I realize that I have always been interested in how creative work gets done. I’ve always secretly thought that our most important scientific discoveries also came from creative thinkers, and I’ve long suspected that they might be closer to being artists in their scientific understanding than many of their colleagues. It’s okay if I’m wrong about this. I’m just suspicious that it’s possible.
Among other disciplines, I’ve long been interested in what I could learn about how creative work happens from composers of music. For example, the young Brahms eventually wrote his first piano concerto, but it wasn’t anything certain. It was an eventuality. First, he wrote it as a symphony. But then, after several private performances of it on a piano in front of friends, he changed his mind and switched to a different form. He wrote it as a piano duet.
I try to imagine that, writing over forty minutes of music in one genre–in this case, as a symphony–and then switching it to a duet for two pianos. But Brahms wasn’t finished with it.
After thinking and hearing it as a piano duet, he switched it back to a symphony again.
Only after this did he bring it to it’s current rendering as his first piano concerto.
I’ve not conveyed in my little summary here the amount of anxiety that must have gone into this back-and-forth re- and re-visioning of a major project. My understanding, from the reading I’ve done (I happen to really like this piano concerto and have owned recordings of several performances of it) is that the composer was under some real anxiety trying to write a meaningful symphony after Beethoven. In spite of the encouragement he got from Robert Shuman, he felt himself to be composing in the towering shadow of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Eventually, apparently, it must have felt safer to come out with a piano concerto, to work in that form, before he actually wrote his first symphony.
I can relate to that anxiety. Looking around at all the great books being written every day, my usual thought is that I’m just pretending I can write. I really question what I could possibly have to offer.
This isn’t so true when I’m in a regular pattern of writing every day or just about everyday. When this is happening, I tend to lose my anxiety and self-consciousness in just solving problems and being interested in the work. But lately my work schedule has thrown my writing schedule off so that I’m really not able to write often. When this happens, I find it harder and harder to get back to the writing. So lately, when a Saturday comes up and I have some extra time, I don’t find it easy to open up a file of a story to work on it. I feel anxiety.
At a certain point last fall, this got to be the regular case for me. I was too busy. One weekend, though, I had thirty minutes between tasks, and I decided to have what I have come to call a “Write a bad poem day.” I allowed myself during that period to write something, and not worry if I was writing it poorly. I didn’t think about what I was going to produce. I just allowed myself to get started. A week later, I read the draft, and I saw new possibilities in it. It wasn’t that bad, I decided.
Writing Poems Instead of Novels
In one of the first creative writing courses I took in college, I remember the professor saying that he preferred to write poetry because it was all he had time for. The forms he wrote in were short, and he could spend time on them.
I have found this to be somewhat true. I also like the way that poetry helps me to focus.
My method has been to do the following.
First, I have about ten to twenty active files of rough drafts of poems. Most started out as bad poems, though some came as ideas or visions or phrases I needed to write down. For example, one afternoon I walked by my journal, opened it, and wrote the sentence, “Baseball teams have beaten worse odds.” I realized a week later that it was a line that was about a surgery my wife might have to eventually face.
These files I’ve kept open on my computer and randomly returned to read various drafts between my meetings. That way, I’m continuing to look at them, add to them, subtract from them, and notice new things about them.
I recently published one of these bad poems. And many of the others are taking different shapes and starting to be what I call “not bad poems.” Eventually, they become acceptable and then possibly publishable.
I can’t say that much more about them except that doing this keeps me actively engaged with some kind of writing. It keeps me in touch with the less actively engaged aspects of my subconscious psyche while my frontal lobes are busy negotiating Zoom and email after email.
Calling them bad just allows me to jettison any unproductive anxiety about writing. It allows me to put ideas on paper or screen.
I admit that this has developed out of my long past practice of keeping a journal. The journal’s main requirement is just putting ideas on paper and exploring them.
Bad Poetry Day gives me my license to just put the ideas on paper. It’s not a bad technique for keeping the writing going.
I would love to hear how you keep your writing going when you face heavy schedules that take you away from your writing.
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