G. Steve Journal

Don't Think!

There's a story the late author Tom Wolfe told about his first magazine article, for Esquire magazine.  The magazine had flown the young writer to LA to report on the car culture there, putting him up in a luxury hotel and sparing no expense, including paying a photographer $10,000 to document the scene even before seeing the copy. 

At the end of a week, Wolfe sat down to write and found himself unable to even begin.  After procrastinating most of an evening, he called editor Byron Dobell to tell him he's unable to finish the piece.  Dobell instructs Wolfe to just type up his notes then and send them along – he'll get another writer to do it.

Freed of the burdens of grammar and style, a newly energized and unencumbered Wolfe begins: "Dear Byron", speed types 49 pages of notes randomly punctuated, finishes at 4 am and sends off the mess of papers before going to bed.

When he calls Byron to see how he made out, Byron tells him he loved what Wolfe sent and, after removing "Dear Byron", ran the piece as submitted, punctuation and all.  And so was born Gonzo Journalism and a career.

Which brings us to the take-home point, succinctly summarized here by sci-fi author Ray Bradbury and understood at some level by creatives everywhere:

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

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Something Inside

Never work for other people at what you do.

Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.

And I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

The other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that you're working in you're not working in the right area.

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being and go a little bit out of your depth and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about at the right place to do something exciting.

                                                                                                                                –– David Bowie

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Not Knowing

Came across this tweet that may very well express the motivation of creatives generally –– it certainly describes my decades-long journey of photographic discovery:

 

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

                                                                                                        - Lucille Clifton

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