So I Guess I'm a Creative

Another look behind the curtain

Readers: This week marks the completion of the third year of The Deleted Scenes—that’s three full years, every day except Sunday, of thoughtful, illustrated, locally rooted pieces on urbanism and more. I’m offering a 20 percent discount for new subscribers, good until the end of Sunday. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription, this is a great time. Your support—whether reading, sharing, or subscribing—keeps this thing going. Thank you! To another year!

And a little extra note: today, April 6, is the exact day I published my first Substack post here. Three years today, exactly.

It’s the coolest thing in the world to occasionally see one of my analogies or turns of phrase pop up in an unfolding debate on Twitter, or get referenced in an article. (I’m pretty sure that happened with my “housing famine” piece a few months ago.) Some of the people I know on the politics/activism side of housing and urbanism would like me to go to hearings or input sessions and support this or that proposal. I generally support the proposals in question, but I think not being an activist is helpful for the work I do.

What is the work I do?

Mostly, as a right-leaning person of faith who grew up around conservatives, I think that the conventional/mainstream left-leaning urbanist movement leaves a lot of argumentative room on the table, and that there’s a lot of room for conservative urbanists who come to the same conclusions from distinct (though not necessarily contradictory) priorities. Furthermore, I believe that there’s a huge untapped audience for urbanist ideas out there.

My work, then, in a more abstract sense than writing, scheduling, tweeting, etc.—is crafting useful or insightful analogies, metaphors, turns of phrase, and arguments for urbanism, aided by getting out on the road, exploring places, chatting with folks, trying restaurants, walking around, taking life in.

In other words, I guess I’m a “creative.”

I find myself writing articles in my head at the dinner table, or in the car, or just going about everyday life. Sometimes I’ll be thinking out loud driving to the supermarket and I’ll go, “That’s a good headline!” and pull over to write it down in my phone’s memo pad. I can’t really describe how an article gets done. I might be going to a buffet to write one of my little buffet review pieces, but I’ll come up with five ideas on the drive there or while getting my food, write them down cryptically, and then maybe months later feel the inspiration or clarity to complete one of them. Some of this exploring and running around I do doesn’t have an immediate use or purpose, but all of it goes towards the ultimate process. There’s just a process you can’t shortcut or reverse engineer. A creative process.

I don’t really like that. It took me some time—a lot of time—to understand or accept that my work is fundamentally creative. Mostly, I think, because I inherited the idea that “creative work” is lazy work. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard something like “you get a philosophy degree if you want to be unemployed” or “these college kids want to study feminist art history and then have their student debt canceled” or whatever. I had to accept that creative work is work in order to accept that my work is creative work.

Kind of related to that, I never thought ideas like “burnout” or “self-care” were real. It also took me a long time to understand that “burnout” and “self-care” are legitimate, real concepts, not just medicalized laziness. It’s funny how when Millennials talk about self-care or treating themselves or whatever, it conventionally reads as soft self-indulgence, yet when people with high-paying jobs go out to lunch every day, that doesn’t read as soft self-indulgence.

To tell you the truth, I used to think all of it was. But now I realize that whatever you want to call it, you do in fact need to give yourself a little something once in awhile, if only to change up your routine and surroundings. That actually helps you be more productive in the long run.

While I don’t feel I’ve ever “burned out,” I certainly understand now how it can happen, especially when your time with real flesh-and-blood people is limited. Sitting at a computer all day isn’t “sitting at a computer all day.” It all depends what you’re doing. All the denigration of the “laptop class” and the sneering at knowledge workers by people pretending to be blue-collar workers implies that working with your brain isn’t a real thing. But it is. And burnout is an effect of brain work. I think of this line from Northern Virginia housing advocate Luca Gattoni-Celli a lot: “You can burn yourself out while having a great time.”

Just like you rotate muscles and workouts at a gym, you need to rotate the kinds of mental tasks you’re doing. That’s why some days I sit and write, some days I’m on the road, some days I work quick and work on the house, etc. What looks even to me like flitting around unseriously is basically how I actually do my work. If anything ever gets me to search for full-time jobs again, despite the success of what I’m doing now, it will be my inability to entirely convince myself of this.

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There’s this really awful idea my generations faces, or absorbed, that adversity is a virtue. That there’s no such thing as good enough, no moment where you can stop and breathe and say, okay, I did a good job. I think sometimes of the people who say “don’t be a quitter” or whatever, and wonder what actual alternative they want. How much risk to yourself is worth the game?

A friend told me a story once about his dad (if I remember correctly) who was a football player. He broke his leg towards the end of game, and he supposedly finished out the clock with his bone literally sticking out of his skin, because he wouldn’t quit.

I can hardly think of something more horrifying—more self-loathing. No sports match is worth your long-term physical health. Nobody’s work is worth more than their life. Quitting is not good or bad—knowing when to quit is a kind of wisdom. (This is all thinking out loud—I’m not getting ready to quit!)

This kind of mutual mystification happens a lot—in the wading in the World War II memorial, with regard to manners and etiquette (I haven’t published that one yet), with those stories about people who worked in a factory for 40 years and boast of never taking a single sick day. Are they making it up? Were they that much tougher? Sometimes I wonder who’s crazy.

But my point in this is that I’ve had to unlearn this “work = adversity” thing. If you enjoy your work—as I do!—but believe work is inherently something unenjoyable, then you have no obvious metric for measuring what you’re accomplishing.

One of the challenges is that when anything can be work—I almost take the ability to turn any given thing into an article as a challenge—it becomes difficult to identify what actually is work, and what isn’t.

I think of Paul Simon coming up with the song “Mother and Child Reunion”: “Know where the words came from on that? You never would have guessed. I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called ‘Mother and Child Reunion.’ It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, ‘Oh, I love that title. I gotta use that one.’”

Or this anecdote from John Stewart, the songwriter who penned “Daydream Believer” for The Monkees: “I remember going to bed thinking, ‘What a wasted day — all I’ve done is daydream.’ And from there I wrote the whole song.”

This is pretty much exactly how a lot of my articles begin or get completed. It’s an art without a clear and replicable path to completion except to make room for creativity to strike, and take the world in.

And as long as I’m doing it, I might as well do it in full.

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Related Reading:

How I Write

Urbanist Ecumenism

Am I a Content Creator?

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