Creation Takes Time and Energy

I always forget this.

Creation takes time and energy. No matter how much you enjoy writing, painting, acting, playing music, or any other art, it takes something from you as you do it.

It’s easy to feel like creating art isn’t “real” work because you want to be doing it. “Real” work, we make the mistake of thinking, is what you don’t want to do. A 9-5 office job is “real” work. Being a doctor is “real” work.

But because you’ve wanted to write books since you were a child, because it involves no physical labour apart from sitting at your keyboard and typing, then writing can’t count.

Acting must be painless because so many people want to do it. Playing pretend like children, and getting paid or acclaimed for it? It must always be a dream come true!

Of course artists who have the privilege of circumstances that allow us to create art in security and share it with others are grateful. I’m grateful that I live in a place, time, and financial situation that lets me spend my time on stage or in front of my latest manuscript. I’m very grateful that my family and friends support me in my artistic ventures.

But being grateful is different from pretending creation is relaxing.

Acting is physically and mentally tough. It involves a lot of standing around, moving your corporeal body through sometimes-demanding scenes, and exhausting your stores of psychological energy to portray a character.

Because acting means forging a bond of camaraderie with fantastically creative cast and crew, it’s easy to forget that part of that bond comes from sharing intense labour. When I think of my theatre experiences, I think of fun people, pulling through together. I conveniently forget what it was that we struggled to pull through, until I’m slogging through new lines to memorize, running on no sleep, poor diet, and no recreation because rehearsals eat up everything but the time I need to work. I don’t remember how much it physically wears me out to spend time on stage acting out my scenes over and over again. The emotional weariness — don’t talk to me, don’t ask me for feelings, don’t force me to communicate — always creeps up by surprise.

Acting is work. Learning lines and blocking, practicing both, figuring out the right way to pour out parts of myself that are difficult to dredge up — all these things require huge effort. And my job is flexible; I literally, hyperbole-free don’t know how my castmates with more rigid hours, more demanding occupations, or more than one production on the go (as most aspiring professionals take on) do it. Not to mention the ones who have children!

When I was a child and teenager, I used to play soccer on summer evenings. Later, I used to participate in a young Shakespeare-in-the-Park company. Guess which tuckered me out more?

Soccer is a demanding sport, full of running. It requires endurance. But I never came home from a game ready to collapse into bed and fall asleep immediately. Romeo and Juliet could drain the energy out of me the way two goals and a ball never could, and I bench-warmed more in the production than in the game.

Writing may not be physically tough in the same way, but communication and creation are mental labour. Sure, I think of the time each day when I get to sit down and write my blog or work on my manuscript as my least demanding work. I like having ideas and expressing them as well as I can.

But when push comes to shove, when I’m exhausted, I can propel myself through my teaching and marking much more easily than I can meet even the short fifteen-minutes-typing quota I set for myself each day. I can mark ten papers faster than I can produce a page or revise a scene.

It’s easy to forget that my writing doesn’t happen in paused eternity like when Captain Picard gets stuck on a looped Romulan vessel or Will Stanton steps out of time to talk with the Rider outside the earshot of ordinary mortals.

It’s easy to forget that no matter how much I want to get that manuscript written, that story revised, or that blog entry typed out, just wanting it won’t make it happen.

It’s easy to forget that if I want to finish three chapters this week, I will have to put my butt in my chair and agonize in front of my monitor for several hours each day. I will have to say “no” to friends and family if they ask me to do things. I will have to let the dishes go undone, save my pet projects for another day, and spend less time with the people I love.

It’s easy to forget that setting myself schedules of revising a chapter a day (ha ha ha!) is like telling myself I’m going to run thirty miles in an hour.

Is the point that creating is so hard, so everyone should pity me? No, of course not. The moral here isn’t for other people, trying to figure out how creative workers and our labour fits into their worldview. It’s for me.

Whether I am being a performer or a writer, I can’t let myself feel guilty for treating my creative time as work time. I can’t feel guilty for getting tired from doing the things I love, because loving them doesn’t make them less exhausting. I have to give myself time and energy to do the creative things I do, and I have to make space for them the same way I make space for work I don’t like to do.

When a task doesn’t feel arduous like work, it’s true that it’s more pleasant. But it still is work, and if I want to complete it, I still have to treat it that way.