Move With the Light (12 minute read)
This issue officially marks the sixth month point since I started this newsletter. I forgot to mention another milestone last week which is that I recently crossed over the one-thousand subscribers mark. Thanks for going on this journey with me!
Quick update on the idea I came up with on my trip to Binghamton: I recorded two sessions while brainstorming dictation for a half-hour each. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly more intuitive than I thought it would be. It’s hard to tell how different it was than my normal brainstorming sessions with pen and paper or if it altered the outcome in any significant way. It was a bit like being in the writers room except you’re, you know, alone. At this point I’ve decided it’s a feature pitch so as soon as I flesh it out I think I’m going to record the pitch and post it with some edited clips of these dictation sessions.
Hope you have a great weekend!
Move With the Light
I started listening to a fascinating podcast called The Huberman Lab, hosted by Dr. Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and professor of Neurobiology at Stanford. He had a colleague on recently, a professor of neuroendocrinology named Dr. Robert Sapolsky who had a pretty interesting take on the concept of free will, which is that he doesn’t believe we have a shred of it:
“You do something, you make a choice, where did that intention come from? Was it due to the sensory environment in the previous minute? Some of it came from hormones in your bloodstream that morning. Some of it is from whether you had a wonderful or stressful last three months. Part of it is what hormone levels you were exposed to as a fetus... all of these are relative factors.”
I’ve spent so much time over the past six month talking about how I come up with and develop my original ideas in this newsletter. I’ve always been under the (maybe mistaken) impression that I was dreaming these things up based on my day to day lived experience, or whatever external stimuli I was taking in, all of it filtered through my compulsion to play the “what if” game in my imagination. I take a certain amount of pride in being able to will these things into existence with my brain.
It never occurred to me how much of that process might be taking place on a much deeper physiological level, that I might be drawn to a certain idea on a certain day because of my hormone levels, or whether or not I was going through a seasonal depression, or if I got a good night’s sleep a few days before.
How much of what we think of when we think about the creative process actually takes place in the brain? How much of it is influenced by what’s happening elsewhere in our body? I'm a creative person of average intelligence so take everything I say here in the spirit of this newsletter, which is to question new ideas and pull them apart to see if it leads to something new. But for me, that one quote sparked a whole new train of thought in regards to my process.
The more I thought about it the more this connection with our body seemed like a possible reason for why we get massive surges of creativity at certain times and find ourselves “blocked” or stagnant in others.
It’s always disheartening when come up with a new idea that I think is the BEST THING I’VE EVER and I write a burst of scenes or a treatment and then a few days later I look at it and think, “Well, that's fucking terrible.”
It’s the exact same idea. The words on my computer screen or in my journal haven’t changed. So why am I suddenly doubting it? Why have I suddenly lost interest?
I’m obviously not the same person I was a week or even two days ago but it’s not like I’ve gone through some major event that upended my whole perspective on the world, or came face to face with a work of art so staggering that it set me back twenty years of building up my own competence and confidence.
I think I’ve always been suspicious of my brain when I get in the middle of something and then a brand new shiny idea pops up and says, “Look at me! I’m so much cooler than that other thing you’re working on. I’m the one that really has a shot!” I always assumed it was my brain trying to trick me into skipping the hard work of figuring out Act Two, or answering a really tricky note that I know has merit.
It’s so easy to beat myself up when it happens, like there’s something wrong with me, that I lack discipline or focus. I know I’ve given other writers pep talks about this in the past, telling them to push through it, that their brain is pulling a fast one.
Maybe that’s not it at all.
Maybe it’s the fact that the body connected to my brain is going through some other whole process that I’m unaware of and it’s secretly grabbed the wheel that steers my inspiration and force of will.
It makes me appreciate novelists and sculptors and people who are involved in creative tasks that take months or even years to finish. And it shines a new light on some of the stories I’ve heard about how those works come into existence.
Take Monet’s Haystacks series, which took him nearly a year to complete. Part of the process involved him working on a number of paintings simultaneously, switching from canvas to canvas in sequential order as the light changed during the day. Sometimes he would work on as many as twelve paintings a day, moving between each one for a short time until they were complete. He had a similar process for other series like Mornings on the Seine and the Rouen Cathedral.
This is from the Wiki (yes, Wikipedia. This is a newsletter not a college thesis):
“Certain effects of light only last for a few minutes, thus the canvases documenting such ephemera received attention for no more than a few minutes a day. Further complicating matters, the light of subsequent sunrises for example, could alter substantially and would require separate canvases within the series.”
One of the things that Dr. Huberman talked about when he was a guest on Armchair Expert was how the eye is the only part of your brain that we can actually see directly and the amount and qualities of the light we take in affect our hormones throughout the day. Sunlight cues special areas of the retina which triggers the release of serotonin.
To me, that suggests that as Monet was studying the light in order to translate its effect to his canvas that same light was also changing the chemistry of his brain over the course of a day. Those paintings aren’t just linked thematically by the changing physical properties of the light but also on the affect it had on Monet’s creativity while he was actively in the process of moving his brush. Was he consciously placing each brushstroke in an act of artistic free will? Or was every decision being guided by the waxing and waning of his serotonin levels throughout the day?
What’s happening inside me when I’m sitting in Starbucks and the caffeine is starting to wear off and the sun disappears behind cloud cover or a blanket of wildfire haze? What effect does that have on my mood and how does that dictate the ideas I’m drawn to?
It reminds me of the day Greg Walker and I toured Paramount for possible offices for our season one writers room. Deep down a part of me would have loved to be on that historic lot but the only space big enough for a writers room was a windowless sheetrock cell. I remember Greg saying, “We don’t want to be stuck in here eight hours a day with no sunlight."
I got a little sidetracked from my main point, which is —
Scripts take a lot of time. A new pilot can take me anywhere from a few months to a year from inception to completed spec. I'm 10k words into a novel at this point and have no idea how long it's going to take me to finish. I’m not just up against the story problems, I’m also dealing with my general health and mood swings throughout the duration. Could those changes be part of why I feel impostor syndrome on some days? Or why I go from thinking this is the best idea in the world to the worst?
I can't abandon every project at the whim of my hormones. I have to finish some of them at some point. When I'm on a contract there are deadlines. I have to turn in a draft on x date, that's the job.
So what can I do in my process to make sure those changes work for me instead of against me? After thinking about it for a bit I came up with a few takeaways for my day to day work.
When I have that experience of “I thought this was great but now I think it sucks,” I’m going to recognize that it may a temporary byproduct of whatever’s going in my body that day. If possible I’m going to let it chill on the back burner for as long as necessary without any guilt.
I’m going to bring that day’s lived experience to the work at hand as much as possible. Whatever I’m feeling, thinking, eating, drinking, listening to, I’m going to let that be part of the work, as opposed to forcing myself to stick to some preconceived notion of what I thought I’d be doing that day. I was a different person when I made that plan.
I’m going to keep up my morning pages so that I’m already in the process of letting that day’s state of mind flow from pen to page.
Healthy behaviors — make sure I’m getting enough sleep and taking care of myself so I have an identifiable healthy baseline to work from in the first place. I’m generally pretty good at this now that I’m in my late 40’s but I still get off track from time to time.
“Move With The Light” If I get distracted by some sparkly new idea, I’m going to be like Monet and move my canvas where the light of inspiration is shining and not treat it like it’s some kind of defect or defensive mechanism in my brain. Even if it’s just for two minutes, I’ll add a few strokes to that canvas and see where I stand. Monet finished a number of masterworks over the course of a year, maybe I’ll get lucky and finish one of my own at some point.
City of Ronin concept doc
I mentioned my personal development slate a few issues ago. One of the series I want to do is based on a short story I wrote earlier this year, one that continues my interest in lifelike robots that started with EXTANT. I'm far more interested in how they may potentially impact our empathy and connection to each other the potential for genuine emotional connections to them than I am in whether or not they'll turn against us. I want to explore all of that in a world that blends my love of sci-fi and love of crime fiction.
I put the concept doc on my website if you're interested. (Art and design by my friend Tony Teel.)
City Of Ronin – Extant StoryTech — extantstorytech.com
CITY OF RONIN A tech-noir story world based on the short story "The Fix-Up" Written by Mickey Fisher INTRODUCTION “The Fix-Up” is a tech-noir short story by Mickey Fisher that takes place in a grounded, near-future
Huberman Lab — hubermanlab.com The Huberman Lab Podcast discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life. Hosted by Dr. Andrew Huberman.