Ok, I admit it, people are ruder than hell

[nancylebov]

Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about creativity-- she wrote a surprise best-seller called Eat Pray Love about a self-directed non-drug cure for her depression after(?) a divorce. She went to Italy to enjoy the senses, a very rigorous meditation course in India(?-- it's been a while since I've read the book) to get behind the senses, and then Bali (?) to combine meditation and the joy of life.

In the speech, she talks about how people would keep coming up to her, very worried, and say isn't she afraid of-- and I'll tell you what they asked in the first comment. I guessed they would ask her if a non-drug cure for depression was safe and stable, but it was worse than that.

Aside from the bit I'm ranting about, I recommend the speech. It's got a very interesting take on the creative process, a description of what it's like for a poet to perceive poems coming at her, Tom Waites on how he developed an adult relationship with his tunes, and some history of how people think about creativity.

Link thanks to shadesong.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

They asked her if she was afraid that she'd never be able to write anything else as good.

If someone feels such a fear strongly, is it plausible that they'd want to talk about it with a random stranger?

Just a guess, but I think a man would have been asked the same question about as often.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

I recently went through the vast majority of my posting on my blogspot account, and was fairly bummed to see that my favorites were the first few I ever did.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Peter Kramer rants often and at length about this issue in his book "Against Depression". He finds it maddening too.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

There's a fairly broad swathe of artists -- musicians, in particular -- whose first album is by far their best. My theory is that for these artists, that album represents years of creativity, compressed into that smallish format, while their followups, created in significantly less time, are of lower quality because they haven't had time to distill, or build up (or both) the collection of excellent work represented by their debuts.

This is true of some authors and visual artists as well, but, I think, less so because of the nature of the media (although authors who write shorter forms may be subject to a similar arc).

It's clearly not true of all musicians; many grow, and prove capable of delivering consistently excellent work on a relatively short turnaround. And some do wait long enough to have that collection of excellence, so that their output is spaced at longer intervals, but also maintains the level they want.

ETA: I am, of course, thinking of the lattermost folks as possibly being subject to that same fear, or concern, at least, about living up to their prior work. (The ones who can and do produce at shorter intervals may be subject to the same concerns, but seem to overcome them better.)

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

I read the book, and she freely admits that she was on anti-depressants for a while. So she's not an advocate of foregoing western medicine, more of the idea that an unbalanced life will make you miserable.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed people say that. But I think a lot of people feel that way when praised for something good they have done. I certainly do. If I'm feeling that I suck, telling me that something I did in the past was good doesn't help, it just raises the bar.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Sounds like they were projecting. "Your book really affected me, and I am afraid that I won't read anything as good, and I feel a sense of loss."

People are weird.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

My first published book for Steve Jackson Games, GURPS Steampunk, won the Origins Award for best roleplaying supplement of the year. Only one of my subsequent books has even been nominated. So I don't take issues of peaking early . . . or being perceived to have peaked early . . . as entirely groundless. On the other hand, it hasn't stopped me from writing more books!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I don't think fears of peaking early (whether artisicly or commercially) are groundless. I do think it's obnoxious for strangers to invoke those fears when talking to the artist.

[(Anonymous)]

As a nitpick, I wonder how much of peaking early is an artifact of randomness, or of the overlap between randomness and the process used to decide whether to publish (or write) another book by some author.

As a very simple thought experiment, suppose each book has a 1/1000 chance of being a huge success. Also assume that each author gets a random number of books they will manage to publish, say between 1 and 10. In that world, peaking early (having one huge success early in their careers) would still happen to some noticeable fraction of writers, even though there's no underlying drop in the author's quality or anything.

To make it more realistic, make the quality of previous books determine how many more you get to publish. For example, suppose that you get a random number of books to publish from 1..10, but if any of those are huge successes, then you get another random 1..10 books to publish. In that world, we'd see a lot of peaking early, just because that early success allowed writers to write more books, but it was very unlikely that any would be huge successes.

I'm sure both publishing decisions and writer quality are more complicated than that, but I can imagine all or most of the "peaking early" phenomenon to be explained by basically random processes.