The Artist’s Way - Week Seven
“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite - getting something down.”
Any actor who has been through training can tell you that the chief skill used in the craft is your ability to listen. To listen and react truthfully. Living truthfully under the given circumstances. In essence, that is what it means to be an artist of any kind.
I started acting in the theater in the fifth grade. Even younger than that, I remember reading a stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and acting it out in my bedroom, as Alice. All the other characters appeared around me in my mind’s eye. I printed out a copy of the film script of The Wizard of Oz and did the same as Dorothy outside in the yard. At that age, I was too young to know or understand technique. I had no awareness at all of the technical side of acting. No Meisner, no method, just an imagination. Just me listening to my instincts and the words on the page.
The same would happen with creative writing assignments at school. I took the prompts and just wrote. No concern for format, how many drafts I would need, or if it was even going to be any good in the end. And I wrote pieces I was proud of.
When we’re younger, the creative voice in our head is free to be as loud as it wants to be. It is pure and unobstructed. Getting older, that voice gets clouded by a desire to compare, to be good, to be better. Technique and methodology can be useful. Thorough knowledge of your craft gives you a leg up. But I have spent every day for the past several years trying to listen for that pure, unobstructed voice that made art easy and fun, just for the sake of it.
_______________________
“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves.”
I have recognized that I am a deadly combination: a procrastinating perfectionist. When in full swing, those traits ensure I get nothing done. It assures me that there is always something “better” to be doing. Something more useful, more pressing, more immediate in its productivity. I can always find fifteen easier things to get done that reward that part of my personality that feeds on productivity quicker, while ignoring and pushing off the big projects. The hard and somewhat vulnerable bits of making art get put off over and over again.
That being said, I have felt a shift in the last couple of days. I still spend an incredible amount of energy feeling like I have to make things perfect, but looking at perfectionism the way Cameron describes it has been freeing. I catch myself trying to edit as I create, and now mentally reframe that instinct as looking for the worst. I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m seeking out a problem.
_______________________
The willingness to take a risk goes hand in hand with the need to be perfect. The more you’re striving for perfection, the less willing you are to actually take a risk. To pursue a creative act is a risk in and of itself. I have personally fallen victim to the ethos that if I can’t do it perfectly, I shouldn’t do it at all. I’ve fallen into it repeatedly. Yet, when I think back on it, almost every risk I’ve taken has paid off in some way, shape, or form. Most of the time, it’s not in the way I would expect, but they are worth it nonetheless.
