whether I am having a breakdown—or a breakthrough. It is, of course, the music itself that holds the answer, and I have found that the music received in such a sudden and cataclysmic way does indeed have surpassing beauty to recommend it.
Far more often, creativity is a less dramatic, more daily affair. Inspiration comes not in bolts, but in inklings. Usually I hear music a few notes at a time, as though I am being led gently down a garden path, following a trail of notes. It is nice when creativity is so friendly and inviting. And most of the time, for most of us, it is. Our folklore, of course, is filled with dramatic stories. We hear of first drafts scribbled down in days. We hear of music that visited like a sudden fever. These stories are just stories, and we like them for their drama, but they are not the norm. Just as on many days the rainfall comes in gentle sheets with lightning far away, and on many days you can walk the sage fields without once spotting a snake.
My first musical, Avalon, struck me like lightning. I had never "heard" music before, and suddenly it was flooding through me in great surges. By the time Magellan came to me, I knew enough to tell my worried husband, "It's just music. Don't worry." When The Medium at Large landed as a rapid and sudden set of songs, I knew enough to eat and sleep—as well as write them down. When lightning strikes creatively, it is very important that we keep our grounding, that we remember that as important as the work seems, we, too, are important and must be cared for. It is romantic nonsense to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of art. A lack of sleep, a lack of food, a lack of companionship—all of these heighten our already heightened state. A lack of sleep induces psychosis, and we do not need that, we need art. Friends and families can be warned that
we are in the creative rapids and reassured that as the name suggests, such rapids will pass rapidly. Just as a well-built house has lightning rods for grounding, we as artists can choose among our friends those who are able to encompass the surges of creativity that sometimes come to us. "I'm in the rapids," we might say. "Are you sleeping? Remember to eat," our friend might reply. With practice, we can sleep, and we do eat. With faith, we remember that the bolt of inspiration was strong enough to leave a lasting imprint, and that we will be strong enough to carry our vision fully to fruition. It needn't all be done at once. Even a rainstorm can continue to pelt down after the lightning has passed.
Local Co lor
SUDDEN INSPIRATION
Try this: When sudden inspiration hits us, we may be shaken and doubt our own ability to follow through. It is at times like this that we need the encouragement of an elder mentor. It is possible, and useful, to access a wise mentor. To do this, set aside one half hour. Take pen in hand and write yourself a letter of encouragement, using the persona of an older and wiser and admired artist. You may wish to mail yourself this letter.
On the high mountain ridges, dark conifers stand stark sentinels against the sky. Taos is in the high desert, and within its reaches it holds five vegetation zones, ranging from desert to alpine. Lilacs flourish here, but so do cacti. Tulips, peonies, and jonquils thrive, but so do chamiso and sage. Just as the vegetation zones vary wildly as you gain altitude, climbing from the valley lowlands to Wheeler Peak, so, too, do the townspeople present a colorful and varied mix. Of course they do—there is a very high proportion of declared artists among them, and many others practice creativity in some form. Your short-order chef at the hot dog stand may be a novelist, your housepainter may be an acclaimed portraitist. There's no stigma in Taos to having a day job—sometimes several. The economy is poor, the beauty of the landscape rich, and people make their peace between the two.
Novelist John Nichols lives in a tumbledown adobe sheltered by a small stand of aspen. Sunflowers tower along his garden fence. Nichols makes his way around town by bicycle and battered truck. An award-winning writer, he is as whimsical and particular as any of his creations.
Sculptor Kevin Cannon lives in an ancient adobe with tiny odd-size rooms. His studio windows are hung with muslin to prevent him from being distracted by the dazzling views. Cannon works in leather. His sculptures are collected internationally. Like
Nichols, he favors a bicycle for his trips to the post office. For his drives to Santa Fe, he uses a well-kept vintage Volvo in a red the color of sangria.
Novelist Natalie Goldberg lives in an exotic underground house called an "earth ship." Hers is located amid sage fields out on the mesa, and she must use a fine wire mesh on her chimney lest she be visited in her home by curious rabbits and snakes. Goldberg prefers walking to any other mode of transportation. She has a car, a used Subaru, for the long drive into town, but once there, she parks and travels by foot.
As these few examples show, Taos is a bouquet of varied artists. A cocktail party in Taos, or an art show opening, displays a rogue's gallery of colorful archetypes. Sometimes I think the town is like a scientific experiment, a hothouse environment in which artists grow and flourish. According to our mythology, artists are distant creatures, unable to mix well socially. This is not my experience. In Taos, artists are Joe Citizen, turning out to clean the ditches on Ditch Day. Many artists are themselves gardeners. Goldberg's house features a solar underground garden illuminated by wild-flowers. Painter Peter Ziminsky paints entire landscapes in his day job as a landscape architect.
Taos is a chockablock community. Zoning laws are nearly nonexistent—a half-million-dollar adobe villa may adjoin a double-wide house trailer. A log cabin may abut a house made of recycled Coke bottles and tires. Malcolm Brown's house surges like a ship's prow above the valley meadows. The Double D Ranch looks like a frontier town from the outside but features a sushi restaurant and artificially cantilevered waterfalls for showers. Since the days of the original painters who settled Taos, creativity has been expressed in
myriad ways. Mabel Dodge Luhan tinted the wooden vigas of her ceiling in rainbow hues. Leon Gaspard, a Russian, managed to give his adobe villa a Russian flavor. Sometimes Taosenos joke about their diversity. Violin maker Charles Erwin lives on a ranch the size of a taco chip. "Medicine Dog Ranch," his homestead is dubbed, named for Ervin's distinctive pack of guard dogs.
In Taos, a Hollywood set designer might do the scenery for a high school play. An Oscar-nominated screenwriter might participate at an open mic poetry event. Halloween is the community's favorite holiday, and costumes appear everywhere, from Wal-Mart to the Chevron station. Fathers dress as vampires, mothers go to town as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. There is a festivity inherent in all this creativity, a gentle sense of permission pervading the town. It is as though the community logo is "anything goes—and let's see what you come up with." Like the five vegetation zones blooming side by side, Taos is a demonstration that creativity creates a human garden.
The Longer View
LOCAL COLOR
Try this: Each of us is colorful and unique. Each of us displays our creativity by the choices we make. Some choices are more relevant than others. They seem to sum up, or embody, our value system. Take pen in hand and number from 1 to 5. List five choices that you are proud of, choices that seem quintessentially you. For example:
I danced center on kickline in college
I helped my sibling financially during a
divorce
I mote and published a short-story collection
I stood up to the classroom bully
I got sober and made sobriety my priority
Set aside another half hours time. Pen in hand, explore just what it was about each choice that seemed so important and particular to you. Is there a choice you can now make that would fill you with pride and satisfaction?
The forest fires that stormed across the Southwest, burning large stretches through Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, have been contained. Strong rains have come and rinsed clear the smoke-and soot-laden atmosphere. Now you can see distance. In Taos Valley, mountain range upon mountain range unfolds to the east, north, and south. To the west, a vast mesa studded with sage stretches to a far h
orizon, also marked by a range of mountains.
The ability to see distance is critical to a creative career. We must always bear in mind that each day's work is part of a larger body of work, and that body of work is the work of a lifetime. Unless we are able to take and maintain this long view, we are apt to be derailed by any rejection. One discouraging letter, and the novel goes into a drawer, never to be submitted again. One surly gallery owner, and our canvases get retired to the garage, never again to make the rounds. "What's the use," we may say, and stop writing or painting. Artists are easily bruised. This is why we retain agents and dealers to handle our rejection for us. I once shared a literary agent with William Kennedy, the author of Iron-weed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Our agent told me he submitted Ironweed fifty times before he had a bite. Was Kennedy any less a writer while those rejections were unfurling? No. Being published, being in a gallery, or being currently employed as an actor
does not make us a "real" artist. Doing the work does—showing up at the page, the easel, the rehearsal hall, and putting in our hours.
Seen in the long view, one stinging rejection does not unmake a career. But the long view can be hard to hold on to by ourselves. I have published several books, well reviewed and well received, that initially met with discouragement. "No one would read The Artist's Way," I was told, a prediction that was off by about two million readers. "This book would ruin your career," I was told about Popcorn, sl well-thought-of collection of short stories. My crime novel, The Dark Room, also met with dire predictions, only to sell well and receive good reviews. In each of these circumstances, I relied on my Believing Mirrors to cheer me through the acute depression that my naysayers induced. We need stratagems to survive rejection. Like Hal Prince, director John Newland always scheduled a meeting on a new project for the morning after opening night. A veteran writer of my acquaintance has made a rule to make one new submission for every rejection received. A well-thumbed Writer's Market is a trusted ally.
Just as the smoke from the forest fires erased the mountain ranges, so, too, can we go blind and lose our perspective when faced with a harsh rejection. Even the most seasoned writer or filmmaker has difficulty shrugging off a bad review. Many novelists and directors do not read their reviews until long after the fact, if then. Actress Julianna McCarthy states the problem this way: "If you're going to believe your good reviews, then you have to believe your bad reviews." She believes a good review can do as much damage to a performer as a tough one. "You start trying
to imitate yourself, and the next thing you know, the performance is dead." It helps to think of our life's work in terms of portrait painting: Our work is the subject, front and center, but our lives are the background that gives us context. That background is the longer view.
THE LONGER VIEW
Try this: Take pen in hand. Number from 1 to 10 and finish the following phrase as rapidly as possible:
1. If I took the long view, I'd
2. If I took the long view, I'd
3. If I took the long view, I'd
4. If I took the long view, I'd
5. If I took the long view, I'd
6. If I took the long view, I'd
7. If I took the long view, I'd
8. If I took the long view, I'd
9. If I took the long view, I'd
10. If I took the long view, I'd
Landmarks
At Embudo, New Mexico, the Rio Grande and Embudo River intersect at a cross. On a mountaintop, high above this juncture, stands a white, snowy cross. Eagles nest in the cliffs below the cross. They soar out over the rivers, hunting for food to return to their young. The great cross oversees their activities. Like the floral-wreathed crosses that stud the roadside, it is a reminder, a memento mori. We are all mortal, the cross declares, and one day we will each of us pass from this sphere.
Beneath the foot of the mountain where the cross stands sentinel, the Rio Grande curves on its glistening green way. If the cross is a reminder of our deaths, the river, with its living waters teeming with trout, is a reminder of life. It has been said that we make art in order to be immortal, in order to leave something behind. Perhaps we do. But we also make art to fulfill our days among the living. Just as the river quietly flows, we proceed at our work. On rising, I write Morning Pages. They help prioritize my day and show me when and how I can find the time to make my art. A brief Walk sandwiched in between phone calls and appointments tells me how to make my art. Tangled plotlines and stifled songs untangle as I walk. It is in dailiness that art is born.
Writer Sophy Burnham estimates it takes her ten years to make a book. She sometimes works on more than one at a time, alternating projects in her daily sessions at her desk in the study of the
brick town house where she has lived now for thirty years. "I write a draft, then I let it breathe for a while, and when I come back to it, I have a new perspective," she explains. In her time, Burnham has written plays, novels, and three best-selling works of nonfiction. She is a writer of the first water, and above all else, a worker. She works daily.
Sculptor Kevin Cannon is another daily worker, rising early in his old adobe home, making himself a small breakfast and retiring for a long day's work in his studio, where he makes very beautiful sculptures from leather. After each piece is finished, he makes a meticulous charcoal drawing of it, often as beautiful as the sculpture itself. Collected internationally, Cannon prefers to work in the anonymity he finds in Taos. There, the beauty of the landscape and sky feed his artist's eye and he is undistracted by the din of the large city as he works. A jazz guitarist by avocation, Cannon can be found playing small local gigs on winter evenings. Although a very fine guitarist, he still holds himself an amateur, reminding one of the word's root in the Latin verb arnare, "to love."
It is our love of art, of the process of making art, that draws us to our daily work. Artists are committed to the making of art, although we often toil for years without a sentinel landmark, like that cross, to remind us of our path. My first musical, Avalon, was seven years in the making. Magellan, an opera, unfurled in six. In the final stages of each project, demos were made. It was exciting and unnerving to suddenly have physical, auditory proof of the long process my musical collaborator and I had undergone—suddenly we had a landmark for our creative travels.
Recently, I gave a dinner party that another writer attended. "Would you like to see where I work?" I asked him. "Oh, I
would," he answered. And so I led him up the stairs to the small crimson room where an old wooden desk held my IBM Selectric and a sheaf of papers. "I love Selectrics," the writer enthused. "I work on a computer now, but I've been thinking of getting myself a Selectric again. There's something about them that just invites writing, isn't there?" "Yes," I said. "I think it's their sound. They're companionable, like a horse trotting along. A typewriter keeps you company while you write." The writer nodded agreement. Neither of us needed reminding that in our daily march, we went to our writing alone, like a monk to his cell.
As artists, we want and need encouragement. This may be why some artists are superstitious, writing with a special pen in a certain notebook, at a certain spot. Perhaps we could use a sentinel cross to mark the mountain of our work.
Build It, and They Will Come
LANDMARKS
Try this: Go to the five-and-dime. Select a large photo album, the kind that allows you to place an entire sheet of paper behind the cellophane shield. This is your landmark book. Use it as a scrapbook for your own creative projects. Every project generates a trail marking its progress. Yours may include letters, ticket stubs, recorded compliments, reading dates, gallery invitations, and photos of special occasions. Allow this creativity scrapbook to document the landmarks of your progress.
Questa, New Mexico, is located in the mountain valley at 7,500 feet. High peaks soar at its perimeter. Coming into the town, there are two landmarks: the White Dove Laundromat, and a log cabin labeled Paloma Blanc
a Coffee House. Run by a mother with her two daughters, the Paloma Blanca features homemade pastries and fine coffee. I am not the only Taoseno who drives twenty-odd miles for a cup of their brew. Taos itself is well stocked with coffee shops: the North and South Bean, the World Cup, Cafe Tazza, and Inspirations, to name just a handful. Still, none of them holds a candle to the coffee at Paloma Blanca. It is worth the drive.
Often, as artists, we doubt that mere excellence is enough to attract our good. We buy into negative and self-defeating notions like "I have to live in New York; I have to know the right people; I have to have an agent; I have to do almost anything that strikes me as impossible in my current circumstances." A few years back, there was a fine movie called Field of Dreams. In it, the hero was directed to build a major-league ball field amid his corn crop. It would be a great tourist attraction, he was told. "Here?" he protested. "In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a cornfield?" His guidance reassured him: "Build it, and they will come."
"Build it, and they will come" is profound creative advice. It puts the emphasis on process rather than on product. It emphasizes the
fact that artists lead rather than follow the market. Too often, artists get sidetracked trying to market their work before it is finished. They write book proposals instead of books, screen treatments instead of screenplays. Meanwhile, precious weeks, months, and years tick by.
Often, when I advise a writer to write a whole book rather than a proposal, I am greeted with "But, Julia! I don't want to do all that work for nothing." But we never do all that work for nothing. When we write, we become better writers. When we paint, we become better painters. Dancing improves our dancing, acting our acting. Art lies in doing, and an artist who creates freely has a certain allure. A wild horse is more mysterious and attractive than its domesticated brother.