Radiolab: Me, Myself, and Muse

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/me-myself-and-muse/

The episode of Radiolab that this segment is taken from is all about making deals with yourself. In the clip above, Jad and Robert talk to psychologist Oliver Sacks and author Elizabeth Gilbert about their struggles with the creative process.

Oliver Sachs discusses a time when he was working on a book and was having a terrible time with writers' block. In keeping with the theme of the episode, he solved the problem by making an unimaginable bargain with himself: If he didn't finish in ten days, he would commit suicide. Though he is unable to say whether or not he would have actually gone through with it, this literal "deadline" as he describes it, created a powerful imagined threat that got him writing, first out of necessity then out of a creative well he had not known existed. He describes a "wonderful associative engine" in his head that made writing the book feel like taking dictation. This story was shocking but humorous and well-worthwhile look taking desperate measures to encourage creativity. It found an analog in the way one of my friends described her creative process- purposefully leaving projects until the last possible moment so that she has no chance to second-guess herself.

Next, Elizabeth Gilbert talked about her attempts to "live a lifetime of creativity without cutting your ear off." She described the anxiety she felt when working on a book to follow "Eat, Pray, Love" and her fears that she would never be able to surpass her first novel. She recounts interviewing Tom Waits who believed that there were different ways songs came into the world: "songs you have to sneak up on like hunting for a rare bird," "songs you find little bits of like pieces of gum under a desk," "songs that need to be bullied" This was the first time that she had ever thought of inspiration as an it, something that can be distanced from oneself and negotiated with. This is a radically different view of creativity than the prevailing wisdom, and was a neat idea to toy with.

get distance from it, negotiate with it