The Art of Messing Around

Hey y’all,

This conversation with Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, happened because of my response to a single note she posted:

This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, because over the years I’ve noticed just how many pieces of creative work start off as a joke, or a lark, or just goofing around. (Also, a lot of these ideas are prominent in my next book, Don’t Call It Art.)

I wanted to share 10 highlights and thoughts from our conversation:

1. The creative spirit is not just something you have, it’s something you enter into.

This is something I wrote about in my letter, “entering into the spirit”:

For artists, we get to play at Halloween all year. That veil between the material and the immaterial stays razor thin. Every day, we get to step into our costumes, don our masks, perform our rituals, and enter into the spirit.

But to do so, we must surrender our need to be good. And show up and surrender it over and over again. Day after day, keeping the channel open, getting out of our own way.

Hence my belief in “silly rituals.”

2. Whatever comes after the phrase “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” is probably something you should take seriously.

Matt Farley (more about him in my letter, “On quantity and quality”) writes really well about this in his creativity guide, The Motern Method:

Sometimes in a conversation, you’ll hypothesize about a creative idea by saying “wouldn’t it be funny if…” followed by a description of a very ridiculous idea. It’s an idea that no self-respecting person would ever devote a lot of time to.

But if you learned that someone had done it, you’d be curious about it, right? Of course you would. You’d bring it up in conversation with friends.

Do that project.

This also a great way to generate stories. One of my favorite stories to read this time of year is John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” (I love listening to Anne Enright reading it.) It’s a story about a guy who is at a pool party and basically says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I just swam home?”

In a journal entry, Cheever played around with “what if” scenarios while he comes up with the story: