Revising Up

This is the final installment of my three article series on revision. In the first article (“Many Minds”), I introduced the concept of the “receptive stance”—the state of humility, openness, and trust required to acknowledge new ideas and recognize the new pathways they reveal. The second article in the series (“Assembling Your Creative Council: Demons, Muses, and Guides”), introduced the “creative council”—a curated assembly of your demons (the inner critics that block you), your muses (the people, attributes, and/or works that inspire you), and your guides (the people past and/or present who mentor you). In this article, you’ll learn how to use your creative council to work through your creative blocks, guide your work in progress, and work toward your long-term creative goals.

Revising With Empathy

We make to know. In his book The Art of Revision, the fiction writer Peter Ho Davies calls revision “…an ongoing process of creativity, inspiration, and discovery, in which we continue to learn, to refine our intent, to come to understand what our own stories mean as we know them better.” Yes, the goal of revision is to produce ever “more perfect” drafts, but the way we make our work better is knowing it better. Often, this means letting go of our initial intentions for the work so we can discover the intentions embodied in the work itself. To do this, you need to experience your work from a different perspective—to imagine a member of your intended audience and read from their perspective.

The widely celebrated fiction and essay writer George Saunders describes revision as “welcoming” the reader into the rarefied world you’ve created. But welcoming in the reader is more than seeing through their eyes—it’s reading from their perspective with empathy and belief in the intelligence of your reader:

We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties—the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonor her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”

And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.

—George Saunders, “What Writers Really Do When They Write.” The Guardian, March 4, 2017

Empathy is also a critical component of engaging with your creative council. In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown defines empathy as “understanding what someone is feeling, not feeling it for them”—what researchers call “cognitive empathy” or “perspective taking.” The ability to listen and respond with empathy improves our interpersonal decision making, our ethical decision making, our capacity to make moral judgements, and our creative work. Saunders adds that revising with respect and empathy for your reader increases the “ambient intelligence” of a piece of writing:

…it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.

—George Saunders, “What Writers Really Do When They Write.” The Guardian, March 4, 2017

The key to revising with empathy, and to successfully using your creative council, is summed up in this quote from Brown’s book:

We need to dispel the myth that empathy is “walking in someone else’s shoes.” Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.

—Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart

Believing the feedback we hear from others about our creative work,even when it doesn’t match our experience, is the essence of the revision process—whether the feedback is real, or imagined as we use the experimenter’s mindset to read our work through the perspectives of others.

Seating Your Creative Council

If you read the last article in this series, you’re familiar with the role your demons, muses, and guides play in your creative council. Hopefully, you’ve given some thought to the representatives of each group that make up your council.* Now it’s time to seat your council.

We’re all familiar with the momentary pause that occurs every time we step into a meeting room and the nagging question “Where should I sit.” Even if you’re not familiar with the dynamics of seating arrangements, you instinctively know that where you sit matters. It reflects your relationship to the leader of the meeting and affects how you interact with the other attendees, especially those whose ideas often conflict with yours. The same is true for the members of your creative council. The graphic below shows how I visualize the seating for my creative council:

My Demons and Muses sit across from one another. My Guides sit in the power positions at the two ends of the table. The “table” in the middle is the space in the creative problem-solving process I call the “Maker’s Workshop.”** It’s the transitional space between divergence and convergence where most of the work in the creative problem-solving process gets done, or as Lin-Manuel Miranda memorably named it in Hamilton, The Room Where It Happens.***

Research on seating arrangements shows that seating around circular tables facilitates collaboration. But circular tables also diminish the power of the leaders of the meeting. The rectangular seating arrangement above empowers your guides—the voices you’ve picked and will rely on as you navigate your way through the creative problem-solving process.

The following visualization exercise will help you bring your creative advisory council to life. As you pose questions to the council, it’s easier to sort through the different points of view the members represent if you’re able to imagine the meeting room, the people at the table, and their physical relationships to one another.

To complete this exercise, use this worksheet to describe the meeting room and seat the members of your council. You can choose a rectangular table or a circular table.

Your completed seating chart will look something like this:

Using Your Creative Council to Work Through Creative Blocks

You may wonder why your Demons have seats at your creative advisory council table. As I wrote in “The Inner Life of the Inner Critic”:

All of us are familiar with the inner critic: the voice inside your head that delights in belittling, criticizing, and judging you. It’s hard to exaggerate the impact the inner critic can have on your creativity and productivity. Your inner critic can destroy your self-confidence and your career. Many skilled, successful creatives have walked away from their careers because they couldn’t overcome the unrelenting negative thoughts voiced by their inner critic.

Some envision the nagging, critical commentary that runs through their head as the voice of a single hyper-critical inner demon. Others hear the stream as the voices of different inner demons, each with a talent for undermining, sabotaging, impeding, and blocking their success.

You’ll find all kinds of suggestions for dealing with your inner critic(s) and creative blocks from psychologists, therapists, artists, and others focused on enhancing creative work. But the prescription for diminishing the power of your internal critical chatter and working through creative blocks always starts with the same first step: you must acknowledge and name your inner critic(s).

If you took the short Inner Critic Quiz I introduced in the last article, you know which inner critics affect your creative work the most and the fears that motivate them. The approach to working with your inner critics I’ve adopted for this exercise is inspired by the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz.**** The IFS model is based on the idea that we are all “multiple,” meaning that we don’t have one mind—We have many minds that are constantly interacting with one another. That interaction is what we call “thinking.” In the IFS system, each of these minds is called a “part.” A core tenant of the IFS approach is that there are no “bad” parts. In his book “No Bad Parts,” Dr. Schwartz tells us:

  • Even the most destructive parts have protective intentions.

  • Parts are often frozen in past traumas when their extreme roles were needed.

  • When they trust it’s safe to step out of their roles, they are highly valuable to the system.

Your creative blocks are barriers laid by your inner critics. They are there to keep you from the consequences of succeeding that your inner critics fear. For example, one incarnation of the inner critic is The Conformist, who tries to get you to fit into molds set by society or your family. The Conformist fears the free spirit in you who may act in unexpected ways that might lead to rejection, shame, or abandonment. As a result, it keeps you from being in touch with and expressing your true nature.

Imagine you’re a musician who loves jazz, but you believe you’re not capable of improvising. Every time you try, you hear a voice in your head shout, “That’s the wrong note!” The Conformist has undermined your belief in your ability and your trust in your musical instincts. You’re blocked, but your creative council can help. You can look to your muses for inspiration and your guides for help navigating a way forward.

Miles Davis, one of my muses, said, “It's not the note you play that's the wrong note, it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” Davis’ words encourage us to build on what we believe are “mistakes” with the same commitment that we display when we believe we’re building on a success.

One of my guides, Brian Eno, gives us a method for doing just that with his Oblique Strategies cards. The cards, randomly selected, provide short, sometimes enigmatic instructions. Using the cards successfully demands that you commit to executing the instruction, even if doing so feels silly or “wrong.”

Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards provide a way around the creative block laid down by The Conformist, and Davis’ words are the foundation for a new story about the art of improvisation that dispels the idea about starting off on a wrong note. The fears that motivate The Conformist are understandable, but the stories that express those fears have become distorted—what began as an impulse to protect has become an overprotective falsehood. But bringing the minds of others into the conversation changes the story. As George Saunders says in the quote above: “Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.” Many minds can make short work of creative blocks.

Using Your Creative Council to Revise Your Work

Seeing your work from the perspective of others reveals what’s working in your draft and what’s not, but it doesn’t ‌help you figure out what to do about the areas where your work is falling short of your goals. It’s up to you to determine how to respond to the feedback you receive—you and your creative council. Your muses can help.

The word “inspiration” comes from the Latin work “inspiratio,” which means “drawing in of breath,” or “being breathed into by the Divine.” When you are inspired by something, you draw it into yourself, and in the process connect with something larger than yourself. Your muses can shape (inform) your creative problem-solving process. When you turn to your muses in revision, you are asking them to help you reform your thoughts—to see again through their eyes.

I am inspired by beauty. I believe the pursuit of beauty is a primal force in nature. In my article “Cathedrals of the Imagination and Other Beautiful Things,” I explored the nature of beauty and the idea that some works of art express such an expansive sense of beauty that they become cathedrals of the imagination:

…spaces expansive enough to generate and accommodate the endless “replications and resemblances” required to keep a work alive throughout the ages. Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s symphonies, and Martin Scorcese’s films all come to mind—as do many others... These are works of unique substance, grandeur, complexity, and beauty. Like the monuments built of stone, these works of art connect us with the eternal, but remain rooted in the world. They live as long as our ability to animate them lives, to endlessly connect with and reimagine the animating spirit that informed their creation.

Another cathedral I often visit is the one formed by the music of Joni Mitchell. Over the course of her career she has created moments of exquisite beauty in an astonishing range of musical contexts—from moments of unadorned beauty on the album Blue, to the tone poems on Hejira, and the radical recasting of some of her best-known songs on Travelogue. In every instance, Mitchell’s moments of beauty are earned. They are the result of her commitment to emotional honesty, her engaging storytelling, her superb craft, her uncompromising artistry, and her fearlessness.

When I breathe in the spirit of Joni Mitchell, I feel braver, more open to expressing my feelings, more sensitive to the nuances of the story I’m telling, more committed to raising the level of my craft, and more confident in my artistic vision. In those moments, she is both an inspiration and a guide.

But there’s nothing random about these moments of inspiration. Joni Mitchell is seated at the table because she is an enduring inspiration. The difference between passing inspirations and the muses you’ve chosen for your creative council is the intention: the muses you return to direct the work at hand and your career. They are your beacons.

Using Your Creative Council to Achieve Your Long-Term Creative Goals

Imagine that you arrive early for a creative council meeting and find one of your guides sitting at an end of the conference table, sipping their morning coffee. You sit in the chair next to them. Your guide acknowledges you, smiles, and asks, “How are you?” Chances are, you’ll respond with a pleasantry, such as “I’m fine.” Revealing the true state of our interior being is hard, especially when we’re asked to open up to someone we admire, whose approval we seek. But to engage in a meaningful relationship with a mentor—even an imaginary one—you must be willing to being seen, to be recognized as the person you are right now, with all your rough edges and flaws.

How you are is the focus of mentorship: how you frame your challenges, how you navigate life's complexities, how you choose the stepping stones on your path toward your goals, how you choose the members of your creative family tree. While we like to believe that we choose our mentors. In truth, we are often drawn toward them by something we may not even be able to articulate—a feeling that they have something to teach us, something we intrinsically know we need to learn. That magnetic, bonding force is the very thing we need to learn about: what attracts us to a mentor is often a trait, skill, or strength that we believe we lack—or have, but are uncomfortable with.

Developing a fruitful relationship with a creative mentor requires curiosity, an open mind, and time. You need to immerse yourself in your mentor’s work, learn about the personal and creative challenges they faced, and understand why they made the choices they did—even if you think you would have made different choices. You need to be able to visualize your mentor as a living person: someone who is passionate about their work, who is wrestling with their doubts, their challenges, and their shortcomings, just as you are. When you breathe life into your mentors, they become a living presence within you and in your creative work.

The value of your relationship with your creative council guides comes from the quality of the questions you ask them and the effort you put into finding the answers. More than once I’ve struggled with the work of a writer, visual artist, or musician that had a hold on me even though I didn’t really connect with or understand their work. I just had a feeling that there was something in their work and life that I needed to explore… I would start reading about the artist—learning about their life, creative ambitions, and process, and then the work would start to make sense. I understood their intentions, how the work expressed those intentions, and the choices they made along the way. I could see their work—and mine—through their eyes.

In opening up to an imaginary mentor, you’re opening up yourself to whatever forms the bond between the two of you. You’re both seeing and being seen, and in the process finding the validation you need to continue on your creative journey.

We Are Many

I want to close this series with the lovely poem We Are Many by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (translated by Alastair Reid). When we have empathy for ourselves; for the many voices that protect, inspire, and guide us; and for our intended audience, we are capable of creating new worlds.

We Are Many

Of the many men who I am, who we are,
I can’t find a single one;
they disappear among my clothes,
they’ve left for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as intelligent,
the fool I always keep hidden
takes over all that I say.

At other times, I’m asleep
among distinguished people,
and when I look for my brave self,
a coward unknown to me
rushes to cover my skeleton
with a thousand fine excuses.

When a decent house catches fire,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and that’s me. What can I do?
What can I do to distinguish myself?
How can I pull myself together?

All the books I read
are full of dazzling heroes,
always sure of themselves.
I die with envy of them;
and in films full of wind and bullets,
I goggle at the cowboys,
I even admire the horses.

But when I call for a hero,
out comes my lazy old self;
so I never know who I am,
nor how many I am or will be.
I’d love to be able to touch a bell
and summon the real me,
because if I really need myself,
I mustn’t disappear.

While I am writing, I’m far away;
and when I come back, I’ve gone.
I would like to know if others
go through the same things that I do,
have as many selves as I have,
and see themselves similarly;
and when I’ve exhausted this problem,
I’m going to study so hard
that when I explain myself,
I’ll be talking geography. 

Pablo Neruda, “We Are Many” or “Muchos somos,” from Extravagario, copyright ©1958 by Pablo Neruda and Fundación Pablo Neruda. Translation copyright ©1974 by Alastair Reid. Published by FSG in 1974 in Extravagaria

Footnotes

* If not, pause here and read the descriptions of the three groups in the previous article in this series, “Assembling Your Creative Council: Demons, Muses, and Guides.”

** See my article "The Way Forward" for more on the Maker's Workshop and my Make to Know model of creative problem-solving.

*** See my article “The Room Where It Happens” for more on the concept of “inner space,” aka the room in our psyche where “it” (our creative life) happens.

**** To learn more about the Internal Family Systems model, visit the Internal Family Systems Institute website. The following books will introduce you to the model and help you start applying it:

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Five Essential Things I’ve Learned About Creativity

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Assembling Your Creative Council: Demons, Muses, and Guides