Your "Inner Moonlight" And The Creative Process
Last night, Gregg and I went to a friend's party and I spent most of the time there talking to a very interesting guy who's in finance. At one point, he sort of pooh-poohed what he did -- I think because people in Los Angeles, especially, tend to look down on people in the business of making more money out of money, but I know doing this successfully takes a lot: creativity, risk analysis, knowing when to listen to intuition as based in something and knowing when it's baseless fear primed by something extraneous.

Yes, whether you're a banker or a writer, creativity is important -- as is being true to your vision, even if everybody thinks it's ridiculous.

Yesterday, when looking for writing on what goes into a person's art for a column I'm working on, I found this quote by Allen Ginsberg, which hit home:

It's more important to concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. Take [William Carlos] Williams: until he was 50 or 60, he was a local nut from Paterson, New Jersey, as far as the literary world was concerned. He went half a century without real recognition except among his friends and peers.

You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you.

This -- below -- resonates with me as well:

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." --Joan Didion

I hadn't really thought of writing this way, but it is what I do. Very often, when I go into a topic on my column, I realize that I need to do some deeper thinking on an issue. Writing about something has me digging deep where I might not otherwise.

I find that when I'm having trouble writing a passage, it's often because I haven't done enough reading and thinking. And sometimes, the reading and thinking I need to do isn't directly on the topic that I am writing about. I just need to consume some information about some neighboring topics to home in on where I need to be.

I know I'm not a hack because I approach at least part of each week's column with a sense of terror about a subject -- how I'll ever say something worthy and meaningful about it, something that hasn't been said to death already. And how I'll ever manage to say it clearly enough for people to truly get it.

Science is particularly hard to make clear. I can understand a concept through and through and yet not be able to describe it in a way other people can understand it. That was the hardest part of writing my upcoming book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." It's based in science -- it's findings from research turned into practical advice. And that made it hard as fuck to write, but wildly satisfying when it was done.

About the book: My next book, "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," is coming out in June via St. Martin's Press. It's a science-based book, not on prissy stuff like which fork to use but how to treat people, how to keep others from walking all over us, and basically how to leave the world a nicer, kinder place.

P.S. I love my publisher, St. Martin's Press, and, among all the many awesome things they've done so far, they did an absolutely, wildly awesome cover. (Note the fork.)