Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.
When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: “But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?”
Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don’t.
So let’s start.
—Julia Cameron in her 1992 book, The Artist's Way.
Cameron writes that “By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.” Hey, it’s a foot in the door. Want to learn to create art? Congrats! But be prepared for your earliest efforts to suck very badly. Which isn’t the end of the world, though. Get on the board, create something, and then analyze what’s bad about it, what you could do differently, and then immediately begin your next project. And then perform the same analysis on that, and keep going. You can find the earliest recordings by the Beatles on YouTube, and they’re pretty bad. But I guarantee you that they analyzed their efforts very critically, in an effort to improve.
Beyond those initial baby steps, for many struggling artists, keeping going, and cranking out new work is the real challenge. In his 2002 book, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield (the author of the 1995 novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was adapted into a 2000 movie directed by Robert Redford and starring Will Smith and Matt Damon), focuses on overcoming what he calls capital-R Resistance:
Look in your own heart. Unless I’m crazy, right now a still, small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times before, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And unless I’m crazy, you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.
You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.
Heh, indeed, as we like to say at our sister site, Instapundit.
Riding with the Kings
Creating any sort of art involves learning new skills and improving them. To build on the quote from Julia Cameron at the top of this article about learning how to “play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play,” definitely ignore the following advice if you’re about to start teaching at Cambridge or you’re an established historian. But one way for a novice to shortcut some of that learning is to start by slavishly imitating your heroes. Paul McCartney learned to sing by copying Little Richard. David Bowie impersonated Anthony Newley on a lot of his early songs. On The Who’s first album, Roger Daltrey was doing a bad James Brown impersonation, before developing his own unique style.
Keith Richards taught himself the electric guitar by endlessly playing Chuck Berry riffs, and by the end of the ‘60s, he was playing Chuck Berry better than Chuck Berry was playing Chuck Berry at the time. (Berry himself developed his idiosyncratic playing style by adapting to the guitar phrases played by his original piano player, Johnnie Johnson.) Eric Clapton learned to play guitar by studying the Kings – Freddie, Albert, and B.B. King. Stevie Ray Vaughan could do note-for-note covers of Jimi Hendrix’s songs. Wynton Marsalis publicly feuded with Miles Davis throughout the 1980s over the latter abandoning his trademark cool jazz to become a jazz-rock fusion artist cashing in by opening up for rock bands in stadiums, but I’ll bet you that he cut his teeth learning every note Miles played on Kind of Blue.
This works for writing as well. In his 1995 book Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, P.J. O’Rourke noted that writing for the National Lampoon in the 1970s meant that “we parodied every type and style of prose. To do this it was necessary for us to understand the construction and workings of the objects of ridicule. My job was that of an aspiring watchmaker disassembling a fine timepiece. There I was with a thing of value and beauty, pulling it apart, ruining it for everyone, scattering small, useless springs and gears of irony and derision all over the literary workbench, and ... Perhaps I should go back to the National Lampoon and study metaphor.”
Separate Creating and Editing
Once you’ve gone past slavishly imitating your heroes, it’s good to separate creating and editing and polishing, all which, for many mediums, is so much easier on a computer than an analog device. (I envy the consummate skill of writers who used manual typewriters and correction fluid, but I have absolutely no desire to go back to the pre-Microsoft Word era.) When I write an article, I try to let the initial ideas flow out as much as possible, and only when I’ve got a fair amount of text on the page, do I go back and edit and structure the piece via cut and paste.
When I’m in the project studio and starting to record a new song, invariably, I begin by setting up a drum beat and just jamming on a guitar or a keyboard with a variety of ideas. Once those initial ideas are recorded, then I can go back and cut and paste the best bits into a structure.
I don’t know if Stephen Pressfield read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way before writing The War of Art, but his book is sort of the macho version of Cameron’s more introspective and delicate approach. But both offer an entry portal into a world of creativity. For example, I loved Pressfield’s take on “imposter syndrome,” which seemingly everyone in Hollywood suffers from:
Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
While Cameron has all sorts of woo-woo methods to inspire creativity, and Pressfield is obsessed with overcoming capital-R “Resistance,” both agree that creating art is a way of channeling God, whom Cameron dubs “the Great Creator.” “Place this sign in my workplace: Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality,” Cameron wrote.
One way to increase that quantity is to use computers and smartphones to archive raw material for ideas. In his 2019 book Song Journey: A Hit Songwriter’s Guide Through the Process, the Perils, and the Payoff of Writing Songs for a Living, Mark Cawley wrote:
What if you don’t have access to co-writers? I’m going to talk more about co-writing later, but one of the best things you can do is the same thing I’ve done since I started writing songs: look for lines and titles. These lines and titles may not always be the big idea; in fact, they might not end up as titles at all but could just end up being a line in your verse or bridge. It’s a simple idea but so worth it. Here are my top three ways to find them:
1. Bookstores. I know, they’re getting harder to find. Libraries can work just about as well. Walk up and down every aisle. You’re not looking to read a novel on this trip; you’re looking to find a title that jumps out at you enough to where you’d want to pull the book down and read the back. Don’t. Just add the title to your list and stay on the hunt.
For the past 25 years or so, whenever I come across a great title or phrase in a book or magazine article, I copy and paste it into a new Note in Microsoft Office. Similarly, I frequently use the Voice Memos app on my iPhone to record new ideas for riffs and chord progressions via an unplugged electric guitar. The quality of this initial recording doesn’t matter; it’s just a means of getting the first draft of ideas down quickly. Between lyric ideas in Outlook Notes, and music I’ve recorded in Voice Memos, I’ve got raw material to fall back on when I’m starting to record something new in my project studio, even if those initial lyrics and/or music will be entirely transformed via rewrites as I’m going along.
You Gotta Know the Territorial Imperative
The project studio dovetails into a topic that Pressfield explores in The War of Art. He argues that territory is far more important than hierarchy for an artist, which is consistent with his philosophy that you’ve got to put in the work. As he wrote in 2002, “Stevie Wonder’s territory is the piano. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s is the gym. When Bill Gates pulls into the parking lot at Microsoft, he’s on his territory. When I sit down to write, I’m on mine.”
I think that’s true of a lot of artists. In the 1970s, when The Who weren’t on the road and smashing up hotel rooms, Pete Townshend was in his home studio, “writing” new songs for them in the form of demo tapes where he played all the instruments. That same decade, Stanley Kubrick converted multiple rooms of his newly purchased country home in England to workspaces where he could plan, write, and edit his films.
Given that it’s the 21st century, the “territory” could be entirely mobile. If you’re a writer, a laptop or Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad can go anywhere. For a guitarist, an unplugged electric guitar and the Voice Notes app on an iPhone or iPad is enough to begin a song, and that’s an entirely portable pair of devices. Beyond that, a musician may need an acoustically treated environment in which to record. In any case, focusing on territory rather than what level you fit into what Tom Wolfe called the “statusphere” is vitally important to staying sane.
“Weber’s theory of status was something new,” [Wolfe] says. “It replaced the idea of class systems. When Marx wrote about classes, he was really thinking about England. He was sitting there in the British Library with England’s classes all around him. But it never has been a good way to look at the United States.
“After I discovered Max Weber,” he recalls, “I began to think sociology was the king of the subjects.”
Wolfe’s refinement was what he calls the “statusphere.” Everyone isn’t directly competing for status with everyone else; rather, they pursue status within a distinct sphere — and regard their own statusphere as the best of all.
“That has more or less been my system of approaching any subject,” Wolfe says. “For instance, ‘The Right Stuff’ is not a book about space, it’s a book about status competition among pilots.”
Today, no less than in Wolfe’s grad-school days, the lure of what Weber termed “status honor” is all around us. If anything, the age of the Internet has opened up frontiers of status competition undreamed-of half a century ago. Thanks to social media, people edit — sorry, “curate” — versions of their lives to friends and strangers and compete for a dopamine-releasing tally of “likes.” And did Victorian England have anything on modern social media in its capacity for enforcing social conformism through shaming?
Whereas humans working at the peak of their abilities can create art, AI can near-instantaneously create “product.” ChatGPT’s DALL-E image creation software can create just about anything typed into its prompt. Social media is increasingly filled with AI images and video, and that video is increasingly narrated by an Ai-created voice. Last December, L.A.-based music producer and prolific YouTuber Warren Huart (whose guide to recording we reviewed in July of 2023) said that he knows rock bands who are using the Suno AI songwriting app to generate songwriting ideas, and then play over the Suno-generated parts with their own instruments. Effectively Suno creates the first draft of the demo, the band records over it, and then overdubs additional parts to flesh the track out.
That sounds like cheating to me. Especially in an era of rapidly proliferating AI, it’s incredibly rewarding to say that you created, or helped to create something yourself, something from your own mind and fingers, with no input from an artificial intelligence program. Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way can you help take the initial steps to doing just that.
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