Penguin
Review by Walter Cummins
In his quest to explain the creative process behind works of fiction, poetry, drama, art, dance, and music, Adam Moss interviewed forty-plus creators for their explanations of how they did it. Their starting points were often the notes and jottings they produced at the very start of some artistic product, many of which are included in this illustrated book. Moss considered them: “The true value of unbaked scrawls and sketches and whatnot is as a window to an artist’s process. Process is an ugly-sounding word—pedestrian jargon for the inherently wondrous act of creation—but it describes a method by which a thing evolves, which has always had a hold on me.” This then became his goal for the interviews that resulted in this book: “My aim is to render the experience of creativity—that is, the frustration, elation, regret, first glimmers, second thoughts, distress, and triumph that lead to works of art. The thought when I began was, if I can strip creation of its romance, and break it down into discrete and concrete parts, could that help me (and you) to see art as a product of work, a structured mental process?”
Although I’ve never attempted such an encompassing project with such a significant range of artists, I’ve had somewhat similar discussions with a number of writers and poets. While Moss evokes many distinctive renderings of the artist’s process, I believe these results are just approximations, after-the-fact considerations of the steps that resulted in the works. The artist recalls what he or she was conscious of thinking and doing but—inevitably—not the core of creativity that was the source of the articulation. The “structured mental process” is vital but only a partial answer. Even the notion of “structured” is questionable with its systematic connotation.
I recall a friend who had read an essay analyzing one of his stories as he shook his head over the critic’s insights. “I didn’t know I was so smart,” he told me. Creation involves a duality—what the artist remembers going through during the stages that follow the initial raw conception—the thinking and doing, the additions and deletions, the sudden insights involved in the shaping of the finished work. But artistic creation is not a rational process. It’s just the apparent processing that can be described. Simultaneously, the creative impulse guiding what may be fits and starts behind the making remains unknown and unstated. An idea suddenly emerges and, somehow, it just feels right. Then imagination and craft take over to develop it.
Let me illustrate. A novelist I know was centering his Victorian-era story on a founding. Far into the writing it hit him that a character he invented as a minor walk-on would be the father of the founding, the result a significant change in his plot. He hadn’t been looking for the father. The idea emerged from his creative instinct. Now he had to take on a major revision. The steps of working it out is what he could articulate, not how the sudden idea came to him.
Moss understands this point: “Art requires access to the imagination, a notoriously difficult place to visit. The imagination fuels an idea.” The imagination is the real origin, and that is beyond analysis. What Moss and his artist interviewees are actually exploring is what it takes to actualize the creative idea.
Moss’s subjects reveal a range of conscious awarenesses of what they went through, some reporting just a sudden concept that quickly resulted in a rough draft, others remembering the initial seed and then the accumulation of developmental strategies that followed. That seed is the real creative mystery.
Still, Moss illuminates the approaches different artists use to fulfill the potential of an idea. However they achieve the result, that ability to get there may be what distinguishes the successful artist from those who never move far beyond the creative insight. Moss concludes, “Along the way, there is making and destroying, self-sabotage, doubt and despair, but the unifying fact of this book is that successful creators do not give up, even when the thwarting seems insurmountable.”
Michael Cunningham explained, “Everything about The Hours was a surprise to me.” He knew he wanted to write some contemporary version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, first about gay men and then about three women. After a year of writing, he was ready to give up in frustration. But then he thought about his mother:
So I gave it another shot. I tried to figure out what it was about Mrs. Dalloway that was so compelling to me, and my mother drifted into my head. And I realized eventually that my mother, as a homemaker, has always seemed to me to be trapped in a life that was too small for her. If you look at it like this: two women, my mother and Virginia Woolf, who each in their way were trying to do more than was possible—Virginia Woolf writing Mrs. Dalloway and my mother baking a cake—then my mother gets to be in the book just as surely as does Virginia Woolf. And that’s when the book started to come to be what it was.
What Cunningham experienced seems very much like that of my writer acquaintance who had an unexpected idea pop into his head, with the result that he found a way to write the book they had hoped to.
The 2020 Noble Prize poet Louise Glück talked about her poem “Song,” recalling the raw origin when she found a sheet of paper with her notes that said, “‘Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.’ Those lines appeared to me in a dream. ‘I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine.’” Then in an early stage she came up with the last line: “the fire’s still alive.” Through the stages of the writing Leo Cruz becomes a maker of bowls and a teacher about the grasses surrounding the site of his kiln, and then a teacher of living in one’s imagination. Glück eventually found the world of the poem through the discovery of lines, placing them and revising them, despondent along the way but thrilled when the poem was achieved.
For the aspiring artist, Moss’s gathered tales of how others did it provides useful and even inspiring case studies. What he cannot access is the origin of a creative idea, only how it may be realized once manifested. The romance can’t be stripped away.
Moss acknowledges the wonder in his Afterword: “It’s the mysterious part. Some describe that mystery as magical, otherworldly. Others view it as their subconscious churning. It doesn’t matter. All artists are mystics at heart, and they’re talking about the same thing—and that thing is what they can’t really talk about, because it cannot be put into language.”
