Feed the Fire
EPISODE 040: FEED THE FIRE
What do you when the fire of your creative passions burns low or, for that matter, burns out entirely? Fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen, and so does our creativity, though it doesn’t have to be all fire all the time and there’s nothing wrong with letting the flames burn out now and then, especially if the embers remain hot under the ashes. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In the summer of 1994 the camp at which I was working burned to the ground. One minute we were in the lodge ignoring the fire alarm we all assumed was just a drill, the next we were out on the lawn running buckets of water up from the lake and watching our camp turn to ashes. The hole into which it all collapsed smouldered for days and I remember at the time thinking how quickly it had all happened. One moment it was business as usual, the next moment there was fire in the walls, and then–with nothing left to burn–it was gone, burned out with nothing but an empty place where once our entire world had stood.
A couple of weeks ago I discussed the emptiness of burnout in an episode called Embrace the Empty. Before that, in Episode 36, I touched on the troubling idea that there are sometimes moments when we realize we no longer love the thing we do the way we once did. Both episodes prompted me to ask myself: What do you do when you wake to find the fire that, until just recently, was unquenchable and consumed whatever fuel you could give it, has burned down to embers? What do you do when the passion fades? And perhaps more importantly, how do you keep the fire burning and can it be re-ignited when it fades? I’m David duChemin and this is episode 040 of A Beautiful Anarchy, my mostly-weekly podcast about the joys and obstacles of everyday creativity. Let’s talk about it.
Intro / Music
As a metaphor, fire gives us plenty to work with in the creative life. Fire represents passion. Illumination, comfort, and purification also immediately come to mind, and to be honest with you I’m struggling a bit with the paralysis of choice here. I could take this episode in so many directions. But perhaps the one quality of fire that is most intriguing to me is the way it transforms the thing it consumes into something so much more. Fire is a release of all those molecules locked away in a piece of wood, the hotter it gets the more those molecules vibrate until they become volatile gasses, mix with oxygen and create the heat that keeps feeding the fire. A block of wood or some other fuel, transformed into heat and light.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of transformation. I’ve long believed that not only do we make our art, but our art makes us. That the creative process is one of transformation and not just making new stuff was, in some way, the subject of the last episode. It was meant to be about originality but ultimately it kind of revolved around the idea that we all have access to the same raw materials, it’s how we transform them that matters–and how authentically we do so that makes our work original. And that’s where losing the fire becomes not just a puzzle but a real problem. For the artist who loses the passion, who allows the fire to die down, the work comes to a halt, the transformations slow and we find ourselves smouldering.
Fire needs 3 things: Oxygen, Heat, and Fuel. Remove one of them and the fire dies. I’ve thought for weeks now about how to represent those 3 things in this metaphor, hoping it would all parse out into 3 tidy ideas about keeping our creative passions burning or re-igniting them when they grow cold. Here’s where I landed.
The fuel is an easy one. We need to feed the fire constantly if we’re to keep it burning. Creatively that means never getting lazy with the ingestion of new ideas. Not just more ideas. New ideas. Ideas that are different, even divergent. The quality of ideas matters. New books, new music, new conversations with people that are both within and without your area of interest. Where would the impressionists have been without Japanese art, or cubism without the African influence? Where would rock and roll be without boogie-woogie, jazz, and the blues? Rothko acknowledged Matisse as a key influence. Gaugin inspired van Gogh. And how many novelists have been reading the paper or sitting at a dinner party when a story so grabbed them that it inspired their next work?
If it’s been a while since you felt the spark of some new idea, perhaps it’s time you found influences about which you are more curious. Could it be you’ve been feeding in the same place for too long and need to find something to disrupt that familiarity. Something to bring your curiosity to life? That only really happens in proximity to the unknown and the unfamiliar. If you’re a photographer it might be time to stop looking at the same familiar influences. When’s the last time you dug into an art tradition wildly different from your own? What do you know about Japanese cinema or African dance. I love photographing in East Africa, but if my own spark died down and I needed to challenge my curiosity to work a little harder it wouldn’t be to other photographs of Kenya or Ethiopia that I looked. I’d begin wondering what art from those places has looked like for the last couple hundred years. What colour palettes are present? What themes? What rhythms in the music? What traditions in visual art are there to be explored? What ideas might come from getting my senses engaged by the unfamiliar?
It’s easy to get so focused on the things we make that we forget to fuel the fire of the imagination and before long those flames generate little light and heat. Curiosity can be honed and encouraged. It can be given a longer leash and the more it is encouraged to go to places we’re unfamiliar with, or even intimidated by, the greater the chance it’ll bring something back that’s just the piece we needed to spark new ideas and create new connections.
Steve Jobs is only one of the many creative people that acknowledged that creativity is fundamentally about connecting dots in new ways and to call out the importance of collecting more dots from different sources. Here’s what Steve had to say about this:
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
If you’re finding the flames dying down a little, it might be time to go looking for dots. Put the camera down a while. Step away from the keyboard or the canvas. Put the clay down. Go find some dots. Get more fuel. There’s no shame in taking a break. 4 weeks ago I sent out a letter to almost 100,000 photographers, as I do every couple weeks, and I told them I hadn’t picked up my camera for close to 6 months. I told them I hadn’t made a single photograph and the emails I got in response to that letter were like a collective sigh of relief, the kind of breathing out you do when you’ve been holding your breath a little too long, as if so many of them had, like me, let their cameras sit idle and were hoping no one found out. They worried the fire had died.
The thing about a good fire is that the embers can burn a long time with no flames. They can sit under the ashes and wait it out and still have plenty of heat to ignite the next log the moment it comes along and I’m wondering where we all get this feeling like we owe our craft or our art some deeper obligation that we’ve got to keep the flame lit 24/7? Is it possible that you’ve got a deeper fire and while you’re worried that you’re not excited about picking up the brush or the camera right now, the desire to create is still there and will ignite new fuels the moment they’re present? Why can we not have multiple fires? I think we can. All of them burning at different levels.
I’ll be honest with you, my deeper passions have nothing to do with the camera. My hottest embers are the desire to create, to discover, and right now, to write. There is nothing at all lost to me when I put one tool down to pick up another. Different flames from the same embers. And, sure, sometimes everything’s on fire and I’m making good work photographically, and I’m writing, and teaching, and it feels like there are flames in every direction. But there are other times when there’s not a flame to be seen and I’m OK with that, especially as my own creative rhythms demand that I take regular periods to stop blowing on the flames and instead to go gather wood.
I wonder how many of you need to stop freaking out about the fire going out and instead take some time to gather fuel, knowing the embers aren’t so fragile that they’ll burn down the moment you turn your back, nor are they so precious you can’t just reignite them when you need to.
The second thing fire needs is heat, which seems odd to me because I thought fire was what caused the heat in the first place, but of course there has to be some initial spark to kick things off. And this is important because there are going to be times when the fire goes out entirely and you wake up one day and it’s just not there. Nothing but a cold smouldering absence. I’m not sure it’s such a big deal. As long as you know that to light the fire again all you’ve got to do is bring the heat.
I learn something new when I write every episode of A Beautiful Anarchy, the result of my own quest for more dots to connect and more fuel to burn. Here’s something I just learned and don’t think I didn’t do a bit of a happy dance when I saw the implied metaphor within: in the 1600s the word focus meant fireplace. Not symbolically, either. Focus is latin for fireplace. It then came to mean the "point at which rays of light, heat, or other radiation meet after being refracted or reflected.”
Did you ever start a fire with a magnifying glass? To do so you had to get the beam of light on the wood or piece of paper at just the right point, the point where the light was at its most focused, and when you did that, it wasn’t long before a dark spot appeared and then spread on the paper, finally igniting. Add a little more fuel, blow on it to give it more oxygen, and the fire is back.
Is it true that a loss of focus, can allow the heat to dissipate and kill the fire? I think it is. I think when we give things less attention, stop actively exploring them, stop finding new ideas or techniques by which we are fascinated, and they stop engaging our imaginations, we get bored and passion dies in the wake of that boredom.
When we allow entropy to take over, it’s inevitable that our passion for something just gets so diluted that it’s hard to find. But it’s equally true that this is also the path back to that passion, back to being fascinated again, to dreaming up new ideas and taking on new challenges again. It’s focus. Like fuel and oxygen, focus is a resource and more than ever it’s being demanded by other things. Life is complicated and messy and very few of us can be so single-minded that we only pay attention to our creative work. Nor would it be healthy if we could. But when the time comes to re-kindle the flame, focus the beam. Gather the fuel, put it in one place, and light the spark.
There’s probably a whole episode in the idea of focus. When we focus on a task or an idea that challenges us, and here’s where I start taking liberties with my metaphor, there is a friction created. When we push up against the unfamiliar and we explore new techniques and force our skills and thinking to jump tracks, we are asking our brain to fire different synapses. To spark in new ways. It can’t happen when we’re bored. It can’t happen when we’re not being challenged. The same-old-same-old doesn’t demand our attention, and it rarely causes sparks.
Could it be our loss of passion, when the fire dies down, is because we’ve stopped generating sparks on our own? Could it be the connections we’re making between the dots we’ve collected no longer fascinate us because they’re too obvious, too easy? And could it be that it’s OK that this happens once in a while? I suspect it’s not only OK but natural. Have we been tricked into thinking that a life of everyday creativity should be one hot blazing fire of passion and that anything else signals a defect on our part? A lack of genius or a lack of commitment?
You’re not alone if the fire dies down for you once in a while. The world longs for intensity. But it can’t be all bonfires all the time. It’s not sustainable. Some people will be a long slow burn. Some will be bonfires once a month and embers the rest. What matters is that when you burn hot you do with everything you’ve got in the way that you alone can burn. And that you understand how to keep yourself fuelled, and light the fire again when life gets in the way and you turn your back on the flames a little longer than you meant to. I think what’s important is that we learn to create our own sparks, that we understand how important focus and challenge can be. And it’s probably helpful to remember that we’re always changing, that the fire within us is constantly transforming us, and what once sparked the biggest flames for you might no longer do so, and that’s OK. Something will. But not if you’re looking in the same places, and trying to reignite fuels that you’ve already burned to ashes. We need new fuels, not just more. New focus. New friction.
But fire also needs oxygen and though I’ve been a little uncertain where that fits in this analogy, I think I’ve just figured it out: it’s work. That’s where the oxygen comes from and no one who thinks blowing on a fire isn’t work has ever had to do so. You’ve got to get down on your knees, get smoke in your eyes, and blow until you get light-headed. Or to put it more literally, you’ve got to pick up the paintbrush, the guitar, the camera or whatever your tool happens to be, and get to work. Ideas are nothing until they’re bashed into shape, honed and proven by our work, often in several iterations and only after some initially ugly efforts that make us want to give up until suddenly the pieces do fall into place and the fire catches and burns the oxygen so hard it practically pulls it from our lungs.
The fire of our creative efforts is an astonishing joy. When it’s burning hot there are very few feelings like it. And if we don’t get too hung up by the metaphor, it’s not unlike Flow. It probably is flow. Flow needs the same things to exist: focus and challenge. Those are things we alone can provide. I love the light and heat produced by a good fire, but a fire is not a passive thing. It’s not all Kumbaya and charred marshmallows. It still needs us to tend it, to feed it, and once in a while to blow like hell on the embers. You’re not the only one who has become distracted by other things and the demands of life, only to realize the embers have grown cold now and then. Maybe it’s time to build your fire in a different fireplace, to shift your focus. Maybe it’s time just to sweep out the old ashes and build a different kind of fire or experiment with a different fuel. When that time comes, don’t wait for the muse to show up with her Zippo lighter and a can of gasoline, go find some interesting fuel, create some sparks, and blow like hell.
Thanks so much for joining me today. If you want more of this kind of thing to see your everyday creativity fueled, I wrote my last 2 books for you. Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, and The Problem with Muses can both be found in all the usual places, like Amazon, or through the links at StartUglyBook.com, and I’d be honoured if you’d consider letting them help keep your fire burning.
If you’re only just discovering A Beautiful Anarchy I post new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but there’s no reason you should take a break on those 4th weeks so I‘d like to send you a monthly issue of On The Make which is basically an email version of A Beautiful Anarchy and you can get it by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and once a month I’ll draw the name of one reader to whom I’ll send a signed copy of one of my books.
Thanks so much for being part of this. If you’d like to get in touch with me, with feedback, questions or ideas you’d like to see explored in a future episode, I’d love to hear from you and you can email me at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0