knowledge of the instrument and an imagination

"Most of the other guitar solos that you hear performed on stage have been practiced over and over and over again," Frank Zappa complained to an interviewer. "They go out there, and they play the same one every night, and it's really just spotless."

You may not be a rock nerd, but if you've endured much AI-generated text by this point—who hasn't?—you know exactly what Zappa meant by "spotless." Not a compliment.

"My theory is this," Zappa continued. "I have a basic mechanical knowledge of the operation of the instrument, and I got an imagination, and when the time comes up in the song to play a solo, it's me against the laws of nature."

Knowledge of the instrument and an imagination: that's all Zappa brought to each solo. It's also all you need to write a book or tackle any other creative task. Even if you work on research-based, expertise-driven nonfiction like I do, the writing itself must be as free, improvisatory, elemental. The research and expertise stuff happens too, but elsewhere, at other times. When you're writing, all you can do is write. You against nature.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," Zappa explained. "I know roughly how long I have to do it, and it's a game where you have a piece of time, and you get to decorate it." What better mindset for the overwhelming and often bewildering task of writing stuff down than a game with a fixed interval? Decide on a "piece of time," take a deep breath, and plunge in.

When I write, I have some idea of a plan, usually to build out a given section of a chapter. However, if I try to get specific about how to approach that piece before actually writing it down, I end up going in circles. You can think or you can write, I think. Not both at the same time.

A weekend of Transcendental Meditation training drove this insight home. Though I've meditated using other techniques, I've wanted to learn TM specifically since reading David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish, a slim book on TM and creativity that I've re-read three or four times since grabbing a copy from the old Penguin "take shelf." (PRH friends: Do they still have those?) Even though I didn't meditate like David Lynch, I deeply enjoyed the window into his creative process:

There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

But that was then. Now that I've been "transcending" for a couple of months, I've started to look at my writing a little differently. Has my TM practice turned me into a productivity powerhouse? As evidenced by the embarrassing gap since my last newsletter, no. However, I've found an interesting parallel between meditation and creative pursuits like writing. Each one requires a conscious act of surrender. To meditate or to write, I must stop thinking in order to start doing: write things down, silently repeat my mantra, it's all the same. Plunge in.

This awkward and bumpy transition between self and selflessness has always been uncomfortable for me. Even scary. I'm the kid at summer camp who went to the edge of the diving board and then balked and crawled back. Skittish and recalcitrant by nature. Starting to write feels a little like death, to be honest! Whether writing or meditating, I must put aside everything buzzing around in my head—which feels exactly like ceasing to exist—and let the work happen. When I'm unwilling to relax and dive in, when I can't relinquish control, I find myself blocked.

This sounds existential. Maybe it is. To be or not to be? You can be, or you can write. Not both at the same time. You may have heard multitasking is a myth, but they never count consciousness as a "task," do they? Yet this is the obvious consequence of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow. In a flow state, we're not conscious of the passage of time. Isn't that the same thing as not being conscious during that time? You have to die for your work to live. (Temporarily.)

Set an interval. Decorate a piece of time. When you're done, you'll have converted a piece of time into a piece of text. In a sense, you don't fully live those twenty minutes. You trade them in for a bunch of words. At that point, you can publish those words, revise them, or toss them out and start again. Regardless, the time is gone. You've spent it.

Existential surrender isn't a prerequisite for the guitar player cranking out the same "spotless" solo every night. He can stay in his head, thinking about the meal he'll eat after the concert or all the things he needs on Amazon. You contest with the forces of nature only by relinquishing that interval to the creative process, burning it as a sacrifice, letting your fingers lead in a state of mindless abandon. The results won't be spotless, but the best stuff never is.