Creative People Say No.
May 3, 2016 3:09 AM   Subscribe

"How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do."
posted by Fantods (26 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'd comment on this, but...
posted by Drexen at 4:13 AM on May 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


Japanese creatives say "noh".
posted by Chitownfats at 4:52 AM on May 3, 2016


I knew a guy in college who spent most of his time hooking up with different hotties. He was army reserve, got straight A's, did some student club activities. But the rest of the time he was on the hunt. He spent so much time and money on it.

And why not? Not all of us are artists or statesmen whose work is going to live through the ages. Some of us live in pursuit of other interests.
posted by Monday at 4:54 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah but Prince.
posted by petebest at 5:01 AM on May 3, 2016


Yeah but Prince.

You mean famously reclusive, in the latter half of his career only seemingly left Paisley Park to perform for audiences Prince?
posted by mightygodking at 5:40 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Creative people create all the time. They don't bathe, eat, sleep, or spend time with family. If they do, they aren't real creators. Creating takes up every waking moment. Creative people don't use the bathroom. Creative people don't have children; if they do have children, they certainly don't play with them or spend even a second looking at them or talking to them. Creating takes up 100% of their time.

Creative people create until their hands bleed. There's simply no time to compromise when you're a creator. Creating things means grinding yourself into a fine paste by the age of 40. Creators don't have needs or interests outside of their creative work. Every moment they spend away from creating is a moment stolen, never to be lived again. Creative people don't go to the movies or watch television or read books. Who has time for that? Creative people don't have friends.

When you have finally eliminated everything in your life except for your creating—you creative creator, you—then perhaps you will truly understand what it means to be a creative creator who creates.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 5:55 AM on May 3, 2016 [40 favorites]


I actually thought this might be a bit more along the lines of, creative people (or successful people in what they do in general?) are those who say 'no' as in "no, this is done now, I could continue to tinker with this forever, but it's good now and this is it". I don't know if that's true but it's something I've been trying to stress to my advisory committee re: my PhD and a paper that is oh god so very nearly ready to be submitted to a journal. Like... I could have done so much more in life, in my field and not, if I had just learned earlier (and been successful now) about saying "this is it, it's good, let's move on". Putting out something good rather than something perfect.

I guess that's less "no" and more "good enough" which I suppose is a little uninspiring.
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 6:01 AM on May 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think it's worth pointing out that the Isleys said "No-no no no no no-no-no no, no-no no no-no na-no, no, na-no, no-no, na-no, no-no, no, no-no, no ..." while the Beatles said "Yeah yeah yeah" and Yoko Ono said "Why why why why."

Think about it.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:03 AM on May 3, 2016


>nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation.

Nearly all wild overgeneralizations with nearly entirely undefined terms like this one are nearly completely untrue.

Having no life, and no time for or interest in anything but your self-absorbed self and your solitary obsession, does not provide you with the perspective that you need to make even passably good art. If you want to be an artist, a good place to start is by being a human.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:34 AM on May 3, 2016 [6 favorites]


I do believe that was the overeducated alligator's point :)

And yet, there are a few artists who live that way. Professional pianists, for instance. Practice, practice, practice, perform, practice, teach, practice... We're talking 8-10 hours a day, every day, every weekend, don't take vacations more than 2 days. No exaggeration. /did that once, know people who do that
posted by fraula at 6:43 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


“No” makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, anti-social, uncaring, lonely and an arsenal of other insults. But “no” is the button that keeps us on.
quod erat demonstrandum. I don't understand the depth of the grar here; Is this like threads where we pile on artists/musicians for having the gall to want to get paid for their work?

The Dickens quote is (IMO) the nucleus of what he's talking about; it's the same problem of capturing focus that Joel Spolsky wrote about a long time ago, in the context of programming. 'The zone' / 'coding trance' / whatever you want to call it is a real thing, and it's hard find your way into it. It can be impossible to get in the zone if you know you've got an interruption scheduled, even if it's a five minute phone call scheduled six hours from now.
posted by usonian at 7:10 AM on May 3, 2016 [6 favorites]


I'd read this, but...
posted by chavenet at 7:17 AM on May 3, 2016


I'm appreciating the alternate takes on this piece (no, seriously! I'm not saying that through gritted teeth, I promise.)

I used the tag 'validation' because this absolved for me a great deal of guilt and conflict I'd felt about turning down invitations, or feeling obligated to agree to things I knew I really wouldn't be fully engaged with if my attention was still embroiled in some project. 'Just come out for half an hour, you have to eat, how hard is that?' a friend would say. But she didn't understand that getting into work mode is like climbing down a mine shaft in my head, and climbing out of it is just the same, and if stuff is flowing well, I want to tap the vein until it's spent, and not be distracted by 'you have to be dressed and in the car in 45 minutes! No - 40!'

I've learned to say "I want to, but I have to get XYZ out of my system right now, and I want to be 100% there when I'm there or else I'm terrible company. So I'll catch the next one, and it will be wonderful."

I have no doubt that other creative people manage things in a variety of other ways, and being an asocial curmudgeon is not a badge of being super-clever.

Why yes, ADHD with hyperfocus, how did you know?
posted by Fantods at 7:17 AM on May 3, 2016 [7 favorites]


I think living life and spending time doing things you love besides working on your creations, is what drives creativity in the first place.
posted by agregoli at 7:27 AM on May 3, 2016


nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation.

I know a few writers. They admit, not with any pride, to spending a lot of time avoiding the keyboard. Is this a problem in other media?
posted by IndigoJones at 7:36 AM on May 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


It can be impossible to get in the zone if you know you've got an interruption scheduled, even if it's a five minute phone call scheduled six hours from now.

So much this. I wish I could change it, but it's pretty intrinsic to my work style. Also once I've completed the interruption thing, I'm far more likely to have lost motivation to return to the task at hand. I have a constant standing Sunday afternoon coffee date with a friend with a one year old, and I basically have to get all my schoolwork together for the weekend on Saturday or Sunday morning because once the window of possible time in which her kid might start napping and we can go get coffee edges into view, the possibility of interruption makes focused work impossible. They're only hourlong coffee dates, but I've had to skip the last two because I still had schoolwork on Sunday and just couldn't deal with breaking focus like that. :/
posted by deludingmyself at 7:52 AM on May 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


the Isleys said "No-no no no no no-no-no no, no-no no no-no na-no, no, na-no, no-no, na-no, no-no, no, no-no, no ..." while the Beatles said "Yeah yeah yeah" and Yoko Ono said "Why why why why."

Think about it.


No.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:29 AM on May 3, 2016


"The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less." Ooh, the rhyme-as-reason effect in action!

It is very important to have boundaries in life and not blindly say yes to things, or you will never have any time for yourself and will feel stretched thin and probably resentful. This is not unique to the creative class.

My dad was an artist his entire life and never did anything for anyone. Of course he was a pathological narcissist...
posted by softlord at 8:42 AM on May 3, 2016


When you have finally eliminated everything in your life except for your creating—you creative creator, you—then perhaps you will truly understand what it means to be a creative creator who creates.

And if thou gaze long into creativity, creativity will also gaze into thee
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:49 AM on May 3, 2016


There is this history of writers writing about writing, in which there is a valorization of the work, this idea that what you are producing as an artist is more important than anything else in your life is or could be. Male writers, in particular, praise themselves and each other for avoiding family obligations, or neglecting them. (If I had the time and energy, I could totally do you an annotated bibliography on this but I'm drawing on a lifetime of reading and writing here, so feel free to doubt me.) There is this idea that a writer is correct to be ruthless in eliminating friends, avoiding entanglements, dodging paid work, because the writing is so important. It's a kind of self-created and self-perpetuated mythos.

This "creative people say No" thing hearkens to that for me: it means putting Art above all else.

But! Everyone says No to things in order to say Yes to others. Everyone does, or does not, effectively set aside and protect the time they need for things that matter to them. It's very true that if you want to be a creator, things will always be against you. If you're unknown or making little money, the need to support yourself is a major barrier. If you're known, there will be people like this writer of a book about creativity, aspiring artists, conferences and festivals, all wanting something from you.

Many years ago, I dated a famous-in-certain-circles writer. This was pre-cellphones, and I remember being at her house one evening while she checked her answering machine. She had many messages, quite a few of them from people she didn't know wanting her to blurb a book, or write a review, or attend an event, or put them in touch with so-and-so. Anything that was from someone she didn't know, she deleted. I said, "Aren't you even going to let them know you can't do it?" She said, "I have had to learn that I am under no obligation to people who approach me if we have no prior relationship."

So, yes, creative people say No. Or they ignore you. But that isn't unique to creative people. I imagine you'd get a similar response if you wanted to interview businesspeople, or athletes, or just about anything else. But articles/books like this feed into and feed off of this idea that creative people are somehow doing something special and exalted and their/our work is unusually valuable and necessary.

I recently read The Hall of Uselessness, which is essays by Simon Leys (link is to publisher's website). In an essay on writers and productivity, he talks about writers who feel they must produce as much as they can. But he also talks about writers who don't. I really liked a bit about Samuel Johnson. Apparently, at one point Boswell was suggesting that Johnson ought to write more; Johnson disagreed. "No man is obliged to do all that he can do," he said, which I found to be a liberating thought after thirty years of being part of a writing culture that suggests that anything that interferes with "The Work" is rubbish.
posted by not that girl at 9:10 AM on May 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'm not in creative fields in any traditional sense, and I'm not a celebrity* or anything, but I've done some things that people found enviable sometimes, so I'd get people asking me lots of questions and wanting me to sort of 'mentor' them fairly often. I can't imagine how bad it would get for people who are really well known in their fields and/or doing something more enviable than I was, because even at my bush league levels, it would get pretty intrusive sometimes.

Most of the time, I don't give a hard no, though. I just tell people I charge for my time, and it really works well not just in cutting down interruptions (for some reason, nobody ever chooses to pay me), but in framing the issue for myself. I offer my time freely to people and things that are important to me, and I'm not especially flattered when someone I don't know asks me to do things for them for free.

It's not limited to specific fields. In some ways, time is really all anyone has, and we all have the right to spend or conserve it as we see fit. I find that just telling people they have to pay is quicker and more effective and cuts through some of the arguing and negotiation of people who feel entitled to it. Some people do pay me, but they're usually not the ones who start out asking for free stuff.

I actually do that in all kinds of casual situations, too. I've done it lots when some business is blaming their computers for their fuckups and things. I'll just tell them that I'll consider working on their technical problems, but first we need to negotiate a consulting rate. Sometimes, they get really mad, like they're offended that I'm acting like they're trying to hire me.

* Well, I am, but I am one of those super-elite celebrities that nobody knows about.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:31 AM on May 3, 2016


I know a few writers. They admit, not with any pride, to spending a lot of time avoiding the keyboard. Is this a problem in other media?

Same for some pro writer-types I know. In reading about canonical writers as a student, I was always struck by how many of them needed to be put up at friends' country houses to get shit done. That being the mark of distinction between them and "rainy day writers" who might not be able to resist parties "in town" or heading for the beach for a snowcone on a gorgeous day.

None of the pro arty-types I know are e.g. heavily involved in caregiving responsibilities. They all have partners or sisters or someone around to worry about that kind of thing.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:09 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


So, how does Jack Kerouac write On the Road without saying, "Yes" when his friends ask him if he wants to go on a road trip or whatever?

How often does inspiration strike an artist while out doing things instead of being chained to their work-space?

Don't most professional writers make a habit of keeping something to write with/on at all times because they might get an idea?

I'm not a creative professional but I get ideas for solutions to problems any time and any where, I never know what the thing is going to be that sparks an idea in my mind. Not only that but if I'm stuck on something, stepping away so that I can come back to it with "fresh eyes" often gets me over that hump.

Like anything else, the ideal is somewhere in the middle. Once I have that idea I definitely try to make sure I won't have any interruptions (scheduled or otherwise) until I'm done.
posted by VTX at 11:15 AM on May 3, 2016


i would love to get rid of "creator" and "creative" as labels for people

i'm sure some people find it useful, but others -- it seems that as soon as they decide to apply this label to themselves, it becomes tied up in a lot of self-justifying, pseudo-mystical "artist as special type of person" bullshit

the darker side of which is the idea that an artist's lifestyle (regardless of its effects on family) and "inspiration" are beyond reproach, because they're an artist you see, and special --

and it also perpetuates the idea that if you're no the type who's totally driven, to the point of compulsion, to create create create, that you're not an artist, that you're not the special "type", and that art is not for you --

blech i say
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:37 AM on May 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm trying not to be terribly overinvested in my own FPP but I confess I'm dispirited by what seems like unnecessarily poxy goats and 'flowers smell nice' 'Yes but if you try to breathe only flowers you'll die because oxygen is essential for survival'.

It's so easy to have creative work devalued. Apart from the usual background 'your job is fun!' and 'can you do this for exposure/free' stuff, for me at least there's an added layer that because I'm female, work from home, and do a lot of kid-friendly art, my workspace and time are negotiable and casual/recreational. There's an expectation of availability in ways that no one expects a man working in an office to be. There are socialization reasons that can make it hard to say no and set boundaries and 'be mean,' so I'd found it immensely empowering to give myself permission to keep that sanctum. It's disappointing that some comments want to snark on that as being precious.

Of course people need to do things other than work. But people also need to believe that their work is as legitimate as any other kind of job.
posted by Fantods at 11:54 AM on May 3, 2016 [13 favorites]


If you want to preserve your time and not deal with confrontation, it can help to move far away, have other issues you can blame it on and just arrange your life such that very few people feel they have some right to impose. It can take time to do this, in part because it can take time to figure out the pieces of it.

At some point, I hope to have more of a social life again. But I want it to be more on my terms, minus the sense of imposition and burdensome obligation. There were far too many things in the past that felt awful and hugely time wasting and like a not positive experience.
posted by Michele in California at 10:29 AM on May 4, 2016


« Older Pogo, Plain or Peanut   |   contains the entire word Solar and rhymes with... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments