Eccentric or Creative

Working in your pajamas

One of my tests to determine whether someone is “friend” material or merely an acquaintance is to ask them this, preferably over drinks,”Do you ever talk to yourself, in the mirror or otherwise, as one of your characters?”

This question leads to one of two possible looks. The first is, “cuckoo, psycho standing before me…where is the nearest exit?”

The other is the bashful, lip biting, glance over the shoulder to see if anyone else is listening before I blush slightly and admit, “I thought it was just me.”

Now admittedly, there is a third response. The Cocker Spaniel, roll over and show my belly cause “I want you to like me, really, REALLY like me.” [Vomits slightly] I hate these writers. They are like Britney Spears; they will do anything, absolutely anything to appear legitimate. Until you are dead, writing shouldn’t be a popularity contest. It should be about the craft of developing your work.

The unbeliever has already left and the cheerleader isn’t worth the time it takes to write this sentence, so let’s focus instead on the revelation that some of us writers, and possibly artists, dancers, etc., talk to ourselves. Does this make us mad men and women? Certainly not, eccentric most definitely.

Whether you talk to yourself in the mirror, can only work to certain types of music in a certain bathrobe, during a certain solstice or just need four cups of the magic bean juice to keep the gears working. We all have certain eccentric working tendencies which enable us to engage and work effectively at our craft.

Eccentric creatives not only have little idiosyncrasies, we also have strict belief systems attached to those habits. For example, how many of us are willing to divulge the full details of our current project for fear that even the utterance of the topic will case it to disappear into the collective ether. Okay, maybe it is just me.

Or is it? Today I was reading a newsletter from Behance, an online portfolio site (to be discussed in a later post), and came across an article on “Why Creative People Need to Be Eccentric” by Mark McGuinness. The article is a slight hodge podge but what I like about it is that he provides some great examples of eccentric work habits, like Maurice Sendak drawing to music, Truman Capote needing to recline because otherwise he couldn’t think.

It reminded me of the movie “Adaptation” where Charlie Kaufman is wondering whether he should eat the muffin. He plots out all the possible scenarios, like if I eat the muffin now, I will have energy to write but if I eat the muffin later it will be a nice reward for getting some writing done. Kaufman is determining the ritual and the rules for that ritual. Did the order in which he consumed his muffin affect the writing he was doing, watch the movie and find out.

Of course some of you are now thinking that there is a “psycho standing before me..” but wait, think of all the little things you accomplished today. Was there an order, a specific way in which you had to do some of them…not because you had to do them that way but because you wanted to?

So what are your eccentric habits and how do they help you create?