support the salaries of their broadcasters. So people like Blindboy would be muzzled, which would be awful for us, and his creativity. Which is unfortunate because most people aren’t able to talk the way they would with friends and family which means there’s a lack of honesty, a lack of authenticity to their voices because they’re hampered by the language of whatever broadcaster their working for, and then they’re hampered by the political perspective of whoever owns the TV show. So, the words they use are brought under censorship, which is another form of lexical emprisonment. For example, I used to think the people in America were super puritanical, conservative, overly polite, but I was wrong. When you get to know Americans when you’re here, when you listen to them on podcasts, you realize they can be as harsh and forward thinking as anywhere else, but it’s just those voices are not what are seen on the lexically hampered mainstream media.

Our language contributes to our culture. The way we speak, the words we use, and don’t use, condition how we relate to others, how we feel, how we think.

For example, why are words like passion, enthusiasm, madness and inspiration not used more often in a positive way? Because we’ve been taught, consciously or not, to use words like “like” or “interesting”, or phrases such as “I’m on a deadline,” or “I don’t know.” Sentences such as: “Like, I don’t know, like if I like, it’s interesting, like.” What is that sentence actually about, what’s it actually saying? Nothing. That’s what.

Instead of a deadline, can’t we have a due date? Can’t we give birth to a creation, as opposed to dying if we don’t get over some imaginary dead-line? Instead of “I don’t know” can’t we just say how we feel about what we’re responding to? “I don’t understand what you’re saying”, as opposed to the non committal nonsense phrase “I don’t know”. Instead of saying something is “interesting”, can’t we say “That really inspires me.” “That makes me so enthusiastic.” “I’m passionate about…” When people use phrases like these we need to be aware, because they are creating Doors towards creativity and the world of the Imagination, stepping away from the walls of lexical prisons into the world of creation.

Every country has these lexical prisons. In America, they use the word “interesting”, all the time. It’s a language prison because most of the time people are basically saying what you’re saying is not interesting. They’re actually saying, please shut up now. This does not mean something cannot be interesting. It can. But it all depends on the person’s delivery. Are they saying it with enthusiasm, with a positive intention?

In Ireland, we curse a lot. I think it’s because of our servile psyche, but that’s another whole thing. As I said before I had to teach myself not to curse in public. Again, the cursing was a lexical prison, for me. It made me say things in a crude way, without actually saying anything. There were a lot of expletives in my responses but not a lot of substance. As a writer I should be able to express myself with words that show how I feel, the right words.

And a lot of the time we need to get out of our country to experience our lexical prisons, like I did with cursing. Or when I noticed Americans using “interesting” in France, for everything, compared with English English, or Australian, Canadian and New Zealander English, where they hardly used it at all unless something was actually really interesting. Changing our geography, changing where we are can change our perception of the reality we grew up in, where we come from. We get away from the Walls of our lexical ecosystem, out of our lexical habitat, and walk through the Door towards new creative opportunities.

Joyce once wrote “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Not the most positive thing to say about your country. But Joyce was honest, and created beauty away from the lexical prison he was born into. He did so by escaping, and looking in at the world he came from, from the outside.

So, phrases, ways of speaking, stop us from having opinions. “Oh, that’s interesting,” is not an opinion. Cursing is not an opinion. Sometimes, they’re both giving up, because you put lock yourself inside the walls of your own lexical prison. Words such as “like” do the same thing. It’s filler. “That’s like, the way it is, like.” “You know yourself, like.” It’s noise. It has no substance.

We use to run art expos for a few years at our retreat. People would come from all over the mountains to see the art. They’d drink and have a laugh. But there was one old man, the mayor, who wouldn’t come in. He being a good friend of mine I asked him why he wasn’t coming in. He kind of just looked at me because he didn’t know what to say, this from a fella who is never lost for words. I kept prodding him until he explained that he went into the mine when he was around 14 and that, quote “doesn’t have the right language to be able to express what I’d be looking at. I so not have the right education.” There were tears in his eyes. So obviously, his family, or friends or just some villain had made him think that because he didn’t have the language of creation, that he was not allowed to look at it. He was put in a lexical prison. As he put it, he didn’t have the “intelligence” for it, one of the smartest people I met in those mountains. No matter how I tried I couldn’t get him to come in. No matter how many times I told him “It doesn’t matter what kind of an education you had.

Everyone sees art differently, through their own personal lens. You might hate a painting, I might love it, but you don’t need a degree from a university to say how you feel about something.” He smiled, but refused to go in, stuck inside the Walls of his lexical prison.

Ocean Voung has a bit in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous about this reality of lexical imprisonment where he writes about toxic patriarchal capitalism. He sees American males caught in a lexical prison based on capitalistic violence and war. Expressions such as “You’re killing it.” Or “You’re making a killing.” Or “You blew them up.” Or “I went in there all guns blazing.” And men don’t even realize they’re using this violent language, because it’s so common. Capitalistic success is equated with killing people. Death and destruction of others, capitalizing on them, monetizing them, commodifying them, especially commodifying women’s bodies, is seen as a positive way of using language. It isn’t. It’s a very negative lexical prison.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a wonderful French philosopher, mystic and political activist, but like last time, I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

An eye evades a thing it does not see.

Seachnaíonn súil ní nach bhfeiceann.

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.