Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro

Author:Dani Shapiro [Shapiro, Dani]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780802121400
Amazon: 0802121403
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 2013-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHANNEL

Agnes de Mille, who revolutionized musical theater by choreographing the dream ballet sequence in the 1943 Broadway hit Oklahoma!, confessed to her lifelong friend Martha Graham that she found the success of Oklahoma! strange and disheartening. She preferred her earlier dances, which had largely been ignored. She didn’t think the ballet sequence was her best work by a long shot—only “fairly good.” She went on to tell Graham that she had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that she could be.

Later, Graham told this to de Mille:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even need to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

I have kept Martha Graham’s advice tacked to the bulletin board above my desk for the past twenty years, and have returned again and again to the ideas it contains. No satsifaction whatever at any time. I find this bracing, honest, enormously comforting. Very possibly only a writer would find the notion of no satisfaction whatever at any time enormously comforting. But I do. It reminds me that I signed up for this, after all. I signed up for a life in which my job is to do my best possible work—to keep the channel open—while detaching myself from the end result. How I feel about my own work is none of my business. “We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great,” wrote Thomas Merton. Satisfaction should not be—cannot be—the goal.

There is tremendous creative freedom to be found in letting go of our opinions of our work, in considering the possibility that we may not be not our own best critic. As I sit here on the chaise longue in a ten-year-old ratty cardigan and my sweatpants, squinting through my reading glasses at my computer screen, as I plan the rest of my day (student work to be read, a book to review, a speech to write, a few small essays to think about) what I am struck by is the fullness of this, this writing life. My job is to do, not to judge. It is a great piece of luck, a privilege, to spend each day leaping, stumbling, leaping again. As is true of so much of life, it isn’t what I thought it would be when I was first starting out.

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