The Archetype of The Creator: Inspiration, Discipline, and Identity
Somewhat recently a former student wrote to me, asking for some advice on writing, on the mindset of being a creative author. I answered him the best that I could, but realized that I had never really written on the subject of being the creator, of what it means to dedicate your life to art. If indeed it is a dedication, and not a duty placed upon one. You see, I have also been asked many, many times about what I do by normal people—you know, the sort of people who don’t stay up until six in the morning with insomnia because they just understood what a character in a saga they haven’t written yet is going to do when he travels to that other land—also known as the sane.
I’ve been asked by non-writers why I write. What inspires me. How I get ideas. When I started writing, and all these sorts of questions. And they are all impossible to answer. At least, I cannot give them an answer that would probably make sense to them. Why do I write? You might as well ask me why I breathe. I write because it is an automatic function. Take a deep breath and hold it in. Very soon you will find your lungs exploding. Very soon you will find you can think of nothing else, do nothing else. It doesn’t matter what else is going on, or what the consequences are. Very soon you will find that you absolutely must exhale or die. That is writing.
So perhaps you can at least somewhat understand the difficulty of explaining why I breathe to people who find breathing a weird pastime. I write because I have no choice in the matter. I am The Creator.
Let’s talk about Jungian archetypes for a moment. I teach archetypes in some of my literature classes. Archetypes are something that everyone knows something about, even if they do not realize it. Archetypes are these reoccurring figures that we see in stories and dreams, figures that have been with humanity for two million years, and will be with us as long as we exist. Think of figures like “the wise old man,” “the innocent child,” or “the femme fatale,” and you will begin to get the idea.
One of the developments in Jungian archetypes was made by psychologist Carol Pearson, who focused specifically on twelves of the archetypes and how they exist in all of us and influence us in various ways. While each of us, at different stages of our lives, will have a different balance of these archetypes, there are certain ones that tend to dominate in a person who truly seeks to understand their inner selves. The twelve archetypes that she identified are as follows:
Innocent
Orphan
Warrior
Caregiver
Seeker
Lover
Destroyer
Creator
Ruler
Magician
Sage
Fool
While I have parts of all twelve archetypes in me who are aspects of my personality, The Creator dominates all the others quite a bit. Let’s unpack what this means, both from the outside and inside.
How others see a creator
To others, the creator is a temperamental creature. On one hand, he seems to constantly create things out of thin air, things that they sometimes admire and appreciate. But at the same time, he also seems to create a lot of things that seem nonsensical or insane, or perhaps just useless. He seems to walk around, constantly in his head, thinking about things that no one else sees. He is always working, muttering about people, places, and events that exist only in his mind. He seems to have no sense of balance, and will ignore important things because he just had an idea. He will rush off from the middle of dinner or even a conversation to scribble notes, because apparently the muse just spoke to him. He is moody, and the state of his creative work will affect everything else in his life. Other people will often find him fascinating, inscrutable, and impossible to live with.
What it is like to be a creator
To be a creator is both a blessing a curse. On one hand, the creator is the focus point for making the divine world manifest, for channeling the energies of the cosmos into some medium, whether that is stories, films, music, or any other form. To be a creator is to be a mystic. And when a creator is in the act of channeling this vision, of bringing heaven down to earth, nothing else exists. It is a state of pure rapture. The universe unfolds before him. Time loses all meaning. There are many times I have been struck by inspiration, and think to myself, “I will just get down some notes,” and then six or eight hours later I notice the sun rising and people waking up for the day. This isn’t a flaw of being a creator, it is the essence of it.
But of course, channeling the divine down to earth and making one’s vision manifest is like a drug. Everything else in the world gets the volume turned down. Everything else becomes a shade of gray. It is very, very difficult to feign interest in mowing the lawn when the cosmos is calling to you. And by difficult, I mean impossible. For a creator to ignore the call means self-destruction. There is a reason that so many creators have either fallen deep into substance abuse or died early from overdose. To be a creator means hearing, seeing, and feeling very deeply. The cosmic radio is always set to 10. There is a message in everything and it seems to always be playing. Many creators cannot take the constant high levels of overwhelming emotion, and so they find ways to dull the pain it causes. To be a creator is to know pain, to become intimate friends with pain.
But the act of creation itself, well, it is a profound act of healing. Even if no one reads or engages with what the creator has wrought, it is a profound alchemical act of transformation. Carol Pearson, on the archetype of The Creator, said that the primary goal of this type is identity and authenticity, and this is true. A creator wants to understand the vision inside and manifest it so he can come to terms with it. And every time a creator manifests part of that vision, he learns something deep about himself. He is often surprised by what he creates as much as anyone else. It is like there is a part of something inside of himself and by focusing on it, by writing about it, by expressing it in music, by painting it, it gains a little bit of focus so he can see it a little better. And so the project that a creator is engaged in his whole life is really himself. He is unveiling and understanding himself one creative act at a time. This is the source of my often misunderstood statement, “all writing is biographical.” Lord of the Rings, Dune, the most fantastic works you want to think of, are all biographical in the sense that any genuine creative work has the soul of the creator all over it. It represents their inner turmoil, their dreams and fears, their traumatic memories, and all the rest. You can call part of yourself a hobbit and send it through your mental landscape you call Middle Earth, but it doesn’t make it any less a part of yourself.
I must pause here and clarify that what I am talking about here is real creators and the genuine creative act. There are a lot of people who make things, who make books or whatever, and they do it following some formula or guidebook, some secret recipe, and when this sort of work is completed it reads as incredibly generic and boring. None of the characters are alive, nothing in the story strikes you, and you forget it almost as soon as you have finished it. There are a lot of movies that get churned out this way. These are not products of a creator’s soul. They are products of the machine, made for profit only.
On the other hand, just because a creator pours their heart and soul into a work, doesn’t mean it will actually be good. There are a lot of reasons for this. Most often, it is merely inexperience. It takes a lifetime to master the act of focusing that inner vision into some form, and there is the skill of the medium to contend with. For example, as a creator, I channel my energies into the written word. But that doesn’t mean that I do not get visions of visual art and music. I do. But when I try to manifest those, my output doesn’t match my vision. With writing, I get much closer. So if you find that you are compelled to create, I would advise focusing in on a single way, and spend the rest of your life mastering it. I have been writing for thirty years and I am still merely the student of this art. I’ve gotten better, but I still have much to learn.
The truth is, being a creator is incredibly hard. Writing is hard. A creator is in a paradoxical position. On one hand, he feels this overwhelming need to manifest his vision and to share it with others. But the reality is the act of listening to visions is extremely isolating and lonely. A creator will live his entire life feeling like he is not really heard or understood. People will read his books, if he is lucky, and then say nothing in response. Or they will say they like it but what they see will be quite different than what the creator intended. Even if he gains an audience, even if he becomes rich and famous, he will constantly question himself and be filled with self-doubt. He will think that his work is poor compared to the great creators of the past and present. He will often feel as a failure.
The greatest creative genius of the twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien, while he was writing The Lord of the Rings, constantly felt like he was wasting his time, that no one would ever read what he had spent years working on. At many points, he considered himself to be a creative failure! Vincent Van Gogh was told by many others that his painting sucked. He only ever sold one painting his entire life. He was completely unrecognized, and went to his grave thinking that all his effort was unappreciated. And yet he persisted. That is very hard thing to do. A creator must learn to create with zero validation, with no support. He must take the visions he is given and channel them into his art because that is what he is called to do. And he must often perform to an empty room.
The thing is, success for a creator means something different than it does in many fields. If Van Gogh had used the commonly understood idea of success, then he would have to concluded that his life, his art, was a failure. But it was not, even if he never got to see it. And even if none of us knew about or appreciated Van Gogh, he still would have been an absolute success. Again, this is very hard to understand, for creators and non-creators alike. But the act of creation, of true creation, is a beautiful act no matter what happens after. Because in that moment, the creator has manifested his vision, he has gained focus on that hidden thing inside of himself, and by doing so, he transformed and healed himself. The audience and the applause? That is just bonus, like an unexpected tip. If it ever becomes the goal, the purpose behind creation, then the creator is no longer being authentic, and they are no longer truly a creator. They are merely a businessman, selling a product.
As Robert Henri said, “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
Some practical advice
I want to try and give some actual, practical advice to those who feel the call of creation. I have sometimes heard young people tell me they are thinking about being a writer (in the pure creative sense), and I don’t know what to say to them. If you are thinking about it, then you aren’t an artist. I never thought about being a writer. As I hope I have made clear, I had no choice in the matter. If I was condemned to a tiny cell awaiting execution, I would scratch my words on the wall. If I were the last man alive on earth, I would find some paper and work on my next book. So just realize, what I am saying here is directed to those who are creators, and it doesn’t matter whether you have ever published or whether you think your writing is flawed (I think all my writing is flawed). If you are compelled to create beyond any choice, then you are a creator. Here is my advice on how to be an authentic one.
Cut Noise
Get rid of anything that isn’t inspiring. Delete your social media. Stop watching garbage Youtube videos. Stop paying attention to the news and celebrity drama. Forget politics. Your life is too short for that. You don’t have the time, and you will die soon. Also, if you input garbage, you will output garbage. Purify the signal. Read deep literature. All of it. Watch artistic films. Eliminate the mediocre and banal from your life. This includes people. Focus all your energy into sharpening your creative vision, because it will take great self-mastery to even begin giving form to what is in your head.
Learn Discipline
The muse does not come flitting down to the man who sits around and waits. Art doesn’t truly come unbidden. You need to embrace the grind. Set a schedule of creative time every week. And then play during that time. Create. Make whatever it is you make. I don’t care about wordcount. Just play and let the vision flow. I work every day. I work on my birthday. I work on Christmas. The muse loves a soldier slogging through the trenches. If you don’t have weekly time blocked out for your creative work, then you aren’t really serious about it.
Finish
Nothing annoys me more than creative types that start projects and don’t finish them. Finish your damn projects. And finish them as quickly as you can. Polish later. My first book, The Iron Way, I wrote in one year. I wrote The Babel Project the following year. Then I began working on Lilacs and this was a nightmare to write. I scrapped 3 drafts of it before I even had a foundation I was happy with. I thought I would write the whole thing in 8 months. It took me four years. After two years I had a first draft. I thought it was terrible. I cut out half of it. I revised the rest until it doubled in size again. Then I cut out about 20%. This was around the three year mark. I had no ending. And I still didn’t like it. But I kept grinding. And one day I had an idea and I spent about twelve hours writing it down, and then I realized how the whole book would come together. I spent the next several months revising Lilacs yet again and published it.
The point is, around that two-year mark, this project really felt like a failure. I kept thinking about abandoning it. The problem was I felt deep down that it was the work I needed to make. I just didn’t know how to make it. It took me four years to figure out how to write it. And do you remember what I said about the creative act being one of identity and discovery, of learning about ourselves? Writing Lilacs from the Dead Land has been the single most important creative act in my life as a creator. Is it a good novel? Who cares. Is it my best work? It doesn’t matter. I completed the work. I finished the task. And a couple weeks after I did, I got the idea to start The Bjornlinga Saga, a work that I would never have felt comfortable writing if I had not written Lilacs. Our projects are so much more than sales or applause. If you have a creative work that you are struggling with, good! That means you have gotten to a place of discovery. You are about to learn something about yourself.
Final Thoughts
This is my own take on what it means to be a creator. If you read the biographies and books of other creators, I am sure that you will find a lot of overlap between their ideas and my own. There are certain principles that just seem to be universal to all of us. However, there are also many particulars also. I’ve read many books about creative work, and many more books about writing in particular. The writing books were mostly useless, but two books on creative mindset are pure gold. I strongly recommend them to any creative types:
· The Creative Act, by Rick Ruben
· The War of Art, by Stephen Pressfield
