The Artist as a Vessel
One of the most debilitating concepts is that you have to do something—not just that something has to be done, but that YOU have to do it. ‘I have to write’, being a common hangup of writers, or even people who just want to write. The common denominator is yourself, and what you have to do—but what if that’s entirely wrong? What if that is an erroneous assumption, and as such, a non-starter? What if there’s a better way?
I believe in the artist as a vessel—at our best, the art comes through us, not from us. When it has to come ‘from’ us, it is our responsibility to think. When it comes through us, it is our responsibility to merely write down what we hear—we should be the stenographer for the muse.
Create without judgment—don’t judge the art as it is coming out of you, as that is not your job. Your job is to get it down on paper, or whatever you’re getting it down on. This does not mean you should just write gobbledygook—you should write words, the words you hear. It’s amazing how instantly writers sound better when they are not trying to sound a particular way, construct particular sentences with their mind. The words flow out of the writer, and in turn, flow as the reader reads them. They are like water, instead of like jagged rocks.
Thinking is thinking—it is not creating. By all means, think in life, but when you are making art, you should keep that to a minimum. If you think at all, it should be because you misheard the muse, or got distracted, and need to get back into the flow of it. It is always your fault that the art isn’t coming—there is no shortage of art waiting, and wanting, to come into this world. If you show the muse that you are a good listener, and a diligent one, you will be rewarded with more artistic expression than you could ever handle. You will have the opposite of writer’s block—you will have a faucet that you have trouble turning off.
Bruce Lee once said, ‘be like water’. As an artist, I say you should be like a faucet—be that which water can flow through. Do that and you will have finally begun your actual job as an artist.
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