Efficacious Means to Kill the Creative Spirit
Upon the careful consideration, design and implementation of the following means to kill the creative spirit, I’ve decided to share my most effective strategies here on Wristwatches...
William Blake, do you know how to use this weapon?
No. Not really.
That weapon will replace your tongue. You will speak through it, and your poetry will now be written in blood.
Dead Man - Jim Jarmusch
Upon the careful consideration, design and implementation of the following means to kill the creative spirit, I’ve decided to share my most effective strategies here on Wristwatches, in case, beloved reader, you too may wish to destroy the means by which your vocation and creative impulse may find fruitful union. These are presented in no logical or coherent order.
1) Falsely conclude that your creative impulses, desires, inspirations and pursuits are selfish and self indulgent.
2) Maintain an intensely discrete and guarded attitude to your works and processes, ensuring few are aware of them and even fewer can hold you accountable to the ideas and aspirations espoused in said works and the very act of creating them.
3) Fail to write down salient ideas as they come to you. Ensure you are quickly distracted.
4) Maintain the falsehood that a demanding family life and a creative life are mutually exclusive.
5) Lie and pretend that your professional demands leave little left for what’s left of your creative projects and pursuits.
6) Fail to set up a consistent and viable routine around placing your posterior in the timber chair that sits in the wonderful nook your beloved wife incorporated into the plan for your newly built house so you’d have a place to write etc.
7) Maintain the pernicious lie that you weren’t somehow able to to do this every day, for a number of years.
8) Pretend that the number of children you have is directly, inversely correlated with the time you have to write.
9) Stop listening to Neil Young’s soundtrack to Dead Man when you sit down at the computer to write. ‘Why art thou silent and invisible?’ Indeed.
10) Fail to journal consistently.
11) Spend scant spare time programming your midi controller instead of actually playing music, or writing.
12) Perceive the pursuit of music and literary endeavour as completely separate, unrelated, unknown to one another.
13) Forget the late night euphoria of tenderly placing words upon the page.
14) Surround yourself with utterly rational, reasonable, practical and utilitarian people for whom this is all futile and self-defeating.
15) Remember that this is all futile and self-defeating.
16) Forget and fail to use your diary as the repository of collected notes, ideas and ruminations to find their fullest expression in the evenings writing.
17) Never use a Belton Brick reverb. Ever. And never play a reverb into a fuzz. Only, ever have reverb last in the chain.
18) Refuse to listen to Jimi Hendrix’s Castles Made of Sand.
19) Elevate the practical and political above the true and the beautiful.
20) Stop making ‘calls’ to capture ideas.
21) Ignore the sound advice of building a habit through the consistent repetition of minimal achievement (such as journaling a single sentence).
22) Forget to treat everything as prayer, and an encounter with Christ.