Art as War

Art as War

by | Jul 15, 2025 | Blog

Somewhere in the strange land of four a.m. I realized I had not looked at a clock for eight hours. Nor had I eaten, or even stood up from my desk. All night, I had been writing manically across various projects, jumping from one idea to the next like someone possessed. I was not so much fighting as simply weathering an assault, ducking and dodging thoughts as they jumped out of the darkness around me.

My opponent was the detritus of a couple of short stories, the guts of an already failing novel (which would remain unfinished, as usual), and more scraps of poetry than I could count.

At that moment, I felt buried in creative wreckage, like something inside me had exploded, propelling fragments of consciousness in every possible direction. To this, I had added a generous helping of my own squalor. An unmade bed, items of clothing strewn across the floor, at least a dozen dirty cups or mugs on various surfaces.

I had not been drinking then, although I felt a familiar fuzz around the edges of my vision, the sensation of having had the shit kicked out of me by nothing more substantial than a dream. For a long time, I just sat, trying to steady myself.

No good. Too much caffeine. Not enough of it. No booze.

The whole place was ransacked. Every corner resembled a battle site. I went to the bathroom for a drink of water and glimpsed bare bones in the mirror, the angular hostility of an unshaven jaw; eyes sunken and dark from no sleep, like two bruised moons.

No, I had not been drinking that night. I hadn’t been sick or fighting with anyone. Nothing had happened to me, nothing at all. I had been writing.

Just trying to make art.

Self Against Self

Art is beauty — I have no doubt. But there are times when I feel that it is also war; that a major aspect of any creative effort involves pitting one part of the self against the other.

On one hand, I experience a constant compulsion to make and engage with art, to live creatively no matter the cost. On the other, I find something within me fiercely resisting the same impulse, at times fighting doggedly against it.

I sit at my desk, ostensibly calm and unmoving. But something isn’t working. The words aren’t coming. Ideas hover around me, but won’t fall into place. Finally, I think of a good sentence and move my fingers to strike the keys; but half of them hit the wrong letter, or hit no letter at all, so that all that emerges is a garbled non-sentence and the fading laughter of fleeing inspiration.

My art — all the art I’ve ever made appears before me as a single substance, a sea of thin, yellowing fiber spreading across my desk like mold.

Still sitting calmly, but now incensed, I feel my muscles tighten and my skin begin to sweat. I want to jump up and tackle myself; I want to bash in my own head.

Why isn’t this working for me!

And yet to an outsider looking in, I’m just sitting there quietly with my head in my hands.

The process is not always this intense, of course. Sometimes, I take my notebook to a quiet coffee shop where I can sit and watch people come and go. I often wander with my camera, raising the lens now and then to probe some salient detail in the otherwise familiar surroundings. Maybe I’ll find an important truth there, maybe just something that makes me smile.

As always, the city is at war around me, but for a moment, I am immune to it, shielded from the ceaseless conflagration of modern life by the same thing that not a few nights ago was grinding me into the ground.

This too is the creative process — another form of it.

A Fraught Dichotomy

Is this dichotomy really necessary? Shouldn’t making art always feel like that coffee shop and casual stroll? Something gentle, fortifying. After all, this is something I choose to do, something I make great effort to find space for in my life. I sure as hell don’t get paid for it — not frequently, at least. Nor does society at large find it particularly worthy of their attention.

And yet I do it. I want to do it. I love it.

Ah yes, the L-word. There’s your answer right there.

You think love is always olive branches and doves?

Your Heart is a Battlefield

This makes me think of something William Faulkner said when receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1943. Giving a speech at the celebratory banquet he described good writing as concerned with “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

In context, he was addressing future generations of writers, fearing that in the anxiety-inducing shadow of the Nuclear Age, they would turn their attention from inner to outer, weakening their work as a consequence.

For Faulkner and other practitioners of literary modernism, the inner life of the individual assumes absolute primacy in the grand drama of the species as a whole. They do not dismiss external aspects such as the wars that defined their time, but seek root causes in human consciousness.

From this perspective, when humans fight each other it is really because they are fighting themselves, are struggling to contain an unending inner rebellion.

Where the Nineteenth Century was preoccupied with external socio-political ills imposed on the individual by agents of power, the modernists considered the most significant enemy to lurk within. To catch a glimpse of it, you have only had to look in the nearest mirror.

Following this logic, you come to a clear conclusion: Without resolving inner conflict, all other conflicts remain inevitable.

Is this what the creative act is — a heart at war with itself? Not just within the content of an artwork, but through the process itself. Is the impulse to create a form of self-struggle through which we play out our own existential uncertainties? When we make art, we are simultaneously trying to make our selves, to craft our own being according to principles inexpressible as mere logic?

If so, what does it mean to have some part of our personality actively oppose this?

Where does this villain come from? What is it, even?

Abstract black and white photography of a child writing.
Image by the author.

Being Against Non-Being

There is more happening here than can be explained by common psychological pathologies and the stresses of the modern world. Yes we may turn away from art for any number of mundane reasons, many of them plausible — a lack of money and time; the need to earn a living and focus on our loved ones; common human neuroses like self-doubt, fear and poor self-worth.

But in the struggle to create, a deeper existential resistance comes into play, something almost spiritual in the way that it pits fundamental principles against each other.

Why something instead of nothing? Why be when it would be easier not to be? Why endure the struggle of making something, when you could sit on the couch and drink beer instead?

As animals equipped with fierce survival instincts, we take this desire to exist as a given, as a quality shared across the length and breadth of human experience. We want to live. To live is good, a gift — how could we choose anything other than life? This is why suicide is so abhorrent to us — the ultimate refutation of species and civilization.

At the same time, we acknowledge that to be is difficult, that existence is fraught with inevitable suffering, whether through big, flashing catastrophes such as war and poverty, or just the unremarkable fact of our mortality and impermanence.

Why are we so certain that existence is favorable to non-existence; or that the creative act is a worthwhile expenditure of time and effort?

Maybe that inner force trying to prevent us from creating anything new, actually has our best interests at heart. Maybe it’s trying to save the universe the pain of yet more existence, yet more complexity, confusion, suffering and loss.

Because you can’t suffer if you don’t exist…

You can’t be a failed artist if you don’t try to make art in the first place…

Following this problem, Christian theologian Paul Tillich acknowledges that simply existing takes a certain amount of bravery and resolve; that to live is a choice we make daily, an inverted version of Camus’ view of life as a daily rejection of suicide.

For Tillich, “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.” That is to say, God’s role in a believer’s life is not so much as an arbiter of their existence, but as the source of strength they draw upon to live fully despite the suffering endemic to day-to-day consciousness. In Tillich’s opinion, the external, deistic god — God The Father — has disappeared, replaced by the god of personal existence, of our inner life.

Maybe art plays the same role in the lives of those of us who do not believe, the artist creating as a statement of their own courage to be, their work a personal answer to the silence of the gods.

In this case, creative resistance might be thought of as a personal devil, an eternal adversary pitted against the goodness of life. To make art is to refute non-being and any piece of created work is a record of its defeat.

That’s why art is difficult sometimes, sometimes such a struggle — not only because these qualities imbue it with significance and meaning, but because any created thing is a microcosm of life as a whole, of all of creation.

Art as war. Art as love and beauty. All these qualities impossibly entwined.

Abstract black and white child writing. Only hand and pencil are visible.
Writing in the dark. Image by author.

Sunday. Three-thirty. Soft gray light through the slats of the shade across my desk. The apartment is quiet, the streets outside strangely subdued. There is nowhere to be, nothing that needs done as a matter of urgency. Books and notebooks fan out around me. Otherwise, my room is clean and tidy, my face neatly shaven and well-slept. No pits for eyes today.

Yet, I’m still not completely at ease.

The article you’re reading was a difficult piece, for sure. It started as something entirely different and then split and spread out in several directions at once, winnowing wildly between contrasting themes and perspectives.

In other words, it was a mess.

I’ll confess, I despair a little at times like these. With so much of my self-worth contingent on my creative output, my well-being is often dangerously tethered to how well a given project is going, how often I’m publishing and the kind of reactions I get when I do.

I have to get something out of every session. I have to be consistent with my posting, produce new work as often as possible. If just this one measly article takes so long and requires so much effort, how can I ever hope to post weekly, let alone daily, the way some people do?

And even after all that work, it’s still a mess anyway — garbled, incoherent, mercilessly ambling…

Maybe. Maybe not.

But it’s made, at least— a new creation, something that once wasn’t and now is. Between something and nothing, I chose something, and I saw it through and gave it form, no matter how imperfect.

I think that alone is worth a deep breath and maybe another cup of coffee before I stretch and sigh and brace once again for the next battle.

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An Open Letter to Creatives: Maintaining Artistic Integrity

An Open Letter to Creatives: Maintaining Artistic Integrity

by | Jul 2, 2025 | Blog

It is difficult to achieve an authentic, creative life in a world that overwhelmingly privileges commercial gain, measurable success and indiscriminate attention of any kind; a world in which the value of a creative work is defined more by the capital it produces than by the authenticity of its message.

By capital I mean both hard currency and cultural reach — an insatiable need for attention of any kind, often called relevance, and most commonly manifest as likes, views and subscribers. Not only can these be leveraged for financial gain, but they create an intoxicating amount of psychological satisfaction, at least in the short term. The value of being seen, even unfavorably, has usurped the value of adding something of substance into the stream of the collective consciousness.

Algorithmic dynamics exacerbate this trend, encouraging creators to post broadly-targeted (dumbed down) work as often as humanly possible and with a cynical eye for market trends. Hence the current deluge of poor to mediocre content flooding every field, genre and platform.

Such work is generally characterized by an across-the-board lack of complexity. Eager to avoid challenging the reader in any way, it tends to be stylistically bland and philosophically rudimentary. Occasionally, a creator will harness inflammatory, controversial content to generate attention, but the end result is always the same: Relevance leveraged for material gain.

In our current landscape, quality work is still available, but has become subsumed by quantity as even a cursory glance at any social media platform (including Medium) will affirm.

To navigate this world without compromising one’s creative integrity is a difficult task. Some argue that it is impossible.

 

Creative Integrity is Personal Authenticity

 

What does it mean to insist on creative authenticity, both in the work produced and the process used to produce it?

Ultimately, only the individual artist can answer this question through the prism of their own goals and sensibilities. My personal concept of creative integrity is based on the assumption that all humans have a base essence (often referred to as their authentic self), which becomes easily muddied by social pressures and norms. A large part of our existential struggle blooms from our attempts to resist these pressures and return to the purity of childhood. The more faithfully you honor your essence with your art, the more integrity your work will have.

Note that honoring your essence does not mean explicitly expressing it or working solely within its thematic boundaries. One’s best work need not specifically reference their own life. Rather, one’s essence manifests when the artist expresses what they must express (vision subject and theme) without calculating potential rewards. Such work is typically unaffected by popular trends and market forces, although it may inadvertently align with them, if the artist is lucky.

In this way, the artist divorces their basic methods of development, revision and delivery from the fluctuating laws of the commercial sphere, which invests in authenticity only to the extent that it produces reward.

This is the kind of artist who has something inside them that refuses to rest, that compulsively demands to be channeled into creative effort. This artist creates for the sheer joy of creation, valuing process over product. Their standards are their own, their subjects sacred.

Maybe you have tried at times to suppress this kind of creative impulse, to pursue a more practical way of life, a career or business venture, attempting to treat your art as a hobby or something you do when time allows.

And maybe you’ve discovered that this is impossible, that the creative act demands a place at the center of your existence, asserting itself as your primary vocation, around which all other work becomes secondary. This is a matter of focus rather than time as the reality of late stage capitalism requires that we spend the majority of our hours working for pay. Even so, creative effort must remain the factor that most justifies our existence.

I personally do not consider myself to have a career. I certainly don’t identify with my job title. I am grateful for my nine-to-five job, which keeps me engaged with the world and affords me food, shelter and other necessities while I pursue creative projects. But on some level, it remains a necessary evil, certainly inasmuch as it demands so much of my time.

Maybe you have not experienced things at such extremes, yet remain compelled to take your artistic projects more seriously than the world is willing to reward you for.

To various extent, most artists face the same tension between the need to create and the need to function in material society. Our trouble is that dedication, craft and authenticity do not equal financial viability and at times may even jeopardize it. If we’re lucky, the work we do will have some kind of market value. By all means celebrate this as good fortune. But when it does not, we are often faced with the temptation to give up, or make compromises that dilute the essence of our work so that it better meets the demands of the market.

The voice of our true self demands that create this, and the voice of the market demands that we create that. Unless these two overlap, we are unlikely to find fulfilment.

In such cases, we are left with a bruising sense of self-betrayal, the lingering knowledge that we have lied to ourselves, that we are profaning something sacred for profit or esteem.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that commercial success automatically constitutes inauthenticity or inferior artistry. Many superlative works have successfully generated both financial profit and cultural cache and represent particular value as they nudge mass culture and consumption towards a more advanced states of consciousness. But these works remain the exception rather than the rule.

Of course, life rarely unfolds in such neatly delineated extremes and not every compromise we make will constitute an absolute betrayal of our creative essence. Nor will we necessarily recognize our compromises as we make them, understanding only later the ways in which we fell short of realizing our vision. Falling short is an inevitable aspect of the human experience and becomes instructive when recognized and harnessed as a catalyst for change.

Some will argue that consistent compromise is unavoidable and that to refuse the demands of a broader audience is a stubborn and insufferable form of entitlement. It is certainly presumptuous to expect your most essential truth to appeal to an audience, but it is not for other people alone that we make art.

Ultimately, creating art is a way of life, a deeply personal experience, which needs no external justification. It is both an audacious, self-serving claim to the value of our own experience, and an empathetic, profoundly human desire to enrich the lives of others through it.

The fact remains; if our authenticity is not immediately appealing to enough people at a given time, then there is little we can do but proceed without excessive reward or redefine what reward means.

To accomplish the latter, we must make the profit outcome less relevant than the creative experience itself, the act of making art, which becomes the hinge on which the other parts of our life swing. To be seen, read, listened to or acknowledged is surely a viable goal for most artists. But it should not be the defining factor in their decision to create.

This is the minefield we navigate as committed artists, and I would caution you to consider that many little compromises quickly add up to a bigger betrayal, often realized far too late and when we have become accustomed to the seductive comforts of a compromised integrity.

Sometimes it is late at night, when we cannot sleep, that the sheerest clarity comes to us and we see clearly for the first time what we were and what we have become. It is perfectly possible to shuffle inch by inch of the edge of a cliff.

Of course, I have only scratched the surface of this ongoing, ever-evolving issue. But one thing seems particularly clear; as the content landscape grows ever-larger and artificial intelligence develops at pace, the terms of success will become increasingly complicated, and the authenticity of individual experience increasingly important.

Artificial intelligence can already outperform humans in creating bland, easily-consumed content at scale. It can already generate competent written work and is rapidly improving in the fields of photography, art and design. Video will be next, followed by music.

To outmaneuver this, we will need to be more authentic, more human, less inclined to produce for the machine.

So create honestly. Make whatever you want, however you want. Revel in the experience without hope or expectation. Don’t wonder who is looking. Paradoxically, this might be the key to creating work that others cannot ignore.

Let’s talk again soon

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6 Aspects of a Successful Creative Process

6 Aspects of a Successful Creative Process

by | May 10, 2024 | Blog

1. Love the process. You must love the act of creating and not merely the idea of it, not merely the daydream of a completed work. Success is not guaranteed, although hard work can increase your odds and there is nothing wrong with ambition. But success usually comes slowly and rarely in the form people imagine. The overnight sensation is the exception that proves the rule. For most, the journey will be long and arduous, and if you do not love the nitty-gritty, warts-and-all experience of each step (or most of them), it’s probably not worth it.

2. Accept that most people’s creative process is neither linear or efficient. It can’t be formulated or followed as a series of definitive steps–do A then B then C; nor will it comply with a strict schedule. The energy that inspires creative work is capricious and meandering. It takes its time and will not be rushed. It veers off along unexpected byways and alleys, often carrying the mind back and forth in circles before revealing the true path ahead. This path will vary from project to project, from individual to individual. There may be friends (and enemies) to guide you along the way, but beware of anyone who claims to know a shortcut. In my experience, creative formulas (Write a Best Seller in 30 Days/The SECRET Trick All Artists Use to Get Famous etc.) result in formulaic, inauthentic work. Don’t rush yourself. Don’t admonish yourself for not being where you want to be as quickly as you’d hoped. All you can do is show up, do the work and let the process take its course.

3.Finish consistently. See the majority of your projects through to the end, no matter how long it takes. But don’t be masochistic, either. If something simply isn’t working for you, or isn’t working right now, then let it sit for a period. There is no point banging your head against a brick wall. However, if this proves a common experience, you might simply be giving up too easily. Check your motives. Am I switching projects because I genuinely feel I can’t take my current one any further, or am I simply running away because the work has become too difficult? Ultimately, you can only learn to finish by actually finishing. Get good at guiding work from conception through execution to meticulous revision, even if the end result doesn’t satisfy you. In many, if not most, disciplines, landing the ending is the hardest part.You’re going to have to face it at some point. 

4. Bearing in mind the second and third points above, calibrate your expectations. Look for a reasonable, but ambitious middle ground, rooted in your personal reality and the basic logistics of your material existence–how much time you have, how much energy, and what you can afford in terms of materials, etc. Consider all this honestly and commit to a realistic but rigorous course of action. Regardless of what you discover, you must make time to create–whether it be once a day or once a week, whether four hours or twenty minutes. Beg for time. Barter for space and solitude. Chances are this will require some degree of sacrifice. 

5. Spend time in self reflection. You will be unable to get a handle on the above points unless you are consistently pausing to examine your processes and motives, your ways of working and modes of thought. Time spent writing in a journal (for example) is not wasted. On the contrary, it is an essential part of your overall process. Without it, you will surely sleepwalk through the experience. However, beware procrastination. Periods of self reflection can easily become a way to avoid doing the actual work.

6. Finally, spend time learning. Explore advanced techniques. Research new artists, both inside and outside of your chosen medium. Push your skills and understanding forward in whatever ways suit you. Otherwise, you’re liable to stagnate or slip into a cycle of creating the same piece over and over. As with reflection, time spent learning is not wasted; but again, you should be wary of procrastination as you proceed. All of these ideas, and the creative life in general, emerge from balance. The best work emerges from a state of equilibrium, finding the middle ground between ecstasy and despair, love and hate, fear and confidence–all the eternal dichotomies that footnote objective truth. From a position of balance, you can examine the concepts that inspire you with absolute complexity and nuance.

 

Ultimately, the goal of any artist, I think, is to live in such a way that they can do what they love consistently, while steadily improving their skills and amassing a body of completed work they are proud of. Everything else is a bonus–success, recognition, a prolific output, whatever else pleases you; what are any of these really worth if you do not enjoy the journey? Rewards are fickle. The act of creating endures.

 

Inspiration

Inspiration

by | Apr 9, 2024 | Blog

Inspiration is an often talked-about phenomenon crucial to any exceptional creative enterprise. Beyond a basic dictionary definition, it can be difficult to elucidate and conceptualize, its objective qualities muddied by the experiences of divergent personalities in diverging fields–from science to business to the arts and beyond; not to mention the inherent complexities of individual temperament, inclination and personal taste. As such, there really are no objective qualities to the inspired state, which is so frequently invoked within the cultural landscape that it is now in danger of losing any concrete meaning, in many cases described only vaguely and with much conflation and interchangeability of terms. In this post, I offer a brief summary of inspiration as I have experienced it, aiming to provoke thought rather than inspire certainty.

In essence, inspiration constitutes a thought-state in which the creator can see their destination clearly, and is confident about the path ahead. They not only have plenty of “big ideas,” the kind that shape a coherent artistic vision, but are also able to conceive the sequence of smaller steps that will make their implementation possible. In a state of inspiration, every element of the creative process flows at once and in the same direction–towards the same singular vision, which is a unique extension of the artist’s consciousness or subconsciousness. They know what tools to use and how to use them; words fall easily into place, colors cohere, and once disparate notes harmonize in exactly the ways in which the creator imagined. To create exceptional work, an artist must learn to direct and modulate bursts of inspired energy, molding them to the particular contours of their particular project. Unless harnessed to precipitate an inspired state, hard work, talent and dedication will only take one so far.

By nature, inspiration is difficult to predict and impossible to command. It comes in brief but intense bursts, usually for reasons the artist cannot understand. In some mediums, poetry for example, or certain forms of drawing, song-writing or painting, the work can be completed during a single sustained period of inspiration, in a few hours or so, for example. However, even quickly-composed pieces usually require time to settle, and a period of extensive editing and revision, which may not allow for an additional burst of inspiration. In a broader context, such as the composition of an album, collection or gallery show, the artist will almost certainly require additional time to integrate all of their project’s constituent parts, creating a coherent composite of repeating themes, motifs and overarching style–all the qualities that distinguish the exceptional from the merely good. In longer format mediums such as a novel, riding waves of inspiration from start to finish is near impossible. The artist must find ways to work around the ebb and flow of their inspired state. To complicate matters further, the dynamics of inspiration vary dramatically from person to person, emerging from an essentially indecipherable interplay of personality, temperament, experience, study, dedication and emotion. With so much majesty, mystery and caprice, the laws governing the rhythms of inspiration can prove baffling to study and agonizing to work with. You can’t trigger, buy or barter for inspiration.

Yet, you can’t wait for it, either, can’t simply cross your fingers and hope tomorrow will be the day. Many a cycle of procrastination has emerged from the artist failing to feel inspired enough, frequently enough. This can prove the end of even a talented individual’s creative journey, as they come to mistake their lack of immediate inspiration for indifference or disinterest, for a lack of talent or passion. You cannot wait. If you work only when inspired, you’re in danger of going weeks, months or years without producing anything, without moving a project forward even incrementally. In my own often bitter experience this has meant losing the thread of a current project completely so that when inspiration finally does return, and I sit down to work again, my efforts end up re or misdirected, set off along dead end avenues or towards another destination entirely. This is a great way to amass a body of work that’s little more than a collection of dazzling fragments, parts of projects (usually beginnings), which go nowhere and mean nothing, although piece-by-piece they might be quite pretty.

When inspiration isn’t immediately available, you have to call for it, seek it out–coax it from the mysterious crooks and corners in which it likes to hide. For some, this is an almost mystical process, requiring meditation and sound baths and god-knows what else. For me, it’s as simple as working anyway, working no matter what. You show up at your desk or easel, or whichever other tool you happen to use, and you begin to create something. Hell, just go through the motions if you have to; just act as if. Do this for long enough, and inspiration inevitably returns. You’ll turn over the right rock, or locate the weakest part of the walls around your vision. You just have to be patient and consistent, committing to a practice of dedication, discipline and relentless vigilance. Inspiration emerges, or reemerges, from trial and error, from failure after failure. You must struggle through the hardest stages of the project when everything is ugly and nothing coheres. Things are not so ugly as you think, but for periods it will seem so.

Needless to say, this process can be agonizing. Inspiration won’t be rushed. It won’t explain itself, or relinquish its secrets. In the absence of an inspired state, self-doubt can easily step in to fill the vacuum. Fear takes over, and all sense of meaning and unity dissolves into frustration, leaving you with a terrible sense of isolation and loneliness, as if you are the only living speaker of a language nobody else understands. You cannot find a way to say what you need to say. For an artist, this kind of creative impotence is devastating. Of course, the nadir of most processes do not typically assume such drastic proportions, and more often than not the experience is one of slow, steady drudgery, of a chore or task you simply don’t want to do.

These periods of frustration and doubt are the inevitable lot of any active artist. To overcome them is to distinguish yourself as a working creative, to prove, if only to yourself, that you mean business. And while there is no quick fix for the problem, an attitude of persistence and tenacity will almost always ensure that the project survives. Working through uninspired periods becomes a skill in itself, something that you can hone and develop as part of your evolving creative process. With consistent effort, you will be able to better predict the ebb and flow of your own inspiration, coming to an advanced (although still incomplete) understanding of the forces that drive it. You will be able to identify those behaviors and conditions that nurture an inspired state, and those which are likely to prevent it. You will develop a potent guiding instinct, an abstract but powerful sense of creative direction, which ultimately becomes a facet of your personal style. This is intuition, not science. No book, blog post or video tutorial can teach you this skill. There are no cheat codes or fashionable hacks. Be wary of anyone who promises such things, for so-called shortcuts (Write a Bestseller in Thirty Days!) inevitably lead to the derivative and unremarkable. The mysteries of inspiration are particular to each individual, and only that individual can master them.

Mere competency is not enough.

Nowadays, I find that I am able to slip into some kind of inspired flow state for at least part of every session I commit to. Sometimes, this necessitates sitting through an hour or so of discomfort. Sometimes the necessary flow rushes around me as soon as I begin. Yet, even if several sessions go by before I finally find the right notes, I know by now that I am not merely banging my head against the wall. I know that I am slowly and surely cultivating an inspired environment, steadily building up to a cathartic moment of uninhibited expression. It will come. This is the faith required of any artist, an unshakable belief that there is something worth expressing somewhere within them, an energy beyond their control and comprehension.

As with any faith, the artist’s will be tested again and again, assailed on all sides by the opinions of others in a system that prizes instant, abundant mediocrity over a patient, singular vision. That inspired work should require time and effort to coax out is anathema to our culture of efficiency and productivity, to a society driven by schedules and bullet point plans. Every piece of the mechanism around us is designed to move energy effortlessly and lifelessly towards a single goal: to produce, sell and consume at the fastest possible rate. Art doesn’t work that way.

As I’ve said, the processes and patterns that govern inspiration will vary from person to person, but there are surely overlapping tendencies, and some people are more alike than others. Besides, disciplined consistent practice, it is imperative that you study the work of other artists, both within and without your discipline. Study philosophy. Study history. Immerse yourself in science. Bonus points for engaging with content typically outside of your comfort zone. You are not looking for complete solutions, but for tools to add to your kit, lines of inquiry and experimentation that might suit your particular situation. Let other people’s life and work guide, but not prescribe. Here are some other ways I’ve found to cultivate my own inspired state.

  • Free-writing and unstructured note-taking; writing out ideas in no particular order and without a preconceived plan; experimenting with free association. Even if I never look at these notes again, I find they might subtly dislodge certain blocks in my subconscious.

  • Consuming other art. I mentioned this above, but it bears repeating. Engage with your favorite work. Remind yourself why the hell you’re doing this in the first place.

  • Music: perhaps the most powerful tool I have. For me, no other artform operates on a level so close to pure inspiration, abstract and beyond reason. I make playlists for projects, characters, scenes–whatever. Then I listen.

  • Taking a break. Working hard is essential, but so is working smart. You’ll accomplish nothing by pushing yourself to breaking point or beyond. There will come a time when staring at your materials or fiddling with what you’ve already produced will provide diminishing returns, even if you haven’t yet met the daily goals your discipline demands. Your mind needs time to settle. The rest of your body needs to recharge. Once you’ve immersed yourself in a project for enough time, your subconscious will begin to work on it even when your conscious attention is elsewhere. Give it an opportunity to do its thing. Take up another activity. Sleep. Stare out the window. Walk. Eat. Hard work is not self-destruction, no matter how tragic and romantic that notion might seem. Inspiration needs a body, and a body needs food, water and exercise. Let the depths of your mind keep working when its surface cannot.

These are just suggestions, of course–the things I did today, which I won’t necessarily do tomorrow. They may help you. They may not. The important thing is that you are striving to create conditions favorable to an inspired mindset, and not simply waiting for it to come to you. In the end, your process will be its own kind of mystery, a puzzle unique to your mind, and which only your mind can decipher. The rewards are worth it, not only to create work you can be proud of, but to find through that same work a way to speak to others in a language beyond any rational understanding. In a state of inspiration you encounter the central paradox of creative enterprise: that by discovering something so singular that only you could have produced it, you are at the same time touching the shared substance at the heart of Everything.

In parting, here’s a little something from an artist who really, truly loved what he did:

This is ecstacy, and behind the ecstacy is something which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern–to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. [Nabokov, Speak Memory, 139].

Resistance

Resistance

by | Mar 15, 2024 | Blog

I enjoy doing creative things. I like to write. I like the process. I like having a finished product in my hands, something I can show to friends and family, or even send out into the world, hoping for wider publication. I feel the same way about photo and film projects. I’d go so far as to say these things are my passion. They give me a warm, wiggly feeling deep inside. At times, my reaction is close to what I imagine a “spiritual experience” might be for those inclined towards such things, a deep-dive panoramic sense of some greater cosmic truth, which peels away the curtain of drudgery to reveal a silvery, white-heat core just out of reach at the heart of things.

The point is, I’m drawn to create as more than just a pastime. It’s something I feel encoded in my DNA with an almost mystical imperative. Why then, do I often have to drag myself to the page or camera? Why is it that more often or not, it’s agony to get started on what I love doing. Why do I dread it, skirt around it, avoid beginning at all costs? It’s not laziness–at least as far as I can tell. I’ve examined this possibility quite carefully, and to the best of my ability to self-analyze, I don’t see much evidence of indolence. I don’t spend my time vegging out. My procrastinations tends to the take the form of skirting around a project, rather than relaxing entirely, fiddling with this and that, but not getting anything done. I think I’m pretty driven, overall, and tasked with doing something definite by a third part, especially if it involves a deadline, I have no problem going all in.

So, it’s not laziness.

I used to think it was entirely self-doubt–crippling, complete, soul-crushing self doubt on a pathological scale. But again, looking closer at the issue, I see that self-doubt is only part of it. Yes, one of the obstacles to engaging in anything creative is the fear that what we produce won’t be good enough, won’t stand up against other people’s work; that our ideas are feeble and uninteresting, our technique unremarkable. Yet, the difficulty doesn’t seem to emerge from self-doubt alone. Over time, I’ve been able to work on my confidence levels. I’ve been able to accept that I’m at the very least good enough, and what I produce isn’t so hopelessly inferior as to preclude its mere existence.

And yet the reluctance persists.

My mind vibrates with a thousand excuses, each more inventive than the last. Like a game of psychic whack-a-mole, I deal with one delusion only to find another one popping up to take its place. This idea will never sell, is a common one. It’s a good concept, but not publishable. Go ahead and work on something new. Yes, sometimes the problem is simply “shiny object” syndrome–a tendency to be seduced by the promise of a new project at that exciting beginning phase when everything is pure potential.

There are other excuses too, but ultimately, they add up to a single force of resistance, which is more than the sum of its constituent parts, an evolving barrier that mutates like a virus in the artist’s mind. This force is able to outmaneuver whatever reasons you deploy against it, always one step ahead of your desire, ever evading your self-will. In its absolute purity, it feels almost spiritual in nature, a spiritual affliction, something beyond reason. It is the energy of non-being against the impulse to be, entropy versus order, stagnation opposed to creation. Some essential aspect of reality, encoded in the collective consciousness of human experience, actively opposes anything good–anything inclined to add something to the world, to contribute to the lifeblood of positive culture.

If this is indeed the case, the remedy, naturally, will be existential or spiritual (depending on your belief system). In other words, it will require a response beyond reason, which transcends chains of logic. The energy of resistance won’t be reasoned with. It won’t listen to you. and so the response must be conceptually abstract, an instinctual priming of spirit against nothingness, which is more akin to attuning to a field of vibrations than it is to following an exercise regime or sequence of self help steps that prescribe A followed by B. You don’t defeat the resistance, or remove it in any meaningful way. You absorb it, let it run through you and out the other side in ways that prevent it from inflicting the damage it wants to inflict–to prevent you from working.

All this sounds terribly mystical, I know. for someone dedicated to reasonable explanation, I increasingly find myself confounded by my own unreason, made dizzy by a reality that refuses to conform to the contours of common human thought. We must, it seems, become increasingly uncommon. Our reason will only take us so far.

Ultimately, I can’t offer a final solution to the problem of resistance, and will likely end hashing it out in different ways in different articles. I have some sense of a solution, I suppose, but no language to describe it in a series of steps. Close your eyes and breathe. Go anyway. Just do whatever you’re trying to do, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Yet, these half-formed solutions are hardly adequate given the sheer scale of the problem before us (and I know well that i’m not the only one to face crippling creative resistance).

For now, I will keep working, and take what little victories I can. I anticipate revising these paragraphs will require quite a bit of self-will and effort.

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