Maybe it's Time to Give Up
- but how do we know?
All creatives have to find ways to poke and prod and energize themselves for the work they want to produce. While this keeps us going, are there times in a creative cycle when we should give up the effort?
I made the decision recently to press the pause button on writing. That’s allowed me extra time to read - I devoured four books in short order. I’m thinking about my work in a more playful way and that’s allowing my imagination to roam more freely.
Ideas about characters and plot for my next novel are flooding my brain. By the time I get back to actually writing, I think I’ll be ready - impatient, in fact - to get going again.
How do you choose whether to give up or keep going?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself time and time again. A few years ago I wrote about when I almost quit writing fiction, and just a few weeks later got an offer for my novel, The Forgotten Hours—which ended up being a bestseller. Go figure.
I put a lot of pressure on myself to work: I create projects that are designed to hold me accountable, such as my eight week “Summer Sprints” class and a new Substack called Anatomy of a Novel. And sometimes, I need rest.
I was thinking about all this as I read the obituary of a New York filmmaker named Manfred Kirchheimer.
Years of work in almost total obscurity
We’re always being told we must love the PROCESS of creating, because the outcomes of our work are so uncertain. Can we keep being creative when we don’t achieve the “success” we dreamed of, or when recognition doesn’t come right away (or ever)?
The German-born filmmaker and professor Manny Kirchheimer’s early work didn’t get much attention, and in midlife he languished in almost total obscurity, teaching at the School of Visual Arts in NYC but producing no new work for 20 years.
That changed in the early 2000s when he learned how to use computer software; the new films he made then led critics back to his old films. So an old dog CAN learn new tricks!
Stations of the Elevated, Manny’s overlooked “magnum opus” from 1979 was re-screened and finally got some serious attention and praise (click on the image above and scroll through it for the sounds and sights of a long gone NYC). The Times film critic A.O. Scott called it a “visual poem” depicting “an older, rougher, achingly gorgeous New York.”
Then, when he was close to 90 years old, Manny made four new films from footage he’d taken decades earlier. All those years of teaching, thinking, observing (ie. not producing work) culminated in a burst of creativity in later life that got him acclaim - and allowed people to hear about and enjoy his films.
In 2022, the Museum of the Moving Image wrote this about him:
“Alongside Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, Manfred Kirchheimer (b. 1931) stands as one of New York City’s consummate chroniclers of embattled immigrant and working-class life…these films constitute a personal valediction for a vanished New York, uncannily and unwittingly preserved at the very moment of its vanishing.”
Now that art sounds worthwhile. I’m glad he didn’t stop creating.
As summer ends, I’ll leave you with “March Waters”
It was 42 degrees this morning as I sat on my porch having my coffee. Summer is drawing to a close!
The song "Águas de Março" fits the current mood - it’s about contradictions, endings and beginnings, the passage of everyday life and its inevitable progression towards death - like the rains at the end of March, which mark the end of summer in parts of Brazil. Enjoy.
I often feel this way. I've had successes and many rejections. I have to write for myself. There are so many books being written and published, more than ever before--and each book can be read by as many as want to. So the more people there are doesn't mean the greater audience. I know it's harder than it used to be. Small comfort but there is no other.
This struggle never ends, but I think it's all ego, at least it is for me. When I'm able to remind myself that the writing is less about me and more about service--to laughs, to curiosity, to collective creativity--then it's easier to define success as something other than good reviews and big paydays and other things that are ultimately masturbatory.