Spark: How Creativity Works
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061732311/studi360-20]
doesn't hit bookshelves until February 15. But to get you in the
mood, we've got a sneak-preview. In his foreword to the book, Kurt
describes how he embraced Daniel Boorstin's "Amateur Spirit" and
summoned the courage to keep trying new things.
I graduated from college with no job in the offing and no desire to
return home to Nebraska. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to live
in New York City, hang out with people doing creative work, and get
paid for doing creative work myself, but that I didn’t know how to
act or sing or dance or play an instrument or draw. When I was
twenty-one, that was the extent of my career plan. And oddly enough,
I’ve executed it in all its half-assed, unkempt glory for the last
thirty-five years: I’m a New Yorker; my friends are mostly writers
and artists and filmmakers and musicians and designers, and I’ve
earned my living in pretty much every creative field that doesn’t
require me to make music or draw. Or dance.
But it was just a decade ago that I had two back-to-back aha moments
that finally explained my zigzagging professional path to myself and
also made me understand the prerequisites for creativity.
The first lightbulb went off when I read an essay called “The
Amateur Spirit” by the great scholar and writer Daniel Boorstin. The
main obstacle to progress is not ignorance, Boorstin wrote, but
“pretensions to knowledge. . . . The amateur is not afraid to do
something for the first time. . . . the rewards and refreshments of
thought and the arts come from the courage to try something, all sorts
of things, for the first time. . . . An enamored amateur need not be a
genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.”
Here was a supremely credentialed prince of the Establishment, the
ultimate professional intellectual—Rhodes Scholar, Ph.D., professor
at the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, museum
director, Librarian of Congress—arguing in his seventies that while
professionalism of the good kind (knowledge, competence, reliability)
has its place, it is the curious, excited, slightly reckless passion
of the amateur that we need to nurture in our professional lives,
especially if we aspire to creativity in the work we do.
A few months later I found myself interviewing my funny, brilliant
friend Tibor Kalman, the graphic designer and multifarious auteur. A
transcript of our conversation would appear in a monograph about his
work. He was forty-nine and when we talked he knew he had only months
to live. Tibor had always been smart about the nature of creative
work, but now the wisdom was pouring out.
“You don’t want to do too many projects of a similar type,” he
told me. “I did two of a number of things. The first one, you fuck
it up in an interesting way. The second one, you get it right. And
then you’re out of there. I have sought to move into as many other
fields as possible, anything that could be a step away from ‘graphic
design,’ just to keep from getting bored. As long as I don’t
completely know how to do something, I can do it well. And as soon as
I have [completely] learned how to do something, I will do it less
well, because what I do will become more obvious.”
I realized my entire professional and creative life so far had been
conducted in a similar way, by indulging the amateur spirit: I’d
repeatedly, presumptuously barged into jobs for which I had no
credentials or much specific training and then worked extra hard,
hoping that my rank inexperience might somehow be transmuted into
interesting innovation. I’d had no experience writing radio and TV
news scripts (for NBC, my first job), or about politics or crime (for
Time, my second job), or about architecture and design (also for
Time), and when I cofounded Spy magazine (my fourth job), I had never
edited anyone’s writing but my own, or run a business. Ditto when I
wrote and produced prime-time network comedy specials (for NBC), wrote
an off-Broadway revue, wrote a screenplay (for Disney), and sold my
first novel (to Random House). Professor Boorstin and my friend Tibor
had convinced me retroactively that what I’d done by accident, going
from interesting gig to interesting gig with no real strategy, had a
philosophical basis.
Shortly after that double epiphany, executives from Public Radio
International and WNYC called me out of the blue and asked if I might
be interested in hosting a new program they wanted to create about the
arts and entertainment and creativity. Really? Me? My total on-air
experience consisted of having been interviewed a few times about
books and articles I’d written. Host a weekly show on public radio?
Were they serious? I’d done plenty of things I had no standing to
do, but no one before had ever invited me to do something I had no
standing to do.
That’s not completely true. Twenty years earlier, a theater director
had called me out of the blue and asked if I might be interested in
playing the lead in his upcoming production of Othello. Really? Me? My
total acting experience consisted of playing Captain Hook in a grade
school production of Peter Pan. And also, I am, um, er, Caucasian. Was
he serious? Well, as it turned out, um, er, uh, no: he’d meant to
call an (African American) actor named Curt Anderson. Wrong number.
But this time, it turned out, the public radio grown-ups really had
intended to call me, and not the veteran radio personalities Curtis
Andreessen or Karl Andrews or Carter Andrazs. They were serious. And
that’s how I came to help invent and host Studio 360.
What we do every week on Studio 360 is try to show how creativity
works by means of individual case studies, by talking at length and in
depth to some of the world’s most talented people about how and why
they do what they do. And for this book we’ve distilled the most
relevant wisdom from my hundreds of conversations to create a kind of
plain-English master class about the difficult, exhilarating process
of pursuing one’s creative passions. It’s Creativity 101 featuring
guest lectures by visual artists and designers Chuck Close, Denise
Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi; filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow, Ang Lee,
Mira Nair, and Kevin Bacon; writers Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates,
John Irving, and Tony Kushner; musicians Patti LuPone, Rosanne Cash,
Robert Plant, Yo-Yo Ma; and many other artests. Maybe you’re an
artist or would-be artist yourself; maybe you’re an amateur singer
or painter or writer. If so, consider this a collegial primer on how
some supremely talented and successful people unleashed their talents
and achieved their successes. But I’m also convinced that there are
plenty of valuable, hard-won lessons about living and working
creatively that can be applied to almost any life and any job. Or
maybe you simply want to enjoy an unbuttoned, intimate look at the
life and times of a few dozen cultural superstars. If so, enjoy.
What I’ve realized after talking to this remarkable pantheon of
creative people for our five hundred shows is that what I learned from
Daniel Boorstin and Tibor Kalman a decade ago is true of pretty much
all work worth doing, especially creative work: the prerequisite for
doing exciting work is to be excited about it yourself, reaching to do
or make something that you haven’t done or made before and which
seems at least a little scary, just beyond your comfort zone. E. B.
White famously wrote that “no one should come to New York to live
unless he is willing to be lucky.” The same goes for people who want
to do any kind of creative work.
As soon as I adopted this paradigm of the amateur spirit just over a
decade ago, taking risks to try new things, staying out of ruts,
refusing to be paralyzed by the fear of imperfection or even failure,
opening myself to luck—that is, once it became my conscious MO
rather than simply the way I’d unthinkingly stumbled through
life—I began spotting other members of the club, such as Danny
Boyle, the director who made 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire,
Trainspotting, and eight other feature films. “Everything after the
first one,” he told the New York Times, “is business. There’s
something about that innocence and joy when you don’t quite know
what you’re doing.” And Steve Jobs, talking about the unexpected
upside of being purged from Apple nine years after he founded the
company. “The heaviness of being successful,” he says, “was
replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about
everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of
my life.” A period during which, among other things, he founded the
amazing animation studio Pixar.
I’m not much of a religious person, but if forced to choose I’d
probably go with Buddhism, because its practitioners write and say
paradoxical things, such as this line by the Zen master Shunryu
Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but
in the expert’s mind there are few.” That’s what Tibor was
getting at, and Boorstin and Boyle and Jobs. And Richard Serra, as he
explained a few years ago in a conversation on Studio 360, which
we’ve included in Chapter 2. “I’m just going to start playing
around,” Serra told me about his decision to abandon painting as a
young man, “without the faintest idea of what I was doing.”
I learned how to make a national radio show by making a national
radio show in the company of people who knew lots more about radio
than I did, especially Julie Burstein, my executive producer from 2000
through 2009. Having written for TV and radio and the movies, I knew
how to write sentences for the voice and ear rather than the eye, and
I knew how to tell stories. But I learned how to have a new kind of
conversation, in which I uttered sentences that parsed and contained a
minimum of ums and uhs and you knows, conversations in which I seldom
interrupted but nevertheless took the lead.
Moreover, in creating Studio 360 with Julie and the rest of our team
of producers, I had the same goal as when I’d created magazines and
websites and produced TV shows and written novels—to make a thing
that I would want to read or see or hear even if I’d had nothing to
do with it, and that was unlike anything extant. For me, that’s also
how creativity works, when it works. In this sense, creativity is
selfish—but it derives from what I call “good selfishness,”
something like good cholesterol.
In the ten years that I’ve hosted the show, I’ve had more than a
thousand conversations with some of the most creative and interesting
people on earth. Many of them have surprised me. Before I met Susan
Sontag, for instance, I was terrified. She’d been a hero of mine for
decades, and her assistant had informed my producer that “Ms. Sontag
does not suffer fools,” just in case I happened to be one. But our
hour-long talk turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever had—and
the only one for Studio 360 that generated a handwritten thank-you
note. I was very differently surprised by the novelist and journalist
Nick Tosches, who did his best to offend me and then, failing to do
so, left the studio for a smoke halfway through the show and never
returned. I was surprised when Gore Vidal remembered he had once
threatened to sue me for an article I’d published about him,
surprised when Twyla Tharp started crying, surprised when Rosanne Cash
became a close friend, and surprised when Neil Gaiman asked me, years
after he’d appeared on the show, if I would write a piece of short
fiction for an anthology he was editing—and thus last summer I
published my first science fiction story. Once again, I’d never done
it, didn’t know for sure if I could do it, but did it anyway, and
was pleased with the result. Such is the terror and delight of
trusting one’s amateur spirit, being willing to be lucky and seeing
where creativity takes you.
-- Kurt Andersen
August 6, 2010
