Be Original? But How?

A letter to my nephew Nathaniel

My sister lives in Australia with her two sons, Wiley and Nathaniel, and their dad. I adore and miss all of them, but I have a special bond with Nathaniel, who it has turned out has a brain exactly like mine. He came to me with urgent questions about how to make art, what to do with creativity, how to not be hard on himself, what happens when your brain isn’t making new ideas. For context: the child just turned nine and we’ve been talking about this for a few years. He’s as driven as I always was, and seeing these traits crop up in another family member has been an amazing and beautiful healing opportunity for me in addition to just being so cool

Wiley and Nathaniel from a few years ago. I love them both equally and they are my favorite nephews!

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I always thought of myself as a little feral intense weirdo, because the way I think and work and act seemed to stick out as being very different from my family and my peers. From the minute I first talked to my sister in my mom’s kitchen about Nathaniel, and then wrote him an initial letter about making things and care of his brain, I got to re-see myself not as a viciously focused gnome of making but as a person with a certain brain. And Nathaniel has that brain too. So here’s my open letter to Nathaniel.

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Dear Nathaniel,

You recently asked me via a text from your mom about how to write stories that aren’t derivative. First, that’s a great vocabulary word! And it’s also a word that puts a lot of pressure on you. It sees the world, and making things, in terms of a dividing line: truly original versus copies. That’s a rough place to inhabit for an artist and writer, and it almost guarantees that frustration will follow, because most of the time, what you make is going to be derivative. That’s what everyone does.

Actually, being derivative is the source of art. When I was your age, I started writing a novel called Many Deaths To Be Yet Avenged. (I know, quite the heavy title.) It was a rip-off of the plot of Star Wars, which I know you love as much as I do, except I put two little girls in place of Luke and Han Solo and changed their characters. Because these little girls didn’t have access to vehicles, they basically had to walk miles to the Death Star which was on the ground. Not much happened besides walking.

I’m not gonna publish that novel, but I still remember the exact joy of writing that thing. Realizing I could write a book. Learning by teaching myself how to write, and getting completely lost in the details of making and imagining each scene and character. That’s a pure experience—the joy of making—that you have to protect.

When you’re a few years older, I’ll send you another great book, Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. She talks about judgment, about how all artists and writers have it, and it is the machine that makes us critical of our own work in order to understand what to fix. But you can’t use that machine early in the process, just like you can’t build a house with a paintbrush. You have to first build the house with other tools, and then at the end you get to paint it. If you start too early with the tool of judgment, or if you sit down and say meanly to your precious brain, “Make something original!” your imagination is going to shut down and go back into its hidey-hole. Imagination comes out when you make it clear that it’s time to play. The only way you’ll eventually make stuff that’s original is if you let your imagination grow up with you, if you let it play and practice on whatever it feels like it wants to play with.

If you want to write something that is exactly like Star Wars, that’s what you should do. It’s so much fun! Along the way, you begin to get to know yourself, and your imagination builds its muscles. You start to see glimmers of your own imagination’s specific weirdness, and that’s good. We want the weirdness. I began to see that, in my fiction, little girls popped up everywhere, and so I kept writing about them. Eventually, slowly, I grew the confidence and skill to write things that leaned more and more into my specific weirdnesses. You have to discover your beautiful weirdness within yourself, and let it play and grow, and eventually, that’s how you gain the skill and confidence to make things that are more original.

Everyone leans on everyone else. All art is a mash-up of other things, a huge conversation. We share techniques and support and learn from each other. It’s not a competition, but it feels like that because we’re competing each with ourselves, pushing ourselves to make the next cool thing, to try hard and have big exhausting fun. So if someone says to you, “That’s derivative,” you can say, “That’s exactly right: I’m at this stage in my artistic practice and I’m learning. I’m right where I need to be!”

People who don’t make things say things like “that’s derivative” because they don’t know where creativity comes from, or they have the mistaken and very old-fashioned view that a deeply critical eye is the only way that cool stuff gets made. We know it’s play, and that we have to protect and understand and be gentle with the brains and hearts and imaginations that help us make everything we can think of.

So here’s what you do. When you sit down to make or write something, you say to yourself: “This is playing, and playing is the only way my mind is going to grow. There’s no pressure here. Afterward, when it’s done, I’ll take a step back and look at it, see what I built, and decide what to do differently the next time, but whenever I’m critical of my own work, I’ll also vow to notice what I like and what I want to do more of.”

Huge love from your equally weird-brained Aunt Sawn

Nathaniel and me from a few years ago.

It’s Nathaniel’s birthday this week, so I got him Rick Rubin’s new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being and Lynda Barry’s What It Is, both of which, to me, embody the spirit of play.