Unleashing the Artist Within

Breaking through Blocks and Restoring Creative Purpose

Eric Maisel

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780486846354
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Maisel intimately understands the anxieties of the creative process and the psychological landscape that artists inhabit. Strong on the psychology, he is equally strong on practicalities." — The Writer Magazine Are you a painter, writer, actor, dancer, musician, or would-be creative? Are you stuck in the process of creating and sharing your art?
In Unleashing the Artist Within, Eric Maisel, PhD offers lessons, anecdotes, and real-life case studies that will help you unlock your creative powers. Dr. Maisel focuses on the reality of artistic development, explaining that unfinished and disappointing works are not a matter of personal weakness or unfortunate circumstances; they are simply daily occurrences in the lives of imaginative people. His twelve lessons demonstrate how to recover from dashed hopes and restore lost meaning. Helpful exercises show how to work through the process, managing the daily grind and pushing past everyday resistance.

Chapter 1

EMBRACING THE REALITIES OF PROCESS

The creative process is harder to tolerate and therefore harder to embrace than most people—the majority of creatives included—imagine, for a variety of reasons.

Only a percentage of the work that we do turns out well. And only a percentage of that percentage is really excellent. This means that we have many “failed” efforts to endure, including countless mediocre works that may pass muster in the world but that don’t thrill us much, internally count for much, or do such good a job of keeping the meaningfulness of creating afloat.

The creative process involves making one choice after another. (For instance, “Should I send my character here or should I send him there?”) and the activity of choosing provokes anxiety. Just about every decision we make—say about buying this car or that car, changing our day job or staying put, accepting this not-very-fair gallery contract or rejecting it—produces anxiety, and the creative process is nothing but and exactly an endless series of choices. Given all that choosing—and given that, as a rule, we do not really love the experience of choosing—it’s easy to see why you might not want to turn to your novel or your symphony as soon as you wake up.

The creative process involves going into the unknown, which can prove scary, especially if where we are going is into the recesses of our own psyche or to the place of reexperiencing trauma. Say that you are certain that you want to set a play during the Holocaust, but do you really want to spend hour after hour writing about Nazi torturers and their victims? Do you really want to be in that interrogation room? Your play may demand that you go there, but how likely is it that you actually will go there or be able to tolerate the experience once you are there?

The task we are setting ourselves—unraveling this scientific knot, creating that full-scale opera—may be beyond our intellectual or technical capabilities or may require information and understanding that we don’t currently possess. Each individual’s creative process is constrained by what he or she knows or can know.

The thing called “inspiration,” which is one of the great joys of process and without which our work would prove lifeless, comes only periodically and can’t be produced on demand. We must show up for what may prove days, weeks, months, and even years of slogging along with our creative project before a single brilliant ray of sunshine enlivens it and illuminates what we’re doing. That is an idea that is very hard to tolerate—and even harder to tolerate as a reality.

The above is a fraction of the longer list of reasons why tolerating the creative process can prove so daunting and why fully embracing the realities of process can elude us. Most creatives do not grasp the extent to which this demanding process is itself stymieing them. They chalk up the fact that their novel remains unfinished to personal weakness or to their unfortunate circumstances and do not credit the reality of process as the real culprit.

The creative process can feel so daunting for a variety of reasons: not everything creatives attempt will turn out beautifully, many efforts will turn out ordinary, and a significant number will prove flat-out not very good. A composer writes a hit Broadway musical, and the next one is abysmal. No one can believe it’s the same person! A novelist pens a brilliant first novel, and the second one is unreadable. What a disappointment! A physicist comes thisclose to a breakthrough but doesn’t break through, rendering his several years of work “worthless.” How demoralizing! These are everyday occurrences in the lives of creatives and the rule rather than the exception. How to stay calm in the face of this?

What to do? Of course, you must do everything required to make the work good, including getting quiet, showing up, honestly appraising, and all the rest. But in addition to all that, you must maturely accept the reality of missteps, mistakes, messes, lost weeks (and even lost years), and unhappy outcomes. To help with this effort, do the following: hang a still life painting of a bowl of apricots on a wall in the room that is your mind. Have that bowl be filled with gorgeous, ripe apricots and also with mottled, discolored, overripe apricots. The reason for installing this painting and the lesson from this painting? That you must calmly and gracefully take the bad with the good.

Romantic painters not understanding the point of this lesson would make sure to paint only gorgeous apricots. Likewise, superrealist painters in preparing their still life would pick only the best apricots to include, unless they were intending to make a point about decay. Virtually no painters, past or present, would fill their bowl with beautiful and rotten apricots. That goes against our ingrained ideas about beauty and about what a painting is “supposed to do.” The painting you hang in the room that is your mind, however, is not being hung there for its beauty.

It is being hung there to remind you about the reality of process. It is being hung there to remind you that you must take the bad with the good as you create. It is being hung there to remind you to be your most mature self, the “you” who understands that you are bound to produce work all along the spectrum from lousy to brilliant and back again. This mature acceptance, once you really accept it, is deeply calming.

Among his hundreds of cantatas, Bach’s most famous cantata is number 140. His top ten would likely be composed of numbers 4, 12, 51, 67, 80, 82, 131, 140, 143, and 170. What about the other hundreds? Are some merely workmanlike and unmemorable? Yes. Are others not very interesting at all? Yes. Was Bach obliged to live with that reality? Yes. As must you. Yes, you might completely by accident produce a brilliant first thing and then never try again and so ensure your success rate at 100 percent. But is that a way to live a life? Or, rather, is that the perfect way to avoid living?

Hang a painting of a bowl of apricots filled with lovely ripe apricots and quite unlovely overripe apricots in a prominent place on one of the walls in the room that is your mind. It is not there to reprimand you, chastise you, or discourage you. Rather, it is there to remind you about the reality of process, a reality that no human being can escape or evade. Every once in a while, when your creative or intellectual work is going poorly or when you’ve created something that fails to meet your standards, stand in front of that painting, sigh, and murmur, “Process.”

Honoring and embracing the realities of process and calmly living with those realities are choices you get to make. The word to underline in that sentence? Calmly. Anxiety is a natural feature of the human condition and a much larger feature than most people realize. A great deal of what we do in life we do in order to reduce our experience of anxiety or to avoid the experience of anxiety. Because life can feel dangerous in all sorts of ways—from walking down a dark alley to giving a two-minute talk at work—and because anxiety is a feature of our warning system that alerts us to danger, anxiety is a prominent feature of daily life.

It also is a very prominent feature of the creative process. When I ask you to embrace the realities of the creative process, I also am asking you to embrace the reality of anxiety as a prominent feature of that process. You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious. No, you want to manage that anxiety, or if it can’t quite be managed beautifully, then create while anxious. What you don’t want to get in the habit of doing is avoiding the creative encounter because of your anxious feelings. You know that you don’t want that to be your way of dealing with the everyday, ordinary anxiety that attaches to process.

Creativity is the word we use for our desire to make use of our inner resources; employ our imagination; knit together our thoughts and our feelings into beautiful things like songs, quilts, or novels; and feel like the hero of our own story. It is the way that we manifest our potential, make use of our intelligence, and embrace what we love. When we create, we feel whole, useful, and devoted. You don’t want your experience of anxiety to prevent you from having all that. The anxiety that is such a prominent feature of human nature can and does prevent us from creating. Now is the time to come to a deep acceptance of that truth.

Why do we get so anxious around creating? There are many reasons. We get anxious because we fear we may fail, because we fear we may disappoint ourselves, because the work can be extremely hard, because the marketplace may criticize us and reject us. We want to create because that is a wonderful thing to do, but we also don’t want to create so as to spare ourselves all that anxiety. That is the profound dilemma that confronts and afflicts countless smart, sensitive, creative souls. And, as a result, most creatives spend a lot of time defensively avoiding creating.

Our quite human defensiveness is one of the primary ways that we try to avoid experiencing anxiety. We deny what we’re experiencing; try to rationalize away what we’re experiencing; misname what we’re experiencing as sickness, weakness, or confusion; get angry at our mate so as to have something else to focus on. We are very tricky creatures in this regard. It would be good if we did a much better job of frankly accepting that we are feeling anxious and then managing those feelings. That would give us a much better shot at tolerating the anxieties that come with the creative process. But most people are more inclined to react defensively than forthrightly when it comes to anxiety.

What should creatives do instead of fleeing the encounter or managing their anxiety in ineffective or unhealthy ways (say, by using alcohol to calm their nerves)? They should:

Acknowledge and accept that anxiety is a regular feature of the process.

Assert that they won’t allow anxiety to derail them or silence them.

Demand of themselves that they practice and learn effective anxiety management skills.

It is too big a shame not to create if creating is what you long to do. The thing to do instead is to become an anxiety expert and get on with your creating. What can help in addition to mastering anxiety management skills? Create an anxiety vow in which you pledge not to let anxiety silence you. Your vow might sound something like this: “I will create, even if creating provokes anxiety in me. When it does provoke anxiety, I will manage it through the use of the anxiety management skills I am learning and practicing.” Or you might prefer the shorter, crisper “Bring it on!”

Since both creating and not creating produce anxiety, you might as well embrace the fact that anxiety will accompany you on your journey as a creative person. Just embracing that reality will release a lot of the ambient anxiety that you feel. Return to your current project right now with a new willingness to accept the reality of anxiety. Since anxiety accompanies both states—both creating and not creating—isn’t it the case that you might as well choose creating?

Draft after Draft

One spring I found myself in London presenting at the First World Congress fo...