Being a genius vs having a genius

For some reason – probably that we all love words – last week’s email generated the biggest response I’ve had for a while. A lot of you have a quite prodigious vocabulary and I raise my hat to you all. Or rather: I raise my hat, my cap, my boater, my beret, my trilby, my cloche, my helmet, my tricorn, my deerstalker, my pillbox and my elegantly laced yet somehow menacing fascinator.

All your responses were interesting – they always are – but one really hit home. Someone tipped me off about a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert. (The link’s in the PSes, if you’re interested.)

The gist of her talk was this:

Writers get frightened of being writers.

We’ll get too much success! The success will eat us. We’ll never be able to perform under commercial pressure. I couldn’t work with an agent, an editor, a publicist, a host of foreign publishers.

We’ll get too much failure! We can’t do our best work thinking about those rejection letters, thinking about those bozo Amazon one-star reviews. We can’t create with joy and spontaneity when we have to tangle with the complicated limbs of the publishing industry.

Or some other reasons. Or some set of mutually contradictory reasons.

It doesn’t matter what, really. The point is: writers get frightened of being writers.

This is, as Gilbert points out, a panic largely confined to the creative arts. Her dad was a chemical engineer, who never got frightened of chemical engineering. My father was a lawyer and a judge, who never got frightened of being a lawyer and a judge. I seriously if most plumbers doubt they can do their best bathroom-installation work under the pressure of a client wanting a new bathroom.

So what’s going on? And how to combat the panic?

Her take is interesting and, I think, has real merit.

Back before the Enlightenment and, especially, before the Romantics, we didn’t think of people being geniuses, but having geniuses. Creativity and inspiration dwelled somewhere outside – as a Muse, perhaps, an actual spirit. In Latin, genius loci, the spirit of a place, was something that dwelled at a given site, the divine spirit given specific form and nature.

The human’s work was therefore not to be the genius, but to listen to the genius. To catch the music and set it down.

That sounds a little spacey if you put it as bluntly as that. And yet – you will all know what it feels like to be in true creative flow. The words just come. The vision. The characters. The dialogue. To be sure, it doesn’t come down perfectly: you still need to edit the damn thing. You still need to use your brain and craft to shape the material. But it feels like the origin of all that good stuff lies outside you – or, at the very least, way outside your conscious ownership or control.

Contrast that experience with the post-Romantic concept of genius: It’s us! We’re special! We’re brilliant! We wear floppy clothes and drink laudanum!

There’s a me-me-me quality here, which gets all the benefits of genius (aren’t I wonderful, darling?) but all of the costs as well (what if the damn work doesn’t come? What if it’s no bloody good?)

Now I don’t really want to argue about the ontology here. (Ontology = the study of what exists.) So is there really an external genius? Or a part of our subconscious? Or just a free-flowing form of imagination we can access in the right mental state only? I don’t really care.

What Elizabeth Gilbert suggests we do is just separate the things. You showing up for work: that’s the part you’re in charge of. The creative genius may choose to turn up that day, or may not. You know damn well that if you don’t come, the creative genius can’t.

But you can’t control that part. You never could, never did. Your job is to show up for work and apply yourself.

Just make sure to leave the window open a little, and maybe have a little dish of rose petals somewhere on the desk beside you. Geniuses love hard-workers – and who doesn’t love a rose petal? If you want to say a prayer – and that Liz Gilbert, she loves a prayer – then say a prayer. Invite the genius. Or swear at it. Or just communicate. You might just get blessed, once again, by that golden hand, that silver tongue.

Go well my friends. Bite into those PSes. They’re chewy this week, but with a soft caramel centre.