It seems fairly commonly accepted that if an artist – or more specifically, a writer – is to produce good output, they must make sure to absorb good input as well. By which is usually meant, if you want to be a writer who writes, you also need to be a writer who reads.
This once led me to make a terrible mistake when I was teaching, and I have gone to great pains to ensure I never made it again.
I was working with a group of students on a module spanning several months – Stage Management students, not writers or actors or people who would describe themselves as artists, and hardly any of them who would even describe themselves as creative. You’ll see the importance of this distinction in a minute.
The module required them to function as a company to pitch, select and produce an event in an urban location that they found for themselves (as opposed to a pre-existing performance space) – an event which responded to the past and present uses of that location. They had to be inspired by what they found in that space and by what they found out about that space. In short, they had to use their imaginations – they had to come up with their own ideas.
It never ceases to amaze me how hard most people find it to come up with even a single idea, let alone multiple ones. It comes easily, naturally to me, and I assume (erroneously) that it will be the same for everyone else. But it isn’t. Far from it.
In part, I think I find it easy because I’m pretty good on the whole when it comes to taking care of input. I was especially good at input when I was a child, reading widely across all sorts of subjects. The lingering traces of all that input are still sloshing around in my brain, coming in useful when it’s time to have ideas that will eventually lead to an output.
Because books (and latterly, online articles) have always been my default sources of input, I used to assume, unthinkingly, that it would be the case for other people, too. You can now probably see where the anecdote about the students is going.
As part of the ideas generation process, I wanted to encourage them to draw on their own input for inspiration – and so I asked them what they were reading at the moment.
All nine of them fell silent. One of them said: “Nothing”. And the tone of their voice told me I had made a massive tactical error. I felt even worse when another of them elaborated that they hadn’t had a good experience at school when it came to books.
They didn’t mean books that they had found boring or difficult to understand. What they really meant was that they hadn’t had a good experience when it came to reading. For them, books were equated first and foremost with reading – with a value judgement based on the fluency of their sight reading.
I was not sensitive enough to infer this straightaway. I can see now that I first took their responses as some kind of personal rebuke – a challenge to my pretensions, to my insistence that books were a good thing. So I started to talk about how great audiobooks were, but the pained looks on the faces around me finally made the penny drop.
I managed to redirect the conversation to say what I should have said in the first place – that all of the things they consume are important inputs, and that none of them are better or more worthwhile than any other. The music and the podcasts they’re listening to, the TV and film they’re watching, the shows they see, the places they visit are all valuable inputs when it comes to helping inspire and generate ideas.
My embarrassment at my own lack of foresight meant I probably extricated myself from this in a very clumsy way. Even worse is the thought that I must have embarrassed some of them, taking them back to judgemental school experiences.
I’ve never made that mistake again. Whenever I talk about input, I make sure from the outset to be clear about the breadth of the sources I’m thinking of. Books are still in there – but they’re not my default in the way that they used to be. And hopefully, I’ve avoided causing embarrassment to myself or anyone else in the process.
As always, Austin Kleon has lots of interesting thoughts and reference points on the whole question of inputs and outputs: you can read a great example of that here.
