creativity – Tommy Tomlinson

Allee Willis died back on Christmas Eve. You wouldn’t know her name unless you’re deeply into songwriting, but you know her work. She wrote or co-wrote “I’ll Be There For You,” the “Friends” theme; “Neutron Dance,” the Pointer Sisters hit; the music for the Broadway show “The Color Purple”; and best of all, the Earth, Wind and Fire classic “September,” which you have now started to sing in your head by reflex.

Willis led a big life — she was known for wild parties, and she filled her house so full of knickknacks and doodads that she turned it into a Museum of Kitsch. But when I was reading her obit, something she said about her songs stuck out:

“I, very thankfully, have a few songs that will not go away, but they’re schlepping along 900 others.”

That’s one of the keys to a creative life — knowing that not everything you do will be a hit.

Sometimes you grind out a piece of work, pour your soul into it, put it out into the world, and … crickets. But sometimes a little thing you toss off in 20 minutes becomes what you’re known for.

Don’t discount those little tossed-off things — they’re often the result of years of prep work that your subconscious did to prepare you for that moment.

And don’t grieve too much over the hard work that didn’t find an audience — sometimes the work itself has to be the reward.

Success is a fickle thing and not always up to you. The one thing you can do is keep creating, building a whole body of work that keeps schlepping along, the hits and the duds and the in-betweens, but every one of them yours.

— TT

There’s an interview with Rhea Seehorn, the actress who plays Kim Wexler on “Better Call Saul,” that has stuck in my mind ever since I read it a few months ago.

She had spent a decade in Los Angeles, landing a couple of recurring roles in sitcoms, a few guest spots on other shows. She spent most of her time auditioning for parts she didn’t get. She spent untold hours in little conference rooms, acting her heart out for casting directors, giving her all in scenes that never made the screen.

She still wasn’t much of a name when she auditioned for “Better Call Saul.” But the casting directors remembered her:

I’d never booked anything with them, but they called me in for dramas, dark dramas, dark comedies, light comedies, everything in between. I got to play a wide range of material for them that I didn’t ever get to do onscreen, but they saw all of it. And then they cast “Better Call Saul” and called me in for that role. I went in and I auditioned with a gazillion people and there were callbacks and then there was testing. But from the beginning, Sharon and Sherry, they told me it was my audition [that booked me the role] but also them knowing a 10-year body of work of mine that no one had ever seen. It made me cry when they told me that.

Any creative career requires so much unseen work — pots that never make it to the kiln, lyrics that end up in the back of a notebook or the bottom of a trash can.

My laptop files are full of writing the world will never see. I’ve got four book proposals that never became books. Then I’ve got a whole batch of files that are stuff I cut out of various versions of “The Elephant in the Room.” This morning I opened the document with cuts from the second draft — a point where I was already two and a half years into writing. I got rid of everything from one of the opening quotes (Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you — Bernard Malamud) to a whole deleted chapter. The document is 15,390 words — 58 pages long. Only a few people saw any of those words. I cut most of them before they ever got to an editor. They’re the failed auditions for the book, the work I had to do on the way to doing the work that made it.

I never completely get rid of all that unseen work — there’s often a scrap in there that I can combine with a scrap of something else, the way I imagine hot dogs get made. But even if all those cuts never see light, they’ve done their job. Every word you write, every lump of clay you try to shape, every scene you pour your heart into — it all counts. You won’t know how or when. You just have to do it.

— TT