The weird way works

However weird the inputs in the creative process, they’re nothing compared to the output. (Library of Congress photo)

Confession: I talk to myself all the time.

Not just the banal, absent-minded things I might announce to the world, like “time for a snack,” or the occasional curse word when I hurt myself. I’m talking about full-on, dictating whole paragraphs into the voice recorder on my phone. Often, I do this while walking down the street, hoping that others will assume I’m doing the more acceptable thing of talking to a fellow human.

I talk to myself because for me, it’s way more effective than writing to myself — journaling on paper or on the computer. I do better when I’m moving. I take as many meetings as possible by phone — yesterday, I walked ten miles over nearly four hours’ worth of conversations. Sometimes, I don’t go very far; instead, by the end of a forty-five minute consultation, I have a spotless home. I think better when I’m moving, and I move better when I’m talking.

Creative work, for me, is the impetus for all the talking. I’m not sure how I could do it silently. Working through a challenging project with many variables, I have to get the ideas out and play with them.

My routine work may not require talking aloud, but it, too, is facilitated by movement; hence, I have a big ugly treadmill desk in my office so that I can walk and type. It’s not for exercise — it’s so I don’t fall asleep.

The talking and walking may strike you as needlessly weird or expensive choices. I get that. But I’ve optimized my life for the way I want to work. I have no car, but I have a treadmill desk; I save my chores so that I can do them during my afternoon calls; I have nice warm boots to keep my feet warm in freezing temps on long walks when I must get out of the house to rant into my voice recorder so that I don’t drive my husband crazy. There is a method to my madness.

You might have your own weird things that you do. It may be that your kitchen has to be spotless before you can relax, or you like to go for a drive when you’re feeling overwhelmed. You might have a particular pen or paper that you use to take notes, or a fancy planner that you’d be lost without. Maybe, unlike me, you hate talking on the phone and try to get all of your meetings to happen via Zoom or to go away completely. 

It also might be the case that you haven’t allowed yourself to be weird yet and discover what facilitates your creativity or productivity. Maybe you’ve always worked from nine to five and don’t realize that your peak effectiveness is between 10 PM and midnight, or (like me) in the predawn hours of the morning. Maybe you do your best work when you are wearing comfy sweatpants, or (like me), you need to dress up and put on real clothes, even when working from home, to be most effective.

You might not think these things matter, but they often do. Yes, sometimes our thing is only a placebo, but not always. In any case, placebos work. If we believe we’ve discovered a tactic that will help us to do creative work, then we probably have.

The downside of having a highly specific and refined process (“Let’s see, Snuggles the Teddy Bear is on the chair next to me with his cup of tea, I’ve got ‘To Sir With Love’ playing on repeat, three artisanal pastries, fresh out of the oven, have just been delivered to my door, and the moon is in Aquarius  — time to get to work!”) is that we may falsely believe that we can’t function when the circumstances aren’t ideal. So every so often, we need to shake things up and get out of our routine. 

Because we don’t need to wait until things are perfect — we just need to get ourselves going. And once we’ve practiced doing that consistently, we find that we can do it without all of the accoutrements we have become accustomed to. 

So if you haven’t played around with your process, I encourage you to do so. Try things for fun; change it up. You may be amazed and delighted to find that allowing yourself to be weird leads to positive results. You may want to keep your new weird way to yourself — but I don’t blame you if you want to go around telling everyone. Who knows, you might help them.

And if you have already come up with a process that works for you, I’d love to hear about it. The weirder, the better!