Home, Alone?
EPISODE 049: HOME ALONE?
In reaction to something the Chief Economist of the Bank of England said about creative work, and how working from home might be a barrier to that creativity, this episode takes us down a rabbit-hole about how and when we do our best creative work and how that differs for us all, and how–in the end– it's more important that we know how to find flow and create sparks than it is that we know how to find the perfect context in which to work. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
As I sat down to write this morning I started with what has become my purification ritual, which is nothing fancy but includes shutting down my email and silencing my notifications and as I was doing so one last email slipped in and caught my attention because it quoted the Chief Economist for the Bank of England, a guy named Andy Halstade, and not the kind of guy I suspect most of us would usually look to for advice about our creativity. What he said was that the changes in the workforce that have come with Covid-19, specifically the loss of an office environment with co-workers and water coolers, has led to a loss of creativity. Here's the quote that got me thinking and a little worked up:
"Home working means serendipity is supplanted by scheduling, face-to-face by Zoom-to-Zoom. What creativity is gained in improved tunnelling is lost in the darkness of the tunnel itself....I imagine some people will have used lockdown to write that creative novel they always knew was in them. I doubt many will become modern-day classics."
Wow. I bet he's fun at a party.
He's basically saying that while some people will experience greater flow, or tunnelling, that, well, I'm not sure what he's saying. That we'd be creative if we weren't so lonely, perhaps? There are couple gems in there we could unpack, not the least of which is the implication that it is the office environment, and not the home environment that best nurtures our creativity, that scheduling somehow dampens creativity, and that, what? Work done from home is less serious and has no chance at becoming a so-called classic?
What Halstade calls "the darkness of the tunnel," by which I assume he means the emotional challenges of being cut off from the social life many people had at the office before being sent home to work, is itself is an existential issue, not one of creativity, and on what basis he doubts the pandemic will produce many classics, I can't even imagine. I don't remotely see how they relate. But if he's making a case for solitude being detrimental to creativity, he's ignoring the fundamental alone-ness of generations of artists who have relied on that aloneness, and the focus–or cognitive tunnelling– he's so worried we're going to get lost in. What he gets right is that for many people the sparks that come from being together and having conversations about ideas, and just, you know, so-called "normal life"–these can be important stimuli. What he gets wrong is the implication that creativity is a one-size-fits-all experience. So how does where we work, when we work, and with whom we work affect our creative lives? I'm David duChemin, and this is Episode 49 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
While it sounds like Mr. Andy Halstade and I disagree about how creativity works, or doesn't, we clearly share a concern about the creative lives of those affected by the pandemic in which we find ourselves, and I do not mean for a moment here to downplay the very real need to feel socially connected. The pandemic has been hard on most of us, even those of us who are more introverted are starting to gasp for air a little bit. And there is no question that how we are creative in these challenging times will be different from how we were creative before all this started.
Ironically, however, I think Halstade's concern over a lack of creativity lacks, well, it lacks creativity. I think we're more resilient than this, and that the human need and capacity for creativity can't be stifled by an 8-month absence of water-coolers and gossip for those who used to work in such environments. I think there are many ways we can find the sparks we need. Simply to mourn the loss of them from the usual places and not encourage the search for them in less obvious ways is just lazy and cynical. I think we can do better and I think it is human creativity that will get us out of this mess, whether or not we have a water-cooler around which to gather. In other words, we might have been sent home, but our creativity hasn't. Not necessarily.
Where we work, and often when, is not a trivial thing in our everyday creativity. Anyone that knows they work better in a noisy coffee shop rather than a quiet cubicle will tell you this. What I hope they will not tell you is that a noisy coffee shop is the only place they can possibly be creative, or that you too need the same noisy coffee shop in which to do your best work. We all work very differently, not only from others, but from time to time, we work differently from one task to another, and these ways of working and the things on which they depend, they too can change over time.
When I wrote my first book I did so in a busy coffee shop on Vancouver's Granville Island. Every day I would take a small ferry across the inlet, order my Americano, put Van Morrison on my iPod, slide my headphones on and write. It worked for me and helped me focus in a way other places and rituals did not. When I wrote my last 4 books I was alone in my home office in my attic, sitting in my Eames lounger, still with coffee, though now in silence. The best of my writing has always been done in the morning. But as a younger man my best work was done in the evening, long hours spent designing web pages or writing my comedy routines, finally going to bed at 2 in the morning. These days I'm in bed by 11 if not 10. Within 20 years, the where and when in which I have done my best work has changed. Some of that change has come in a slow evolution. Some changes came much faster when work or even where, or with whom I lived changed.
But if you suddenly find yourself at home and alone and worried you can't be creative there, or what you need is to be home, and by yourself then you're not–well–you're not alone. And with all due respect to the Chief Economist for the Bank of England, there is no reason why can't write a modern day classic, or whatever version of that applies to the work you do, while doing so.
Hemingway needed to write standing up, pounding away at his typewriter for hours. I couldn't do that. But he worked at home, alone. He said, "writing, at its best, is a lonely life." Many of his books are the very definition of modern classics. Take that, banker-guy. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, both painted at their shared home, they lived together but they painted separately from each other. Charles and Ray Eames, the ones who designed the very chair in which I'm sitting, a classic of Mid-Century Modern design, by the way, they too worked most of their creative lives in a home studio in LA. Graphic Designer Paul Rand created the brand identities of some of the world's largest companies while working from home in his studio in Connecticut. Georgia O'Keefe, Goya, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh all painted in solitude. Paul Cezanne, too.
Frankly, against a backdrop of so much creative work that have become so-called classics (modern or otherwise), it's bewildering to me to suggest that creativity depends on getting in to the office and chumming it up in the break-room, or that how and where "we" (as if there were one homogenous group into which we all fit) worked most creatively in one setting rather than another.
The state of flow that so many of us do need for our best creative work is not achieved by prescriptive means, and I suspect it is subject to a dizzying variety of preferences. Broadly, it requires time and focus and while some of us need people around to achieve that, many of us do not. Many of us need the opposite. What matters is that we understand how we work best. For some, it's solitude, for others it's being surrounded by people. For some it's a studio that's chaotic and messy, for others it's space that's clean and well-ordered. Me? I can't work in mess. I just can't. My office looks like it's ready for an Architectural Digest special issue about the tidy home offices of the obsessive compulsive. Others would lose their focus quickly in exactly the environment in which I thrive.
In his latest book, "Keep Going", Austin Kleon, the author of several books about creative work, says this : "My studio, like my mind, is always a bit of a mess. Books and newspapers are piled everywhere, pictures are torn out and stuck on the wall, cut-up scraps litter the floor. But it’s not an accident that my studio is a mess. I love my mess. I intentionally cultivate my mess." He makes a compelling argument for being messy, saying that "Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place."
So while Kleon argues for a need for mess, and the need to create a place in which things are out of place, a place in which interesting juxtapositions can happen, it might be helpful to remember there are different ways for us all to do this. I keep notebooks, specifically my Ugly Notebooks, in which to be messy. My process as a photographer is messy, but that doesn't mean my studio must be. My mind is messy at times, thoughts and ideas running amok. But my desk is clean. On any given day I'll be writing several different pieces, and all of them are in text documents that are very messy, unfit for anyone's eyes but my own, while I'm working on them.
For others, that just doesn't work. What is important is that you know how you work best, how your own brain prefers to find the sparks and the juxtapositions that most excite you. If you work best at night and surrounded by mess, then mess it up and put the coffee on! If you work best in the morning, alone in a clean space, then do that. But do what works for you. Be aware of it. And use it. If you can, don't fight it. I know I'm at my best creatively between 8am and noon, so that's when I schedule my writing and other creative work. I'm rubbish with creative thinking in the middle of the afternoon, so I don't ask myself to be so. I go to the pool. I read a book. I nap without guilt. I do the mundane things I need to do in order to have the time to work more creatively, and sometimes napping is part of that.
Being at home, being alone, or being elsewhere and surrounded by people, are merely context. They are the settings in which our creative work is done, but they are not intrinsically pro or anti-Creativity. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the less than perfect conditions in which creativity has always thrived. People have been wildly creative in quarantine and through plagues before. Through upheaval and war, as well. What we have always been unable to do without, or to do our best work without, are two important things: flow and the sparks that come from new inputs, the latter being–I think–what Halstade argues many have lost in the shift from the office to an unfamiliar work-at-home situation.
The big question is not, are we more creative at home or the office, alone or with other people? The more interesting, and more important questions, I think, are no matter where we are, how can we get into and remain in a state of flow, and how can we guarantee a constant supply of sparks, ideas, inputs, or juxtapositions. These questions are more important because if we can answer these we can be at our best creatively no matter the context, which–as many have recently discovered–we don't always get to control.
Ultimately I think it comes down to the wisdom found carved into the temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know thyself. Know how you work best, what gets you into flow the most reliably, know what kinds of rituals help you get your brain ready to work, know what kinds of habits and patterns get you fired up. And know when any of this changes for you. Which friends are the ones with whom conversations get that fire burning a little hotter? I have two friends especially right now that are important to my creative well-being and we meet weekly for a drink over Zoom. Those conversations are a lifeline right now. But influences and raw materials come in other forms too. Which books or movies or other influences get you thinking? Which podcasts or magazines? Which voices? Knowing this, and knowing what dampens your creative flow, too, like reading or watching the news does for me, is important.
Those of us who have been doing this for a while, and I've been working home alone in one way or another since 2004, know that the water cooler is important, but we also know it comes in many forms and sure, we have to be more intentional about it, but we also get to be more picky about the kinds of conversations we have and with whom. Without the daily meetings and the constant distractions of a shared office we get to control the flow a little more reliably. I want to go back to Hemingway for a moment, and for that matter to the whole cohort of his colleagues we often refer to as the Lost Generation. They didn't get together in Paris and write together, all of them in their cubicles, stopping their work now and then to gather around a water cooler filled with absinthe. Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, and Picasso, among others, didn't do their best work after riding up to the 10th floor together in the elevator. They worked, in their own way, at home, alone. They seem to have understood that the time for sparks, for conversations and arguments and the gathering and intermingling of ideas was later in long hours spent in bars and cafes and no, we can't do that right now. But we can still have fascinating conversations, we can still share a drink–and ideas–with someone and stir the paint for each other. We can still collaborate with others.
And no, it's not the same. But nothing is ever the same. Everything is impermanent. And the creative impulse is one of the ways in which we deal with that change, though that doesn't always happen quickly. We're only really about 8 months into this pandemic, it's going to take us time to re-direct our flow a little bit, to figure out the new context in which we find ourselves. It's going to take time to find new ways to make the sparks we once made a little more easily in the company of others. But we will find it because the creative impulse is a sneaky, persistent, and unquenchable desire. It's part of who we are and sure, you know what, Andy Halstade, some of us might get lost in the tunnel for a while, we might not really know where the flow is taking us, but the creative impulse has always done its best work in less than ideal conditions, much of it a result of flailing around in the dark a little while making the art that eventually becomes a source of light in that selfsame tunnel. We don't always need to be alone to do our best work, but it certainly hasn't stopped generations of us from doing great work, maybe even our best work because perfect conditions and times of certainty don't make us double-down the way we do when things get harder. They don't make us show up for each other the way we're doing now. They don't make us as hungry and focused, either.
Art has always been a product of the times in which it is made. So have technology and innovation and any creative accomplishment. We respond to those times and the challenges they bring us because that's what the human creative urge and capacity does. It responds. It solves. If anything, we do better in times of change than in times of complacency. We don't necessarily need a messy studio; life is messy enough right now. Things are plenty out of place right now, that mess won't stop flow and it won't douse the sparks that keep our creativity burning, but if we approach it creatively that mess can be the source of that flow and the fuel that keeps those fires burning. And though I try in every episode to remind you that in so many ways you are not alone, you might be. And if no one else has done so, and though it is small consolation, I want to remind you that the muse doesn't disappear just because you're not hanging out with others, or working in the same place you once did. As it has always been, it doesn't matter if you show up at the office, the coffee shop, or the kitchen table. It matters that you show up.
Thanks so much for listening. If this podcast is important to you or contributes to your creative life in some way, would you do me a favour and share it with others you think might benefit? You can point them to iTunes or really anywhere podcasts are served up, or to ABeautifulAnarchy.com - they’ll find their way from there. And if you’re new to A Beautiful Anarchy, I publish new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but I’d be happy to send you a kick in the pants on those 4th weeks by email if you’ll just tell me where to send it and you can do that by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and subscribing to On the Make. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back. Finally, if you’re looking to get in touch with questions, feedback or ideas you’d like to see me discuss in future episodes, you can reach me anytime by email at talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com. Thanks again for being part of this, we’ll talk soon. In the meantime, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0