Part 1_Episode_5: The unseen solitary path


Story Hunter, Episode Five, the unseen solitary path. 


Are you willing to do what it takes to be creative? Art is experienced by the public, in the public. But in most cases, it is created in crushing solitude. I mean, you can become someone stories happen around, you could develop the right kind of eyes, learn to be a context-creating, meaning-making wizard, you can cultivate your story hunter and learn to put yourself in life's storied path. You can seek out life's characters, become a character who finds characters. And still, you would not have faced the quiet desperate solitude of creativity. You see, at some point, if you are to produce good work, you will need to be alone in a room for a long time totally by yourself. Walking between the computer, the paint, the guitar, and usually the fridge with some manic resistance.


 People will watch the film, and commentators will ask you interesting questions about the process of how you write or make your movies or make music. And you will answer in the moment as if the answers were consciously part of your creative genius. When in truth, mostly what you faced was the brutality of months in a dark editing studio, wrestling with the impending feeling that not only is the worksheet, but that somehow you are shit. 


And of course within that there are days of beautiful flow. But mostly there will be a kind of self-consciousness. At times even a self hatred, of procrastination, some eating of bad food as you languish in this dull, judging solitude. And I don't want it to be that way. And surely sometimes it isn't. There are days when it's not like that. But it is also always a profound challenge to be alone long enough to create something of quality. I certainly know this as a writer. It’s downer stuff. The flow of creation is its own magical white heartspace, where one is absorbed and in tune with the muse. But the journey to that space is a dance in its lightest form, and a kind of battle in its shadow. 


David Foster Wallace spoke beautifully about the chasm between the making of art and the experiencing of it, it became hard for him to bridge the gap between the brilliance of his work and the way it was received. And the truth that hours and unseen hours were spent alone eating sweets and with a severe TV addiction, mostly while he failed to create, while the self judgment of not writing became a deep band of self loathing. 


As I write this, I am alone in an apartment in Cape Town. And today, it's not going well. I have a burden of work to produce including two books that I know I can write, and I'm failing to write and the rest of the story hunter series. What you will hear and assume about me, when you eventually get to one of these end products will largely exclude this part of the story, which is that making art is fucking hard by any metric. I'm telling you this because this is where we cultivate creative resolve. I both need to be with how alone I am trying to produce something worth something unprompted from my own being. Because and only because I feel compelled to. How fucking insane is that? I think I have something to say, I notice it. So I'm going to do what it takes to  - un-fucking-solicited. As I have to ask myself why. And I have to ask myself how?


Well the why is its own form of commitment. And here I have to anchor myself to a future quality. It is my experience that my work has given me and others meaning. Martha Beck once told me that when she writes, she imagines she is in a room with one candle lit talking to one person. And I often think of that person. I think of a campfire at some future event. People are laughing and drinking and a story comes. The story is its own medicine. And its medicine because the story is crafted. Specific words have code in them. If the story is good, it is my story, deeply personal. And strangely, if it is personal enough, it squeezes itself through a universal door into the collective secret garden of human experience. It becomes resonant, because truth is truth is truth. Now at the fire, the mood has changed, and something about how that story lived in me, and came out on a day of solitary struggle, is for everyone. I have to write. The stories I have written have a different texture to them than a story I tell off the cuff. And to write I have to be alone enough to hear myself. So yes, I must suffer the aloneness that I am suffering now. Suffer it, anchored somehow, to that campfire in the future. 


How is simple -  I must be alone, I must face terrible days, days, days of this battle. And then I must drink from the respite that creating within this hell gives me. In some ways to actually sit down and create is a battle. So yes, the how is an act of courage, the courage to be alone enough, lonely enough with my fridge-daring self enough, with my vices to sit down and spray the page with my own process, and trust that in those days, I am making my art’s future. A story hunter must have the courage to be alone enough to make their art. Story hunter faces the resistance of now, knowing what it could give in the future.