Books that Change Your Life: “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp
Despite my professional leanings, I don’t usually come across books that "change my life." I read between 40-50 titles a year and choose carefully enough that I don’t feel like I’m wasting time with any one of them. But getting my foundation shaken, lens cracked, perception tilted as if coming out of a handstand? Every 5 years or so at best. Music and more often just by having averages skewed in their favor. In a given year, I’ll see twice that many movies and listen to 10 times that many new songs.
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by legendary modern dance choreographer Twyla Tharp changed my life. I read it over a month ago and still feels like the best cookie I’ve ever eaten. Or the best sex I’ve ever had. Reason enough to get out of best in the morning just to wander the world trying recapture that feeling again.
The Creative Habit argues, with calm, precise conviction, that creativity is not a blessing bestowed on select geniuses nor an unexpected guest which must be entertained immediately. Creativity, says Ms. Tharp, is work, ordinary, clock-punching, get-to-the-table-and-do-it, work. A habit, like brushing your teeth. Your job as a creative person is to set up the ideal conditions for your creative practice to become routine and then show up and do it. Get there and you’ll no more struggle over when it’s time to be creative than over when it’s time to eat when you’re hungry or scratch when you itch.
It’s not the hottest way to talk about creativity, an idea as weighed down by romantic nonsense as artistic inspiration. What of the careening madness of geniuses like Beethoven and Byron, of Orson Welles, Robert Johnson and Diane Arbus? Wasn’t their lack of rigor and structure what allowed their art to flourish? Routines and schedules are for accountants not artists! And coming from an artist like Tharp, responsible for many of the most visually stunning dance pastiches of the last 40 years, this advice seems almost prudish. Next you’re going to tell me John Coltrane birthed A Love Supreme thanks to daily servings of brussel sprouts and plenty of fresh air.
That’s exactly what Ms. Tharp is going to tell you. That and "grow up" and "get over yourself." Life makes practical demands on all of us and they ain’t about to step aside so you have time to create your masterpiece. You have to make time, demand it, seize it from the hobgoblins of procrastination and distraction. And the best way to do this is to make being creative regular, something intrinsic rather than exceptional to who you are.
How to? 12 chapters on that lead you roughly through the chronology of creation: We all begin with "a white room", nothing but ourselves, our experiences and everything that has led us to that point. There’s a nice equanimity in that. A genius begins with the same nothing as a rookie. From there, Tharp pushes us past the excuses we all use to not make our creativity regular. And real.
Us: "What if I’m blocked? I have no good ideas"
Tharp: "Poke, circle, scratch. An half-formed idea worked at is better than waiting for a grand idea that never comes. (Chapter 6).
Us: ‘What if my once-good idea isn’t working? What if I’m stuck or losing faith?"
Tharp: "Happens to everyone. Admit you’re in a rut. Be honest and see why you’re there. Then change something, anything. But always remember you. You wouldn’t have gotten even this far on a crappy idea if you weren’t a creative person. Change your setting, your focus, your theme, anything. But giving up is not a choice." (Chapter 11).
Us: "What if I get interrupted? Life interferes and doesn’t always leave me time and space for my creativity."
Tharp: "The best-kept rituals are easy. Don’t insist on working in the dark if you like the light or in silence if you like noise. There is no right way. There is only the way that works for you and your habit." (Chapter 2).
This was exactly the advice I needed. I’m 35, at (politely) a transition in my writing career, confident enough that I should be writing but unsure of what projects to focus on and how to focus on them and get what I want. The Creative Habit doesn’t teach you how to be wildly successful like its author but it also doesn’t hold your hand and tell you ‘We all have something to give." You make that decision. Once you have, once you decide creativity is crucial to your identity, (and Tharp’s model makes room for creativity in the arts, business, medicine, how do make it work for yourself?
I read this book one chapter a day either in the bathtub or at my favorite coffee shop. After those 15 minutes, I practically leaped up ready to make things happen for myself. To give my energy and soul to something that both meant something to me and I felt like the world needed.
To create.
The Outsiders showed me that kids my own age can survive in an adultless world and set me on my late-adolescent road to independence. And the Band Played On, given to me by a college friend after I told her I hadn’t read for fun since middle school, reignited my love for reading and steered me towards San Francisco years later. And Geoffrey Nunberg’s Talking Right drove home the notion that my liberal brethren does themselves no favors by endlessly screaming about injustices while refusing to focus on practical thereby switching my political values from moral purity to results.
The Creative Habit empowers us to be both creative and functioning people. To be artists and adults. It is a gift, my new bible. And I hope it becomes as special, as necessary to you as it has to me.
(Special thanks to Clarence and his podcast Do You Know Clarence for letting me know).