Transcript: Episode 27

Hey friend, and thank you for spending some time with me today. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

This month I want to share a mindset tool I’ve been tinkering with over the past few weeks, something that I think can help writers stay grounded in our personal creative values as we’re working, instead of getting kind of taken over by external ideas about what we should be doing in our creative lives.

But before I get into that, I have a quick heartfelt request. If you’re a regular listener and you haven’t left a rating and review for the pod, I’d be really grateful if you could take a few minutes right now to do that and support this space, if you’re able to. And if you know a friend who might also enjoy today’s episode, text them a link!

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Okay, /housekeeping and onto this month’s topic.

So far this year I’ve been talking about productivity a lot on the pod – the February and March episodes were sort of a two-parter about how creatives can basically carve out a path for ourselves that bypasses the deepest pitfalls of productivity culture (while still working toward goals around practicing our craft more consistently).

And this month’s topic also flows directly out of what was on my mind in February and March – but it’s not directly about productivity! So if you’re a little done with that topic, don’t worry. I’m going to briefly recap the bits from last month that lead into what I want to share with you today, but then we’re done with productivity for now.

At the end of the March episode, I had a line about creative ethics vs. creative metrics – and I have to admit that in the moment, I liked the wordplay there but then I didn’t really fully flesh out what I thought it meant. This was in the context of essentially validating the choice not to share completed creative work – here’s the quote:

“By honoring the work you don’t publicly share, you remind yourself over and over that your goal is not to get the most possible output in front of the most possible consumers. You’re not trying to be the kind of prolific that equates publishing stats with creative worth.

Your goal is to practice your craft consistently as an ethic, not a metric.”

Which, like – yes, the contrast of ethic and metric has a nice ring to it. But what does it actually mean?? I did not actually say.

So this month I am going to say what I think it means, and I’m going to give an example of one possible creative ethic – a set of core values to guide and nurture creative practice.

For my purposes here, I’m defining an ethic as a philosophical system, in the vein of Kening Zhu’s concept of systems that I mentioned last month. Here’s her definition again: “[A system is] like a growing organism; there’s a regenerative, living property to systems. There are things that emerge from systems that are unexpected and spontaneous.”

And then here’s how I applied that definition to creativity in my own words last month: “Creativity is a system of cyclical, evolving relationships between the different aspects of your craft and your practice.”

So, here’s what I was getting at with that little ethic-vs-metric wordplay thing: A creative ethic is a generative system of values that acts as a counterbalance to the pressures of productivity and the creative marketplace.

It’s a philosophical system that you consciously choose and follow in order to avoid unconsciously taking on all those external expectations just by default. Your personal creative ethic is whatever system of values helps you keep materialist productivity from being the guiding value of your creative life. And it’s something clearly formulated, something both simple and nuanced enough to actually apply in your day-to-day practices.

I’ve got an example ethic that I’m going to use for the rest of the episode, purely as an illustration of how this kind of system can work and what kinds of values it can encompass. If you like this example ethic, by all means use it – but the point is not so much to win you over to this specific philosophy. (I’m not even sure yet that I’m won over to this specific philosophy.) The point is just to explore how this kind of system can support creative practice.

So, with that said: My example for you today is not something I made up myself; it’s a set of four values or guideposts called the Witches’ Pyramid. As you can guess from that name, it’s often connected to the actual practice of magic and witchcraft, but it’s not necessarily confined to that context (hence why I’m using it for the purposes of talking about creativity).

The Pyramid is a philosophical tool first created or formulated by the French occultist and poet Éliphas Lévi in the 1800s. (That’s my potentially wretched attempt at the French pronunciation; spelling of the name is in the show notes.)

There’s some debate about the specifics of Lévi’s biography – but he was involved in Catholic monasticism and in socialist politics at various points in his life, and he’s part of a philosophical lineage going back to the Renaissance that basically attempted to find a single coherent theory of reality encompassing spiritual evolution, social order, and empirical science.

Here’s Lévi’s original formulation of his philosophy, or at least this one part of it:

“To attain… the knowledge and power of the Magi, there are four indispensable conditions: an intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity which nothing can check, a will which cannot be broken, and a prudence which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate. TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, [and] TO KEEP SILENCE – such are the four words of the Magus.”

Since Lévi first wrote about these “four words,” the concept has filtered out into various spiritual and occult traditions and has become a sort of magical meme, taking on a life that arguably doesn’t always have that much to do with their original intent. The term “the Witches’ Pyramid” was actually coined in the 1950s during the earliest phase of the modern neopagan movement (the idea being that these four philosophical pillars can form the foundation for spiritual or magical practice, symbolized by a pyramid).

The Pyramid has been reinterpreted and even rephrased almost numberless times and in a lot of different contexts, so I don’t feel any sort of compunction about adding my own take into the mix – and in this take, magic and general woojery are welcome but certainly not required.

So, taking those four pillars of the Pyramid – to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silence – here’s how I see these guiding values as a system that can hold and sustain a creative practice.

First, there’s To Know – or as Lévi puts it, “an intelligence illuminated by study.” This pillar can clearly relate to the study of writing as a craft, and to a continuing dedication to that study. It’s the part of your creative foundation that’s most closely tied to creativity as a practice of skills. It’s the part of you that’s an eternal apprentice, always looking for new ways to move inspiration through you onto the page.

But To Know can have less obvious dimensions – it can be your creative intuition, that spidey sense that tells you when a weird thought is worth paying attention to, or that tells you when you might actually need to set skill aside for a bit in order to loosen your grip and discover something new. To Know isn’t just the study part of Lévi’s definition – it’s also the illumination, the more mysterious knowing that emerges as part of your creative life. It’s both competent ability and clear vision.

Basically, To Know is what’s at play when you know how to put together a sentence that expresses your creative thought. But it’s also what’s at play when you’re researching obscure historical facts at 1 in the morning because you “just know” something interesting is going to come out of your newfound expertise in 16^th century open-hearth cooking. (Or your expertise in 19^th century French occult philosophy…)

The next pillar of the Pyramid is To Dare – “an intrepidity which nothing can check.” To Dare is the pillar of your unbridled imagination, of everything that’s unlocked when you reach the edge of what you know and keep going anyway. It’s the faith that your creative life and work matters even when society tells you it doesn’t. It’s the audacity to just add your voice to the world – and to actually listen to the voices that answer back, even when they’re wilder than you could have anticipated.

To Dare is the act of allowing your curiosity to create a portal, and then stepping through, trusting that the risk is worthwhile and that you are worthy of facing it.

On a more practical level, To Dare is the courage to publish, to go to the writers’ meetup, to try a completely new creative medium. Or maybe it’s the strength of mind to say no to an opportunity that looks good or impressive on paper… but that leaves you feeling like maybe there’s a better way forward for you and your work, a path that diverges from the standard pattern of quote-unquote “success.”

Next is To Will, the third pillar – “a will which cannot be broken.” At first glance, this looks like a bit of a restatement of To Dare. But if To Dare is about unchecked curiosity and potential, then To Will is the pillar of steadfastness, even when potential seems to have gone stagnant – or when obstacles emerge that you are really not particularly curious about experiencing, thanks anyway!

To Will is the deep creative commitment required to actually make things instead of purely imagining them. But this pillar isn’t just about willpower in the standard sense – it’s also about the ability and will-ingness to enact change through your creative expression. To Will is to manifest, to have a consciously crafted effect on the world you’re embedded in (and to take responsibility for the effect you create).

This pillar is the tangible act of following through on the promise of inspiration – of letting inspiration do its work on you and through you. It’s revising the manuscript for the third effing time, until it finally takes the form that feels right (imperfections included). It’s submitting the poem to another lit journal – because you still love it, even after all the editors you were sure would want it sent you form rejections. It’s realizing your new project is knocking on some mental doors you’ve been keeping firmly shut – and continuing to write anyway.

Whenever you fully accept, articulate, and actualize the gifts of a story – that’s the pillar of Will in your practice.

Which brings us to the fourth pillar, To Keep Silence – “a prudence which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate.” To Keep Silence is to make space in your creative life for the deep, reflective pause, in order to reconnect with aspects of your creative self that can sometimes be eclipsed or occluded by words and action. It’s prudence in the sense of alertness to your own inner dialogue, of standing back from both pride and self-criticism. It’s what allows you to be committed to your storytelling craft without letting any one story (and its perceived success or failure) become the whole truth about who you are, or what your craft can be.

Keeping Silence is also the simple awareness that listening is just as much part of being a storyteller as speaking or writing is. To Keep Silence is to hone your ability to really pay attention to the world, wherever you find yourself – both the world within and the world without. Without Silence, there can be no story, because you have to hear the story to write it.

And finally, To Keep Silence is to know when a creative work is just for you or a close circle of others, and to honor that as part of your craft. Some stories are secret, and are all the more powerful for it.

 

To give you an example of the Pyramid in action, here’s how the four pillars could emerge within the timeline of completing an individual writing project:

·        To Know is the first imaginal stage when the idea of the work is percolating and gaining its initial form – when you and that spark are introducing yourselves to each other. It’s the transition from pure inspiration to the first words on the page, those moments when you know you’ve hit on something you want or need to write, and when you begin to know what shapes it might take.

·        To Dare is the next stage, when you plunge in and let the story lead you – when the initial knowing expands into everything you can’t know until you actually begin the creative work.

·        To Will is the stage when you have to commit to a tangible path and form in order to bring the work to completion. It’s the stage when everything you’ve discovered about the story through knowing and daring meets with the determination required to finish and revise the draft.

·        To Keep Silence is the stage when the words are done, when you release the active work and determine how to share the resulting creative gift – and finally, it’s when you patiently open your inner ear for the call of the next story.

But like I said earlier, the Pyramid doesn’t have to be viewed as sequential. I’m calling my version of these four pillars a creative ethic and not a writing method because the pillars are guiding values, not linear steps; you don’t progress neatly from one to another.

If you were to hypothetically adhere to the Witches’ Pyramid (or I guess, the Writers’ Pyramid), all of the four pillars would relate in some way to your creative practice at any given time. That’s part of what makes them an evolving, relational system, the kind of spiraling system that can allow deep creative work to emerge. To call back again to Kening Zhu’s concept of organic systems vs. productive recipes, the pillars aren’t set inputs in a recipe that result in a predictable but limited output.

Each of the pillars interacts with and informs the others simultaneously and continuously: You might be working on a project that’s in the To Will stage of drafting, but in the moment that you show up to the page to work on that draft, you’re also exercising knowledge and daring. You’re exercising silence every time you pause to attune yourself to the words already on the page in front on you, and to catch what words are coming next.

And each time you do exercise one of the pillars with care and self-awareness – no matter how small the scale – you’re training yourself for the times when that guiding value is the primary one you’re going to need to get you through a challenge or show you where to go next.

This is where the idea of a philosophical counterbalance comes in, the idea that a core creative ethic like the Pyramid can help keep other, external values from steering you in directions you don’t actually want to go. Without some kind of formulated philosophy, it’s really easy to confuse one of your writing goals for an actual creative value – you can conflate a metric for an ethic.

I talked about this concept from a different angle way back in an early episode of the pod – it’s number 7: Valuing your storytelling vision. That episode is a bit more about defining creative values in terms of what values are explored in your stories themselves, or even just in one specific project. Kind of like defining themes for your writing process. One of the examples I used was that a writer might have a value statement about “writing stories that help people imagine new ways of finding and nurturing family.”

I wanted to mention that past episode partly because it just makes a good companion to this one if you haven’t listened yet (and I’ve linked it in the show notes). But I also wanted to highlight that there are different kinds of creative values (at least as I see it) – some are about what kind of specific work you want to create, and others are more about how you want to create, and how you want your own life to be shaped by creative practice. So I’m talking more about the latter here. Although of course, how you create will impact what you create… which is kind of what every episode of this podcast is about.

Anyway, going back to the example of the Pyramid: Here’s how each pillar might act as a defense against a competing value or goal – something that could otherwise draw you off your chosen path.

To keep this connected to last month’s topic of “being prolific,” let’s say you’re faced with a decision about publishing a specific story. After all, this is sort of the ultimate sneaky goal-that-acts-like-a-value. A goal that’s absolutely worthwhile, but that also aligns so easily with all the invisible, default values of the marketplace – all those alienating values you kind of have to swim in if you want to publicly share creative work.

I want to make this example as universally relevant as possible, in terms of genre of writing, so let’s go with a classic decision most writers need to make in some way at some point – self-publishing vs. seeking a traditional publisher. And let’s look at how the pillars of the Pyramid could help hold you steady no matter which direction you ultimately go in.

·        To Know reminds you of the power of doing plenty of due diligence research – and it also reminds you to stay alert for your gut response to all the knowledge you’re gathering.

·        To Dare reminds you to imagine what you actually want, what success for this project actually looks like to you – instead of accepting that concerns like money, exposure, or prestige should be the determining factors. (And to be clear – maybe what you ultimately dare to imagine is that yeah, you want the exposure of having your work on the Barnes and Noble shelf! Or yeah, you want to control your copyright so you can make the most money possible from each book sale. That’s great – as long as your choices are being made consciously.)

·        To Will gives you the stamina both to make concrete plans for your goal and to actually enact them. And it also reminds you that no single plan should ever eclipse your deeper will for your work – by which I mean the way you want your work to effect readers (and the world). If you’re talking with a well-connected, big-name agent who wants you to tweak your work to appeal to a specific market, but you’re not sure about the changes… maybe that’s not the right publishing plan, no matter how much you might like it to be.

·        And finally, To Keep Silence offers you a still point in the center of all the hustle and uncertainty of getting your work into the marketplace. No matter how your goals end up shaking out, whether you’re getting exactly what you hoped or not – the practice of silence reminds you that there’s always something available to you in the act of reflection. And as long as you take the moment necessary to find it, your creative life will outlast any number of highs or lows.

I think this example of making a publishing decision shows how a creative ethic can both dovetail with external goals and also transcend them. You can use the values of the Pyramid to help you meet a specific goal in some very concrete ways – but if you do that work within the container of the Pyramid, then the goal itself will never highjack your practice. It won’t become your key value and start determining the way you relate to creative craft as part of your life. (Or at least, you’ll have a much better chance of catching yourself when that does start to happen.)

This is partly because of the way the Pyramid is formulated – it’s psychologically catchy or sticky in the way that all good mottos and memes are, but at the same time, it’s flexible and nuanced. You could apply the pillars of this ethic over and over in different ways throughout your writing life, and their meaning for you could shift and grow along with your practice.

So here’s where I reiterate that I’m not actually proselytizing the gospel of the Witches’ Pyramid specifically – I’m using it to illustrate a point. There are a lot of different ethics or philosophical formulas you might choose to work with. To give another existing example that is actually pretty similar to the Pyramid, but with a very different vibe, you could make the four Stoic virtues into a creative ethic: wisdom, fortitude, justice, and temperance. Or you could build an original formula of your own.

Anything that works as a mental ethical touchstone can have this kind of guiding and grounding effect on your creative practice. It just needs to remind you of two things: what you really value most about the art of storytelling, and how you really want to relate to your own craft. Because when those ideals form the core of your practice, when you’re enacting and living them through your writing – that’s when the real creative magic happens, for you and for everyone who encounters your work.

 

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That’s it from me today; thanks as always for sharing this virtual audio space with me, and for being the kind of creative weirdo who actually wants to take half an hour out of their day to think about stuff like how a centuries old occult philosophy can maybe help you write stuff. The world needs you and your work, and I hope this pod can be a tiny part of inspiring your stories.

Until next time, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.