I love when someone gets all enthusiastic and insistent about lending me a book that I “ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO READ!”
This happened recently with our pal Pableaux Johnson, a food writer and bon vivant down in New Orleans. And if that combo doesn’t go together as well as anything since peanut butter & jelly & ice cold milk (or more appropriately, butter & garlic & salt), I don’t know what does.
Pableaux promised to lend me his book but due to enthusiastic bon vivanting and other unavoidable concerns, the handoff was postponed. We had to leave New Orleans about the same time a mutual friend from up here in Brooklyn headed down to NOLA, so he acted as book mule and brought it up to me. And that book is…
The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp, of course.
Sustained creativity isn’t for the weak. You don’t just roll out of bed, waste half the day then say “Gee, do I feel like ‘being creative’ today?” No. The oxymoronic term I use is creative discipline. It’s orderly. It’s scheduled. It’s hard work. And it’s gotta be done whether you’re inspired or not. The painter Chuck Close (a legendary workhorse) put it this way: “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Damn straight, Chuck. That’s why you’ve made enough paintings to fill the Grand Canyon and they hang ’em in the Met.
Ms. Tharp takes a similar approach. Every day she does the work. She has a routine. She has rituals. She maintains tried and true habits to seek out fresh ideas and stay engaged. She’s a dynamo.
For instance, she gets up daily at 5:30 a.m. and hits the gym for a workout. That’s her start-up ritual. She’s a dancer and has to keep the machine humming. No exceptions. Up and out the door and the day is in motion.
The book is full of stuff like this. She gives her advice to the creative person and shares her personal way of implementing it. Besides the daily “ritual of preparation,” she shares ways to get to know your style of creativity better, how to leverage it and how to “scratch for” new ideas. She addresses courage and skill and ways to avoid creative stagnation. I dig the book because she’s walking the walk. She’s Twyla freaking Tharp, not some hack who gathered a bunch of “helpful hints” from others. She knows. She’s been there.
The book is called a “practical guide,” and it is. It’s also readable, thank you, because a lot of these sorts of books dreadful. Either corny or dry or lame in 10 other ways. This one isn’t. Check it out.
(And because it’s one of the best food books I’ve ever read about a city I love written by a helluva guy, here’s Pableaux’s book Eating New Orleans. If you want to enjoy New Orleans more, buy it! It works.)
