What Two Unpublished Novels Taught Me About the Creative Process

Permission to Create

Once in a blue moon in a charmed lifetime, there will come a creative process that flows from start to finish with almost no hitches. We should never expect this to be the norm. If it happens, it is a divine gift to which the only appropriate response is humility.

Unfortunately for my humility practice, my first and only published book to date fell into this category. In a ridiculously serendipitous sequence of events, I conceived of the idea, wrote the proposal, secured a book deal, interviewed the subjects, did the research, and wrote the book in the Italian countryside, in the holiday home of a friend’s family. It took me about 9 months from start to finish and it was pure pleasure. When the book came out, I appeared on BBC World, Woman’s Hour on BBC4, and some Italian television show whose name I can’t remember. I went on book tours in Germany with a national celebrity and was interviewed at the Milan book fair.

It has never happened again.

As I was still in my early 30s, my response was far from humble. I believed this was going to be the way of things going forward. The process would unfold thusly: I would receive divine inspiration, a book contract would fall into my lap, the writing would flow, and 9 months later, a book baby would be born.

Ha!

From the seeds of that hubris grew a generous tree of false starts, unfinished works, and rejection letters. Eventually, I learned to find a new creative rhythm; since that time, I have written 2 novels (both unpublished), created dozens of initiatives including university seminars, new concert formats, and a podcast. I have also had the privilege of guiding hundreds of people along their paths of artistic growth. Sitting in the shade of this tree, I now have a profoundly different perspective on the creative process than I did at 31 after such unexpected early success.

Public Recognition Does Not Equal Artistic Satisfaction

As a musician, I already knew that my best work did not necessarily yield the public response I desired. Sometimes the performances that fell to the extreme humdrum end of the spectrum in my opinion elicited the most praise, while the ones where I had remortgaged my heart to invest more than I had were sometimes met with indifference. Both scenarios left me feeling oddly outraged.

Scenario 1: How dare they call this rubbish good! They clearly have no critical judgment.

Scenario 2: Why isn’t anyone saying anything? Are they heartless, insensitive fools or do I entirely lack objectivity about my own work?

During my years of not being able to write for one reason or another, the desolation of being cut off from my inner artist was far more painful than not having another book deal in my pocket. As many published authors will attest, the moment of fame and celebration is brief, confusing, and bizarrely unrelated to the solitary creation of the book you are promoting, and then you are left alone in the room where you did all this lonely work with no one to cheer you on or indeed to care whether you ever write another word.

The journey was most certainly not the destination for me in my 20s, 30s, or even for most of my 40s. I rolled my eyes when I heard that overused adage applied to art, even as I continued to meditate and practice mindfulness. When it came to my artistic career, I wanted to arrive, dammit, I wanted to have a physical product that people talked about. I wanted my creations to matter. I didn’t care what it took to get there. I applied my entire arsenal of immigrant work ethic techniques to the completion of a book. I joined writing groups and went on creative retreats. I established draconic routines for myself that had worked for some of the writers I revered, even when they left me nodding off at my ‘day job.’

Nothing could reproduce the miraculous flow I had experienced while writing my first book, and I finally had to accept and grieve that fact.

My favorite bookstore in the world, the Antico Caffè San Marco in Trieste, Italy

You Can't Whip Yourself Into Artistry

Having a book contract did not give me financial freedom; the advance, even back in the naughties, was not generous enough to make up for the income I lost while writing the book. What it gave me was permission to see myself as a writer, and that flipped a switch in my brain that allowed me to write. When I didn’t immediately succeed with the next book, however, I took it to mean that I should no longer see myself as a writer or act like one, that I should get on with ‘real life’ and take my place at the back of the line. I understood my permission slip to have been valid for one book only; the first time had clearly been a fluke.

I didn’t realize at the time that it was an act of self-destruction to stop working on my book.

If you’ve read my essay about how I met my husband, you know that writing—even unstructured, ‘unserious’ writing—has shaped my life in a very tangible way. Not writing meant losing not just part of myself, but my whole center.

My agent assured me that the first novel was often a doozy, that it could take dozens of drafts to reveal the final work. As the years went by, I softened my tactics. If people could be wrong about my performances, they could be wrong about my books too. And even if those books needed more work, I was capable of extending that permission slip or even writing my own.

The young people I mentored in the music university thought they could whip themselves into artistry; they believed there were techniques that had to be perfected before anything could be expressed. At the heart of it, they believed they had to earn the right to create and express; they treated themselves like disobedient children who needed to sit down and finish their homework before going out to play.

Seeing this reflected back to me over the years, I resolved to recognize myself as an artist, as a person who has the need, the desire, and the right to center my life around artistic creation.

Failure is the Norm in the Creative Process

There should be another word for it. The word failure is a devastating final pronouncement, a big fat goose egg, while what happens in the creative process is more like reaching an unsuitable location for the picnic you were planning. It is not wrong, period; it is only wrong in the context of what you are trying to create, which in turn ideally spurs you on to use your imagination so you can find a different route to that perfect picnic spot. Arriving repeatedly at the wrong destination is not an indication of your degree of skill or talent; it is the very culture of this terrain of creation. You are forging your own path without guidance, and that is no small thing in the age of GPS.

Sometimes it is possible to pivot and continue; other times it means abandoning your entire work and starting over.

I have been at this point many, many times, and have had to grieve whole volumes of work that will never be seen by anyone, that will never mean anything to anyone but me.

The Achiever and the Artist

The achiever in my head—for whom anything short of a place on the New York Times’ bestseller list is failure—has gradually learned to regard the dead end as a rerouting process. There was a reason we ended up here, and there is a reason we are being asked to undo, redo, or take the long way. The achiever desperately wanted me to be an admired novelist, and when that career option didn’t materialize, it sabotaged the attempts of my inner artist, who is a sensitive creature.

Allowing myself to go on with my book means mediating between the achiever and the artist. The achiever really just wants to create the space and the justification for the artist to create in a world where art is not valued. In the past, it only knew to do that by means of pressure and abuse. Now it has learned compassion for the difficulties the artist has always faced among the deities of Productivity and Revenue. It is a delicate balance to keep the achiever compassionate and the artist at play through iteration after iteration, through dead ends and detours, but this is what it takes to go on creating, and creation is life.

Grief Makes Us Resilient (if We Take Time to Process it)

When you create something, you inevitably experience grief, and there are different shades of it.

There is the grief over the many years or decades spent not creating.

There is the grief of your work disappearing into the vortex and not being recognized.

There is the phantom grief, before even beginning, of imagining your own failure.

There is the grief of having to scrap a week’s, a month’s, a year’s worth of work because it isn’t right yet.

And, if we process that grief, it gets poured into our work, and that work grows richer, more complexly human.

And we go on.

That is resilience.

I’ve learned that I can’t count on the god-given book baby, but I can count on putting in the work again and again and again.

So can you.