The Secret to Creating Authentic Work
It’s not as hard as you might think…
This article is adapted from a talk given by Nicholas Sailer on January 29th, 2016. You can view the talk here.
I’m starting to hate my life, not because I’m a terrible person — I’m not suicidal, and I don’t hate life itself. I’m starting to hate my life, because I have ideas that are in my head, burning and fighting, like small little Olympic gods, cramped inside my skull, and they just won’t stop. They wrestle every night and I can feel them punching each other — It’s not the best feeling, but without them, I don’t feel very much at all.
“Oh, that’s schizophrenia,” I’ve heard before, but no, it’s not. This is different, I’m sure of it. These small little deities aren’t personalities, and if they were, they wouldn’t be my personalities. They have voices, of course (who doesn’t?), but they aren’t my voices. These demi-gods are just ideas, though; they fight each other in a way that would make Charles Darwin proud that he named his theory ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s a beautiful battle, but a bloody one and a horrific one that has no escape, and rarely a resolution.
On the outside, my eyelids twitch because I only got about three hours of sleep last night, but inside my skull, the twitching eyelids are the least of my worries — they’re just the side effects of an all-out, good-and-hardy, down-and-out fist fight. And every so often, they miss each other and hit the back of my eyeballs, causing my eyelids to twitch.
“You should see a doctor.” I’ve heard that before, too. I thought that would solve this little headache issue of mine, so I gave it a try. But I didn’t get a solution, I just got drugs and pills, and ideas don’t like drugs and pills, they like pen and paper. No, I didn’t need a doctor, I needed a new notebook, or better yet, a giant whiteboard where my ideas could splay themselves out across the wall and move the battle onward.
Onward, and upward, more violent and more creative. The battle raged in ways and shapes I never expected. The ideas started to learn karate and tai-kwon-do and archery and fencing and finally I just had to stop them and ask them:
“Where do you guys learn all of this anyway? I don’t know any of this!.”
But of course they didn’t answer, they just kept on fighting until it wasn’t just the twitchy eyelids, but muscle spasms and jittery fingers and achy backs and stiff knees.
Finally, I met a man who shared the same problem — enduring the endless fighting inside the war torn no-man’s land inside his brain. I happened to take a seat next to him on the trolley, and he took one look at me and said: “It’s the ideas, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course, you have them, too?” I said, probably sounding like an excited schoolboy going through puberty. “How do you survive them?”
He looked at me and smiled.
“Oh, I put them all down. They’re under control. The only thing they do now is knock on my door when they’re hungry and I bring them a nice little brown paper bag of groceries, and that keeps them quiet for a while.”
“Oh,” I said, startled quite a bit. And before I had a chance to ask whether or not it was worth it, the trolley stopped and the man got off. Just then, I heard a knocking on the door to my brain, followed by a terrible bang of a grenade going off inside my head.
A nice little brown paper bag of groceries? I thought. You traded your raging ideas for nice little brown paper bag full of groceries?
You traded your sleepless nights, your wild rabbit-hole conversations, your crazed poetry filled stampedes, your ballistic word canons and your semi-automatic illustration sprees and your violent brainstorming escapades and your spontaneous, directionless wandering for peace of mind and a bag of groceries?
I shrugged, and stayed on that goddamn trolley, wherever it was going to take me, my eyes twitching with every stop.
This story was one out of 365 short stories that I wrote in a project that I did called A Story Each Day. I realized in this project that often, I felt more comfortable speaking the language of stories than I did speaking the language of English. I felt most comfortable when I was writing stories. And it brings up this question:
What is your language?
When we commonly think of language, we think: English or Spanish, or French, or German. We think about a collection of words used by a certain country or a certain region. But very rarely do we think about language in the broader definition: A means of communication. It’s not that often that we think of photography as a language, graphic design as a language, or filmmaking, or dance, or painting, or music cooking, or business. These are the languages that I want you to think about.
My discovery of the language of stories started right out of school. I went to the College of Design in Raleigh, in North Carolina, and I was determined that I was going to tell stories through films. I’d made a couple of films in school that were pretty successful, and so like any aspiring filmmaker, I decided I was going to either move to LA or to NY, because that’s what aspiring filmmakers do.
In preparation for this, I started sending my resume out to hundreds of different companies. But I did this during the evening — During the day I worked this absolutely terrible job doing door-to-door political surveys to save up money to move.
I remember the day when I got the first reply to one of my resumes: I was going door to door in some random suburb in Cary (I now have a hatred for random suburbs in Cary, no offense to anyone who lives in a random suburb in Cary), and I got a call from this video production company in Manhattan, saying:
“We like your resume, we want you to start in August, we’ll pay you $40 a day.”
I said yes.
This is the first thing that I want you to take from this article:
Anytime we try to take a step forward in our journey as creative people, anytime we try to learn a language, we have to embrace uncertainty.
We have to have faith.
I had no idea what I was doing moving to NYC. I’d been there once. I had a handful of friends, but I moved into a closet of an apartment with four other people that I’d never met before, with a company I didn’t know, with an internship that paid $40 a day. I packed my life into a suitcase, climbed onto an overnight bus, and got dropped off in the middle of Chinatown the next morning.
Talk about not understanding the language.
When I got to New York, I immediately joined an artist’s group, similar to Creative Mornings, where once a week a new artist would share what they were working on.
One of the artists in particular said something about her process that shifted the way I understood learning this language of stories. It was like the Rosetta Stone for me — I understood my language that much better because of it.
She said that she’d practiced every single day for 25 years. That when she forgot to practice, it felt like she’d skipped a meal. Like something was wrong.
I realized that learning to tell stories, like any filmmaker has to do, is like learning a language. Every creative discipline is like learning a language. If you only practice learning a language, say Spanish or French, once every couple of weeks, or once every couple of months, it’s impossible. You won’t learn that language by practicing that often. It has to be something that you do every single day. If you want to speak a language fluently, you have to practice that language every single day. It has to become part of who you are, not just part of what you do.
So I decided that in the next year, I was going to write one story every single day for an entire year. I was going to start January 1st, and I was going to go to December 31st, and I was going to do this the entire year.
How hard can this be?
I realized that if I had known how difficult it would be, I never would have started.
And this brings me to the idea of faith, once again. I had no idea what I was doing. I had written short stories before, but never anything to this scale. Part of it was this element of faith, not looking at the scale of this project, but only looking at it one day at a time.
I knew I could write one story in one day. And this project was just a matter of having faith that I could continue doing this throughout the entire year.
There are some really beautiful examples of this idea of having faith in a creative project.
I recently discovered this one:
This is the large hadron collider in Europe. When they began the design and planning for this project in the early 90’s, the technology that they knew they would need didn’t even exist yet. They had to move forward and begin the project knowing that they would have to invent it as they went. They had to had faith in their project.
And so in any creative project, anytime you’re learning a new language, whether it’s English, or Spanish, stories, code, business, cooking, anytime you’re creating something out of nothing, there’s always this crucial element of faith that’s necessary to get that project accomplished.
To give you an idea of the process I went through:
Usually, I would write at the end of the day. I would get off my $40 a day internship, and I would scramble onto the subway with these crowds of people in New York, 45 minutes or an hour back to Brooklyn, and I would run up the 5 flights of stairs up to my closet of an apartment with four other people living their lives, and I would sit down and stair at this blank page.
Now — All of you know how difficult it is to have faith in something. I went through this every day, and I know all of you go through this: when you stare at a blank page or a blank canvas, you get this fear that can grip you, and you start to think:
“I have no idea what to write.” “I have no idea what I should draw.” “I have no idea what this business decision should be.”
This is a rough draft from one of my stories. It’s actually really funny, because I would sit down in front of this blank page and if I had no idea what to write, I would literally write the word “Write” until I couldn’t write that word anymore, and I would write a different word, and then I would write that word until I couldn’t write that word anymore and I would write a different word, and I would keep writing different words until it formed a sentence, and use that sentence as a springboard to jump into the story, which is exactly what I did with this rough draft.
It’s really amazing though, because a couple of weeks ago I was looking through my computer and I found this folder of rough drafts. I didn’t even realize how many I had, but I discovered probably 250 rough draft documents. Most of them are just small fragments of ridiculous stuff like this, but it goes to show that element of faith that we all have to have when we go through the creative process on a daily basis.
I know so many of us have faced that blank page, and just decided, “I’m going to keep going”, even when we were afraid of not having anything to say.
Halfway through the project, I got a call from a good friend of mine, and he said “I know you’re working this $40 a day internship. I’m starting a company, and I want you to move back to Raleigh and help me start this company.” And so that’s what I did.
When I moved away from Raleigh, I was so determined and excited to leave. I was so excited to jump into this wild adventure of New York City. So when I moved back to Raleigh, I was faced with a lot of these questions of direction and what I was doing with my life. It was very scary, because there was this similar element of faith in moving back to Raleigh. I had been so excited to leave, and had worked really hard to feel like I was done with Raleigh. It was behind me, I didn’t need to go back. So when I moved back, it really felt like I was returning to something that I’d buried. It felt like I was facing an old challenge again in a new way.
I want to share another story with you. Anytime you’re faced with these big decisions of starting a company or moving to a new city or starting a project like this, these questions find their way into your creative work.
I distinctly remember when I wrote this story. I was going for a run in downtown Raleigh. And I remember looking around at all of the buildings that were going up, and all of the construction that was happening: The old buildings that were being demolished and the new buildings that were popping up and the streets that were being repaved and the streets that were being rearranged.
I remember thinking about all of the change and all of the growth that was happening in Raleigh. And then when I got home, I started to think about all of the change and all of the growth that was happening in my life.
I wrote this story on July 30th, and it’s titled “Lines of Paint in my Mind.”
The streets of Raleigh are marked and lined with construction spray paint — The kind that workers use to denote where electrical wires are buried. Where to dig and where not to dig. Where it’s okay to drill and where it’s not okay to drill, where the water lines run, and where there’s nothing but plain old dirt. Raleigh is growing and expanding by the minute, and by the time one building is finished, they start tearing up the lot right next to it and start something new.
But for every line of construction spray paint that’s put down, it’s inevitable that they’d miss one, isn’t it? Of course it is. Somehow the line of spray paint that was supposed to denote where the main water pipe is on our street never got marked. I woke up one morning, flipped the water on to brush my teeth, and no water came out.
I stepped outside to see a flood of water pouring down our street, turning the road into a shallow river. I looked upstream to see a crew of construction members, staring down into a hole in the ground. One of them held a jackhammer, one of them held a shovel, and one of them held a sandwich. I wandered up to them, still clothed only in gym shorts and an old X-men t-shirt.
“Any idea when the water’s coming back on?” I asked, trying to sound respectful.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” The one with the sandwich muttered, in between bites. “We’re tryin’ to get this thing fixed as fast as we can, but it could take all day.”
“What happened?”
“Idiot didn’t mark it. Marked all the other spots, but the missed this one, so we thought it was clear. Idiot”
I frowned, looking at the steady spring of water shooting out of the ground.
I turned around and went back inside, trying to pretend like I hadn’t missed several vital parts of my morning routine.
While I should’ve been in the shower, or brushing my teeth, or at least on my second cup of coffee, I imagined all of the places where there are missing construction markers, painted onto the ground. The street in front of my house isn’t the only place that doesn’t have markings, telling the workers where they should be going and where they shouldn’t be going. I’m pretty sure that if there is a God, he forgot a couple of spray painted lines in my life.
No doubt, someone as productive as God would be building and growing things all the time, wouldn’t he? He has the entire world to look after, and millions of people asking him for things, every single day. It only makes sense that he’d have someone mark the pavement in the minds of the people he’s working on. And with all of those people, it only makes sense that somewhere, there’d be a line that somebody missed.
So when God finally gets to me, he’d start building full force, knocking down old ruins and drilling down in the dirt of my mind to secure the foundations of whatever the hell he’s building. The street in front of my house isn’t the only place that’s missing some guiding lines of paint, and so for all of God’s good intentions, he hits the main water line, and turns the street in my mind into a river.
My thoughts wash through the street, flooding the sidewalks and rushing over those memories that wouldn’t budge. The secrets that I’d buried years ago become unearthed, and those hidden grudges that I thought were safe and secure wash to the surface. That time that I lied to dad bubbles right to the surface, along with that relationship with that girl that I haven’t talked to in years, but have thought about every day. My mother drifts past, followed by all of the times I ignored her when all she wanted was to get to know her son. They wash by, and I’m left standing in a soggy front yard, surrounded by fragments of trash and litter that I thought were long gone by now.
I stare at the river, rushing through the front lawn of my mind, just wishing I could brush my freaking teeth. I begin to wonder whether or not this was part of God’s plan all along, or whether somebody just forgot to tell him where the water line was.
I wrote this story right when I moved back to Raleigh, about eight months through the project. And about nine to ten months into the project, September, October, and into November, the project started to become really difficult. I faced this uncomfortable feeling of looking at this blank page every single day.
Every single night I would get done with work and rush back to the apartment — and sometimes this way pretty late — sometimes I wouldn’t get to stare at this blank word document until midnight.
But I would face it every single day.
And when I was done, I would go to sleep knowing that when I woke up, I would have to face this blank document again. And then again, the day after that, and again the day after that.
This became a huge challenge. It became really, really scary.
But this is something that you come across in any creative project: You exhaust the easy channels, or the easy stories to tell, or the easy words to learn. You start to run out of ideas that come off the top of your head, and that’s when you really start to stretch yourself.
I felt this every single day. I would sit down and just have no idea what to write.
It got to the point where I would find the most mundane and insignificant details and I would struggle to find a way to tie them to complex narratives and turn them into complex character relationships.
By about nine or ten months in, I actually had people tell me: “Maybe you should just cap this at nine months. This can be a nine month project — it’s nice round number, just cap it at nine months.”
During this time, I came up with one rule. I knew that that if I followed this rule, I would finish the project successfully. It’s very simple:
You can’t go to sleep until you’ve written a story.
So I was really faced with this fear of being able to complete the project, but at the same time, I had another fear start to creep in. Are these stories good enough? Will anyone want to read these stories? It wasn’t just the fear of facing the blank page anymore. It wasn’t just the fear of being able to finish. I started to feel this fear of my stories not being good enough.
As I neared the end of the project, I started to think about what form these stories would take, and I knew I wanted to be able to hold these stories in my hands. No matter how this project ended, that would be enough for me. In November of 2014, I started planning a Kickstarter campaign.
This was tricky, because on top of all of the uncertainty I felt about what I was doing, literary publishing projects are not the most popular Kickstarter projects online. I started doing research into running a Kickstarter: What is the best time of the week to launch a Kickstarter campaign? What’s the best time of day to launch a Kickstarter campaign? What’s the best strategy for launching? How much should I try to raise? What’s the optimal margin per reward? What kind of video should I create?
At the very beginning of December, the last month of this project, I launched the campaign. I was still in the depths of this blank page. And I felt like my stories were getting worse, and worse, and worse. At the same time, I was confronted by this feeling that my stories were not good enough for anyone to read.
Throughout the project, I would mark the stories that I felt I really connected to, or the ones that I felt other people might really connect to. And there was a time, leading up to the Kickstarter, when I’d gone more than a month without marking any of the stories.
And this became more and more of a reality when I realized: People are going to read these stories. My friends are going to read these stories. My family is going to read these stories. People all over the world can read these stories. Even my grandparents can read these stories. Yikes! Do I want my grandparents to read these stories?
This conflict came face-to-face with me a couple of weeks into the Kickstarter campaign.
A couple of days before Christmas, I started getting these emails, one after another. I remember logging in to my email to see my inbox full of people supporting my campaign, and I remembered thinking:
What is happening?
I went to Kickstarter, and realized: My project was on the home page.
Kickstarter just sent my project to thousands of people across the world.
I started getting these messages, one after another, from people all across the world, telling me:
I can’t wait to read your stories. I can’t wait to get your book.
To get to a place where your language is being spoken in the most authentic way, you have to speak with faith.
You have to forget that anyone will ever see what you’re creating.
If you want speak your language with authenticity, whether it’s the language of storytelling, or the language of music, or art, or business, or photography, or filmmaking, you have to forget that anyone else will ever see it, and you have to speak it in faith.
