Film Courage: You mentioned a conversation that you had about work and how it’s good
work and how it’s good work or bad work is never really finished.
We are in this new age of these sort of gurus and these success articles on five tips to
make you more productive whatever.
So something David was talking about was a sustained obsession.
He said that he’d read and heard from so many people that most successful people are
just obsessed with their work, they are workaholics.
Do you think that’s true?
Dr. Ken Atchity, Author/Producer: There’s a lot of truth in it and I’ve gone through
that same thought process especially when writing a book about the creative mind.
I don’t think that workaholics is the right word for it.
I call it The Type C Personality because workaholics comes from the Selye’s concept of the Type
A and Type B personality and from what I can make out the Type A personality is the unhappy
workaholic who can’t do anything in life except work and who basically is making himself
and the people around him miserable because of his work and his obsessive need to be working
all of the time.
And then there’s the Type P personality who is never very well-defined and who somehow
doesn’t become an ideal as Selye describes it but somebody who is well-adjusted and doesn’t
feel the same crazy pressures that the Type A feels and I thought well the problem with
that theory is that it leaves out people who absolutely love their work and who are able
to live other full lives at the same time and I started thinking about that and realizing
their are a lot of people like that and I call them Type C’s in one of my books and
the Type C is the creative personality that loves to work, would probably rather be working
than anything else but isn’t negatively impacted by that at all.
Instead they just thrive on their work.
I mean there’s an example I saw long ago as Pablo Casals the great cellist was so crippled
with arthritis when he got older that he had to be carried from his bed every morning to
his piano bench because he warmed up every day by playing the piano for half of an hour
or an hour.
But he got to the point where he couldn’t walk to the bench.
He had to be carried to the bench and then stacked on to the bench and his arms had to
be lifted onto the keyboard and then he would slowly but surely start playing for an hour.
And at the end of the hour he walked to the kitchen for breakfast and he did this everyday
for his last ten years and he was reactivating his body through creative process that he
was very well in tune with.
And I realize that Type C personalities are people who have this creative affliction or
whatever you call it (this gift) but understand it as opposed to those who don’t understand
it who have often tragic endings like Sylvia Plath or Hemingway or Virginia Wolf or many
others in the creative world who never understand their process.
Who think that every time they finish a book it’s the end of the world and they go into
a deep depression.
This is very common in the creative world is to be depressed after you finish the work.
So when you really think about that the solution is obvious never get to the point where you
are finishing the work and that happens on the negative side for a lot of people as well
who can never finish their book or never finish their article or never finish their poem because
they are afraid of finishing, fear of finishing.
And as a tenured professor I was always on committees judging other people who couldn’t
finish anything.
And one of my colleagues who like me had published many books we were both on the same committee
judging another colleague who had not finished a single book.
And my colleague said to me “You know you and I would write a book in the time it takes
him to research a chapter in a book.”
And I said “Yes, because I always do my research last.”
I write the book first and then do the research.
So I already know it’s going to end, but to get back to this idea of finishing.
A simple solution to this postpartum depression is when you know when you are almost done
whether you are in a home stretch of a book or a screenplay or whatever it is.
Stop, take a day off, take two days off.
Because the energy of finishing is so huge that it will easily be recalled when you sit
down again when you allow it into this compartment that you are using.
But take a day off because every creative person has another
project that is dying to be next.
You can sit down and start it and do it to a point where you can’t wait to go on with
it and then stop and go back and finish you were finishing.
And then you will discover that there is no more postpartum depression because you haven’t
allowed it, you simply managed the time, the finite commodity at your disposal.
You’ve managed the time so you don’t have to deal with that.
Because being depressed is most of the time basically a waste most of the time for an
artist.
You can allow it for awhile if it gives you great ideas and depends your pathos and the
things you need to draw on but basically too much of it is a waste of time.
You know one of my mentors years ago John Gardner (the novelist) said “People should
just start doing more.
It gets rid of all the moods they’re having.”
If you are in a down mood, get up and run around the block and literally that works.
I mean if you get your body going and run around the block it’s hard to be in that
kind of morbid, depressed state you are in before.
So managing your moods like that is what separates a productive, creative happy person from a
productive unhappy person.
You notice I’m not talking about the unproductive ones.
That’s a whole different subject.
But I’m talking about people who are creatively productive and have careers, they are still
divided into unhappy ones and the happy ones and it’s a matter of understanding how your
mind is working that makes you part of the happy group and you don’t have to be part
of the unhappy group despite a lot of urban myths to the contrary that basically say the
artist has to be suffering and tortured and all of that.
It’s really not necessary.
Film Courage: Well you get more attention that way.
I know Julia Cameron [Author of The Artist’s Way, Vein of Gold and more] talks about (and
I’m butchering this I’m sure) that the unhappy blocked artist gets a lot of attention,
pats on the back and friends around them where the productive, happier person finds themselves
sometimes alone because it’s a little threatening or it’s just hard to…
Ken: Yes…but being alone is wonderful so…the happy productive artist loves being alone
and he loves being with people too but he loves being alone because it’s truly when
he is under the most command of all of his powers and facilities when nothing can interrupt
him and he’s focused on the work, that’s great.
And getting too much sympathy, as a literary manager who has managed hundreds of managers
over my career I think the ones that are unhappy and looking for attention, you really get
tired of them fast if you are dealing with them all of the time.
If they are in your family and you only have to see them once a week, okay fine.
If you only have to see them at Thanksgiving, okay even better.
But if you are somebody who deals with them everyday sooner or later the ones that are
constantly complaining go onto your Life Is Too Short list and those are not the ones
you are looking for.
And they are what I call pseudo artists who end up not being productive most of the time.
Who are longing to be artist but don’t have the mental discipline to actually do it.