Get over yourself.” Got it? And one more: “If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout ‘Begin!’ You never know where it will take you.” Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Here’s another hit: Worried that some other artist has already created the work you want to make? “Honey, it’s all been done before. Here’s the analogy Tharp reaches for: “In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.” If Big Magic is a cocktail, The Creative Habit is a shot of whisky, neat. If you read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, you may remember her metaphor for handling her fears: Fear is allowed to come on the figurative road trip she is taking with creativity, but it’s never allowed to drive the car.
This is a woman who has developed the self-described “steeliness of character” and creative confidence to audition nine hundred dancers in order to hire four. Tharp’s voice is sharp, fierce, and honest. (Because the narratorial “I” in the book is clearly Tharp’s, I’ll be attributing the ideas to her in this piece.) As a choreographer, Tharp’s work only comes to life if she can communicate her ideas to her dancers, and those finely honed directorial skills come through in The Creative Habit. This week’s book is The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, by Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter. How’s the writing going for you this week? I can just see my two-week summer road trip starting to appear over the horizon, which is helping me focus on what I want to accomplish before that big juicy break.
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