How to Find Energy for Creative Work
When I worked at Pivotal I didn't write, for years. The job was just too totalizing. I made it harder on myself by also dating at work, and socializing almost exclusively through work, so even when I wasn't at work I was often talking about work
Last issue I asked ya'll for questions, and I got some really lovely ones, and then I got hellaciously sick — "just" a respiratory viral thing but had a fever, basically slept straight through for several days, etc. etc. So, no newsletter last week.
This week I'm answering the following question, from an anonymous writer.
How do you find energy to come home after work and invest time in hobbies that take skill and effort to learn and refine? Even when so-called "motivation" strikes, by the time I commute home I find myself resting on the couch with my dog. It's nice, but I can't help but mourn building skills and being proud of creation, especially when programming was that passion for me until recently given the advent of AI
The classic answer is: Do it every day, first thing in the morning.
This has always worked... sort of okay, for me? I go through periods when I can do it and then I go through periods where I don't. I was doing a pretty good job at working on the novel every day, but then see "hellaciously sick" above, and now I haven't worked on it for a week. I did start doing morning pages again, and I'm even doing them mostly in the morning.
If you haven't read it already get yourself a copy of The Artist's Way. Yeah yeah yeah spiritual discovery— this is mostly a book about "ways to be creative." Classic for a reason.
I feel slightly ridiculous answering this question without acknowledging though: I don't have a normal job. I've warped pretty much my entire life around not having to have a normal job. I work remotely, and mostly I work for a small business that I own. I'm building StoryTime, a project management tool inspired by Pivotal Tracker. I also do some consulting — yesterday I spent a few hours with a coaching client, working with them on Elixir skills in particular and "how do we get better at software work?" in general. Occasionally I do longer contracting gigs.
Anyway the point is: I make a lot less money than I could otherwise, and in exchange I have more free time and more flexibility in how I spend my time.
This is possible because I share living expenses with a partner (who has made some similar tradeoffs but spends relatively less of his time working on StoryTime and relatively more of his time on client work) and because I live in Minneapolis. I cannot emphasize this enough. We bought a house. Our mortgage is one third what our rent was in the Bay Area, for a place that is bigger and in many ways nicer. A bunch of other expenses are lower as well. It is so much easier to do creative work with lower fixed living expenses.
If I was really optimizing for creative work I probably wouldn't have started the software business, because the culture around software business is such that there's always this sense that I could and maybe should be working on it more. But as "get a 20-30 hour software contracting gig, and then move somewhere where this comfortably pays the mortgage" is a strategy.
A maybe more practical, workable answer is: Classes. Right now, I'm learning improv. I'm taking Very Good Improv's 301 class. (If you're in the Twin Cities, VGI is great, highly recommend, they do a jam every-other-Wednesday if you don't want to jump all the way into a class.) Improv is the kind of thing that's not really possible to do by yourself so it lends itself to a class a more than a lot of creative hobbies but there's nothing like a weekly class with other people at it for putting some scaffolding around your intention to develop a skill.
The last answer is that for me what skills I can develop and what hobbies I can do depends a lot on what else is going on in my life. They have to fit. Often the job is taking some resource and it's hard to do work that also depends on that resource but I can do other things.
For example: In one of my first jobs I was doing data entry. There was a little bit of thinking but it was mostly, "look stuff up in this database and then enter it into this other database." I was very, very bored. I got really into playing Magic: the Gathering during this period. When I switched from data entry to learning programming I mostly stopped playing Magic.
When I worked at Pivotal I didn't write, for years. The job was just too totalizing. I made it harder on myself by also dating at work, and socializing almost exclusively through work, so even when I wasn't at work I was often talking about work, but a full-time, intellectually demanding job is just a tough combination with doing any kind of demanding creative work.
I had a weird little burst in the middle of it of getting really into resin pouring. I was very depressed, I got broken up with, and I did what I think anyone would do when faced with a breakup: I went browsing on Amazon for new hobbies. I wanted to do something that involved colors. I landed on, "Oh, dolls eyes are neat, I want something that gives me an excuse to buy dolls eyes." And so for a couple of weeks what I would do is come home and spend about an hour pouring resin and then bring the terrible little flat disks that resulted into work to upset my coworkers.
That hobby didn't stick because I didn't really have anything to do with the little pieces of plastic it generated, but about a year later I moved to Santa Monica, and — again, I was very depressed — and I got my depressed self on a bus and took that bus to Best Buy and I bought a Nikon D3500 and I started taking photographs of everything. I was obsessed. I have like a foot of photography books from that period because all I did was go to work and then come home and make photographs and then think about composition and how to make the dials on the camera do what I wanted them to do.
It was magical. This is something that photographers talk about occasionally — there's an energy to that first six months or so with the camera, where you're taking photographs of absolutely everything, that's hard to really replicate later. It didn't exactly fix my depression or anything but it helped. It was engrossing.
I bought that camera because of a piece of advice that I remember having gotten through Google Plus, which means it would have been years before this, so it's entirely possible that it's from somewhere else entirely but anyway the point is— I'd been talking about how I was creatively dissatisfied, and I used to write, but I hadn't really written for years, and in particular I could never seem to get to the point with the writing where I got to edit, I just kept starting small projects and then spinning my wheels and starting over. And some very wise person, whose name I sadly do not recall, said something like, "You might try something that has faster feedback. Have you ever tried photography?"
Anyway the point being: If you are struggling to find the energy to work on whatever you usually work on, try something wildly different. If you're usually verbal try something visual. If you're usually visual, try something music. Move from two dimensions to three. If you usually work solo try something that can only be done with other people. Buy a bunch of dolls eyes and resin teeth off of Amazon.
There's a balance here I think, that's hard to really stay on top of because it's always shifting underneath you, between "sticking to the same things" and "trying new stuff, as the urges strikes." It can be useful to stick to a schedule, to do the creative thing that you usually do, because you can build up energy that way. Sometimes the frustration needs to be pushed through. Other times the frustration or the lack of energy is a sign that you're not actually digging the thing that you're doing.
And then we get back to the purely practical considerations: When I moved to Santa Monica I also shortened my commute from 40 minutes to about 10. I don't think it's an accident that I started doing more work outside of work with a full hour a day back like that. It seems to me that a lot of being creative — a lot of life? — is this way. You can take a problem head on, but often there's more progress available by shifting things around behind the problem.
What helps me specifically with writing is reminding myself that I really, really love it. Noticing that I always feel better after I write. I don't know why this is so impossible to understand before I write, and so obvious afterwards.
(Having written all this out, I suspect that the AI part of your question could be a whole other essay. "What do I do with my drive towards technical mastery in a world where these things are becoming a big part of programming?" For a minute I was trying to channel that into getting good at driving them, but they change so fast and behave so erratically that trying to master them feels slippery-pointless.)
If you, too, have a question for me, enter it into Yonder Question Form. Maybe I'll answer it in the next newsletter!