What if the obstacles to our creativity are actually our greatest resources?
Over the past several months, I’ve made a habit of asking parents in creative fields how children changed their work. It’s a question asked mostly out of self-interest: I’m currently working on my second book (my first came out earlier this year) and, as I write this, I am 37 weeks pregnant with my first child.
Invariably, the parents I talk to speak of the difficulty of juggling their creative output with the demands of day-to-day life — the childcare, the family obligations, the day jobs, the million big and little things that make up a typical chaotic existence. It’s a worry shared by everyone pursuing some sort of creative work, with or without children: How do we find that balance between creativity and everything else?
It’s a worry that used to consume me, too. After all, doom-and-gloomers throughout the ages have proclaimed the incompatible aims of family and art. “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” the English literary critic and father Cyril Connolly infamously warned.
But after looking at the lives of lots of different creative people, I’ve realized that balance — the separate maintenance of two distinct parts of life — isn’t the most fruitful thing to strive for.
Take your life as it is
Anne Truitt was in a crisis. The artist had recently separated from her husband and had three young children when she unexpectedly lost her studio space. Suddenly, as she recalls in her 1982 book Daybook, she had no studio, no money to rent one, and, disastrously for a working sculptor, no way to make her sculptures.
One day shortly after the crisis hit, exhausted by panic, Truitt sat down on her front step to think and had a revelation: “It occurred to me that I might regard being deprived of a studio as a present,” she writes. “I began to entertain the idea that, if I looked upon it as such, I could turn myself into it instead of away from it. By the time I got up from the step, I had decided to make drawings in my living room on the white table I had used to change the children on when they were babies. The clear, tranquil sanity of adjustment to reality floated me into peace of mind.”
In her memoir, Truitt calls this adjustment “the principle of reverse solutions” — the idea that working backward from an unchangeable reality can yield new insight. It transformed not only her artistic practice but her approach to creative problem-solving.
It’s a heartening thought: What if the things we see as obstacles to our creativity are, in fact, creativity’s greatest resource?
The power of less
It’s a widely held misconception that abundant time, space, and money are prerequisites for great creativity. The idea is baked into Western history, which is chock-full of great moments of discovery that occurred amid aimless repose. Newton suddenly understood gravity after passing time beneath an apple tree. Archimedes discovered that displacement of water was an accurate measure of volume as he lazed in the bath. Unable to crack the code on flight, the Wright brothers finally declared it wouldn’t happen for 50 years. Then, able to innovate with a distant deadline, they figured it out in two.
Plenty of research, however, suggests that these examples are exceptions, rather than evidence of a rule. One study out of the University of Amsterdam, for example, found that intractable problems open our minds to look at the “big picture,” encouraging connections between unlike things. This ability is called “global processing,” and it is the hallmark of creativity.
And with fewer resources, as the organizational psychologist Scott Sonenshein writes in his book, Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less — and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined, we’re incentivized to view what we have more expansively, using whatever is available in novel ways. The less we have to work with, in other words, the more easily the ideas flow.
Creative constraints
Any restriction — materials, point of view, word count — can be a tool of inspiration. We’re all familiar with the creative constraint of time known as a deadline (without which I would still be thinking about this piece rather than writing it).
As another example, consider a flabby creative writing prompt instructing a student: “Write about a meaningful time in your life.” Where do you even begin with a question that big?
A tighter and thus more promising constraint invites the student to write about a summer job, and the memories — of the itchy polyester Dairy Queen uniform, the crackle of the drive-thru headset, the smell of Oreos and soft serve, the pockmarked cheek of a condescending manager — flow forth.
So rather than waiting for some mythic stretch of undisturbed time and seclusion in a room of one’s own, what if we embraced our constraints? What if we used the fragmented, cacophonous reality of our lives as a prompt to create right now, within whatever crazy conditions life currently offers? You have 20 minutes of no obligations: Go, make whatever you can.
The mundane becomes material
The writer Tillie Olsen recalls in her 1962 talk “Silences” (later published in an essay collection with the same name) that she wrote in “stolen moments,” and “snatches of time,” including the bus ride to her job at a dairy equipment company — even when there was no seat available.
“It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began, ‘I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron,’” she writes.
More recently, the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,” offered pieces — sometimes a single sentence in length — that reckon with divided time and attention, as in the two-page “On Interruptions.”
“There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me (truly you have not lived until you have changed one baby’s diaper while another baby quietly vomits on your shin),” she writes, ”[and] I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion.”
If life is not an intrusion, then it can be the foundation of our work. Art emerges from direct contact with the fullness of life, not withdrawal from it.
There is no balance
As often as the creative parents I speak to sigh about their challenges, they also speak of the benefits that have emerged from the chaos. Improved work habits. A deepening of their work. The ability to be more inventive, dauntless, resourceful. And research backs this up: Studies have shown, for example, that motherhood changes women’s brains to make them more creative.
Of all the conversations I’ve had on this subject, I think most often of the one with a platinum-haired poet I admire. She talked of sometimes writing and sometimes playing with blocks on the floor, how one informed and flowed into the other. When I asked about balancing art and motherhood, she shrugged: “Life is not a mathematical equation.”
I replayed that moment as I walked home later that night, momentarily mistaking a streetlight for the full moon. Of course she was right. I know that quantifiable data can’t answer all our questions. That’s why we make art, after all — within whatever creative constraints we call our own.
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December 19, 2019 at 07:09PM
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