This constant urge to create something out of nothing can be a powerful driving force. Much of my writing career has been shaped, and I suspect will be shaped, by this urge. Now, Gary Klein’s The Remarkable Way We Gain Insights has given me just the perfect phrase to capture this mindset — creative desperation.
Klein uses the term in a different sense. He uses it as part of a model that may help us “change our story”. For me, creative desperation has chiseled out a story.
There is something beautiful about writing, even today when millions of words are written by great writers everyday available for anyone to read for free. There is potential, and indeed hope, that words one writes will touch somebody else in a special way. It doesn’t matter how quickly the mode of moving these words from one place to another have changed. It doesn’t matter if somewhere in the jungle those words get lost. This act has stood the test of time.
I’m glad that I can revel in its joys.
And on days when things aren’t going that well, I’ll turn to this note written to myself, reminding me that there is always writing I can turn to.
As a writer, I suffer from a disability that I suspect isn’t unique. I am never pleased with anything I write. There must be, my critical self nags, a better idea to write about or a better way to write what I just wrote.
Perhaps it is this disability that has forced me to work as a journalist, rather than, say, a novelist. For example, both the aforementioned problems go away when I’m on an assignment.
The first disappears because once my idea has been accepted by an editor, I know that’s what I have to write about. The second vanishes because the acceptance comes with a deadline, which I’m forced to honour so it keeps my easy-to-distract mind on a leash.
This it turns out isn’t a bad way of learning to be a writer. As it happens, Neil Gaiman, a best-selling English author of fiction and comics, found that the restrictions placed on him as a journalist were great for learning to be a creative writer.
In an interview for the Financial Times, he said:
(After school I went) straight into work, as a journalist – a wonderful thing for a writer. You learn you can ask questions, you learn compression and you learn probably the single most important thing for any writer: delivering more or less on time.
Of course, the idea of tethering your mind to a task at hand isn’t a new productivity tool. What is counter-intuitive, though, is that putting yourself in a box that is governed by self-set rules does not kill creativity. If anything, it is enhanced in a way that may produce more results.
Akshat Rathi 