on privacy and performance in the creative life

why the communal act of writing requires the protection of solitude

I was asked recently if I enjoy writing for its own sake, and I thought the question absurd. Who would? The film Chariots of Fire has Eric Liddell saying that when he runs, he feels God’s pleasure. For him, it’s an intrinsic good. That’s fine and well, but running isn’t a communicative medium. Writing is. Thus, there can be no intrinsic pleasure in writing for the sake of putting words on a page, that is, for the sake of having written.

writing as communion

To say that the writer’s work is definitionally communicative and necessarily social is to say that writing is communion: with oneself, with the Spirit, with the world. At bare minimum, say in a personal journal, one might write in order to sort out one’s own thoughts; but in that case writing is still very much like correspondence between friends, allowing the emotional self to communicate with the rational self—or even, you might say, allowing the present self to communicate with the future self—by way of the external medium. The act of writing, in that instance, transforms the inner monologue into a dialogue, where the implicit and explicit meet on the page. However, it’s an odd fellow who would call himself a writer when in reality he is a mere diarist. The diarist is going inward, exploring what may be nothing short of a downright musical inner life. The writer, on the other hand, goes inward in order to emerge again laden with the spoils of war. To leave those spoils undisclosed is to leave them unwon.

The audience, then, is an artistic necessity. As we all know, if there’s one activity least liked by writers, it’s writing; but we are generally compelled by the notion of deadlines and readers, if not by the nobility of our thoughts in their highest expression. The performance of that highest expression is obviously the goal, but without audience, there is no performance, and thus no achievement of that goal.

Sorting things out this way verges on the pedantic, but then again, the writer is responsible for his metaphysic. What is it we’re doing, and what is it we want? Is it name recognition? influence? royalties? Or is a desire for readership built into the act of writing itself?

writing as looking-glass

Yet, while the audience is vitally necessary for writers, the observer effect is inevitable and of concern. Performance is threatened by performativity. Although “audience capture” is a rare danger reserved for the few of us who achieve both sizeable and demandingly interactive followings, we all are bound—boundaried—by our target audience at minimum. To write well, we must imagine for whom we are writing; there is the inescapable reality that the imagination of that other leads directly to the construction of an imagined self reflected by that imagined other. Charles Cooley called this the looking-glass self.¹ We all know this: the temptation to misrepresent ourselves even to ourselves is ever-present. Moreover, though the temptation to a) inflate our accomplishments and b) chronically pursue more of them has probably not grown worse in the internet age (as the slow-living mamas would have us believe), it hasn’t grown better, either. We are blind slaves to our own egos, and the pressure to publish our thoughts at all times only diminishes what clarity of vision we might have had.

So, there is something to be said for the richly creative private life; or perhaps, the richly private creative life. I fear it attributes to us too much of the divine to say that one should first commune with oneself, but it is true: the artist must withdraw, and let deep call unto deep. There must be some sort of protected space for the nascent idea, for the error-strewn and ugly, and perhaps we might understand that undisturbed, dark, and quiet holiness as the womb of the creative life. All naturally created things begin their lives hidden. Overlooked by the modern mind is the fact that there is such a thing as premature delivery, and the artist cannot publish every unfiltered thought to the perusal of the public eye without severe risk to the fledgling work itself. Christ Himself went away in solitude before carrying on with the work. It is the height of arrogance to think that we mortals will conjure miracles out of the shallows of chronic overexposure.

In brief, creativity and performance are related but distinct, and you can’t do both at once.

creativity behind the curtain

Last month, I took Candice’s advice to begin keeping track of my progress and exploring ideas in more private, intentional, thoughtful ways. I started writing more about my ideas in my journal, whereas I used to just record the events of my day. I started keeping a more thorough commonplace “book” digitally, using Notion. I went back to my spiral-bound, college-ruled note-taking style when brainstorming essay ideas, and I’ve written several essays that I plan not to publish because the reason for writing them was solely to find out what I truly think. To commune with my own self. It is so easy to say the thing you know your audience wants to hear, whether it’s your Substack followers or your church ladies’ group or even your own face in the mirror. But I had reached a point where I felt distant from my own thoughts, my own processes of thinking.

As far as progress tracking goes, Goodreads and Letterboxd are great for keeping tabs on the books and movies I consume. I tend to save or archive the Substack articles I like in the app, though keeping a linked, running list by category would probably work better. Also, I have playlists on Spotify for the podcasts I want to revisit (example: “history and mythology podcasts”). Generally speaking, the analog lifestyle doesn’t suit me for practical purposes, but I’m trying to hand-write more often when journaling, brainstorming, and drafting poems.²

My amuse-bouche series is, of course, how I publicly commonplace, but it’s only a glimpse of the massive amount of books and media I blow through on a weekly/monthly basis.

amuse-bouche #9

amuse-bouche #4

Not all my digital space is public. Typically, I draft Substack Notes in my notes app of choice (currently Notion and Keep), but the majority of those never make it to my feed because I am no Archimedes and there are very few shower thoughts worth a streak through the public square. Many essay ideas—with their multitude of errors, rabbit trails, and non sequiturs—die quiet deaths. Leaving them to their graveyard in the cloud reinforces the practice over the performance of thinking and writing. I agree with Annie Dillard that a good idea should not be hoarded; in her words, “Something more will arise for later, something better” (The Writing Life, 78-79). It’s just that we often fail to discriminate between the good idea and the first idea that popped into our heads. There may be many ahas before the triumphant eureka. It won’t hurt to pause a moment and put on a bathrobe before taking to the streets.

Ultimately, I want to live a creative life, not a performative one, and the fertile mind is one whose soil is cultivated before fruit is ever thought of.

For more on solitude, performativity, and the inner work of the creative life,

pair with:

• 6 non-performative ways to track your hobbies and interests by Candice at Finding Quiet
  this piece had a hand in Attention Span’s relative radio silence of late and inspired the essay above

• *The Writing Life* by Annie Dillard
  reflections on the discipline and requisite solitude of the writing life: the necessity of cutting oneself off from the world to engage in the work; together with the writer’s obligation to write with a view to the reader:

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

and again,

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

• Annie Dillard on Writing by Maria Popova at The Marginalian
  rich with links worth following. The Marginalian, formerly known as Brain Pickings, is excellent. I’ve admired Popova’s project since I was in high school.

• Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle
  on Christian faith and art

• *What Are People For?* by Wendell Berry
  on the dance of solitude and community, wilderness and civilization

• Confessions by St. Augustine
  illustrative of the depth of personal writing as a serious endeavor

• The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson
  on creating a private space conducive to making art

• *Beginning to Pray* by Anthony Bloom
  on facing oneself when the noise has subsided and the horror of boredom sets in; on meeting God in the emptiness when there is nothing demanding your reaction

Because we don't know yet how to act without an outer reason, we discover that we don't know what to do with ourselves, and then we begin to be increasingly bored. So first of all, you must learn to sit with yourselves and face boredom, drawing all the possible conclusions.

• Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis
  on the mind formed by solitary exploration

I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, up-stair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. . .

• Everything in Its Place by Oliver Sacks
  on wonder and discovery, their inner joys

• The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss
  on small and private spaces, the delight of treasured objects

• The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes
  on finding peace in loneliness

• The Permission Workbook: Why do you want to write The Story? by Elissa Altman at Poor Man’s Feast
  on the motivations and attendant responsibilities of writing; parts of this essay reminded me of the mental landscape out of which I aimed to maneuver earlier this year:
  

  is it brilliant?

practically speaking

Now, I strongly feel that having my life together in other ways greatly contributes to creativity; feeling perpetually behind is stultifying. Sometimes I need to keep track of creative ideas, and sometimes I need to keep myself on track with those daily or weekly habits that allow my creativity to flourish. The following tips may annoy some readers, because I’m sure that like me, you’ve heard it all from the productivity people. Our happy hippie selves are reluctant to acknowledge the kinship between productivity and creativity. We are artists! Not machines!

Well, hey. To anyone out there who is totally undisciplined and still brilliant, three cheers. Moving on:

The Loop Habit Tracker app is multipurpose and beautifully minimalist, and the Hevy app is great for tracking workouts (increase bloodflow, increase cognition, y’all). Bullet journaling doesn’t work for me, but for analog task/progress tracking, I’m trying to get better at Mystie Winckler’s index card method. Mystie herself owns that this method is “a hard thing to do. It’s a skill that we have to practice.” Having a list of go-to meals, and thus a go-to grocery list, makes life easier. Meal prepping (this can be anything from assembling an entire casserole to simply throwing a few cups of cooked rice and some browned ground beef in the fridge) frees me up on two fronts: the prep part is a good opportunity to listen to an audiobook or let my mind wander while doing rote tasks, and the reheat part is convenient when I don’t want to interrupt a reading/writing session. Last year I used “making dinner” as an excuse to take breaks while studying for exams, but when I’m grappling with an idea I want to pin down, putting a pin in it is a sure way to lose it entirely. Again, you can view things like meal prep and habit tracking as productivity guru garbage, or you can view them as preliminaries to creative freedom. Up to you. These are examples of the quiet routines that delineate creativity from chaos, and are not publicly consumable or cute, but are privately useful and sustainable.

1. Social psychologists today call it reflected appraisal.

2. Anything that would require editing goes directly to digital notes because I do not enjoy the visual clutter of editing on paper.