The Creative Act: A Way of Being

It feels absolutely stupid to call a book about creativity by perhaps the most successful music producer of the last century bad, but holy shit is it not for me.

I'm not sure exactly when I began reading it. Several folks in a movie community I'm active in began reading it more or less as a devotional, and I started it in this way. I quickly found the writing exceedingly annoying, and the lessons overwritten and cliche.

This is nearly 400 pages of the same basic thing over and over again, dressed up in different decoration. Sometimes conflicting with itself (which I don't care about much). It is written in the same tone of voice as instructional tarot cards and horoscopes: incredible authority without any connection to anything. Gaping generalities and astounding assumptions.

I kept thinking, “this sounds like so much pseudoscientifical nonsense,” but of course it isn't scientific and isn't trying to be. It is really more pseudo-religious or pseudo-metaphysical. After more or less every ‘area of thought' there is a little broken out piece of text that sort of languishes on the page. The spacing is broken up to add some extra... Something. Here's one:

“Is it time for the next project
because the clock or calendar
says it's time,
or because the work itself
says it's time?”

Wow! Deep!


Much of the text of the book exists only to add length to basic thesis statements that really stand alone. The added scaffolding does nothing but subtract and annoy. I wonder how this book came to be, and I wonder how exactly Rick and Neil Strauss collaborated on this. Who is responsible for all this pretension and preaching? It seems so counter to Rubin's personality. It has a religious feel, but in the way that you hear a Recent Convert talk. It's one of the most grating things I've read in recent memory.

There are a few parts that I liked, mostly the thesis statements. If you stripped away all of the superfluous gobbledygook, I feel like there's some good stuff here. I had the thought about 250 pages in that there are probably blogposts about this book that are better than the book.

“The work reveals itself as you go.”

I like that! This is actually quite good. It is also one of the standalone things unencumbered by a bunch of scaffolding written by someone on a pay-by-word contract.

To be fair, my hackles were raised at the very start. Rubin (or Strauss, I guess) talks about “receiv[ing] direct transmissions from the universe,” and this sort of thing I am deathly allergic to. I was also really annoyed with some of the early rather privileged ‘wisdom' the book proclaims. Rubin has had a pretty exceptional life with a net worth of some $300, so some of this external/internal experience talk (around page 60) is rather easy for him to say.

There is also a passage on page 39 that simply blew me away — in the wrong direction:

“A helpful exercise might be opening a book to a random page and reading the first line your eyes find. See how what's written there somehow applies to your situation.” (A quick interruption — see how this mirrors religious writing and fortune telling nonsense??? My mom used to read the Bible like this.) “Any relevance it bears might be by chance,” (it is) “but you might allow for the possibility that chance is not all that's at play. When my appendix burst, the doctor who diagnosed it insisted that I go to the hospital immediately to have it removed. I was told there were no other options. I found myself in a nearby bookstore. Standing out on a table in front was a new book by Dr. Andrew Weil. I picked it up and let it fall open. The first passage my eyes went to said: if a doctor wants to remove a part of your body, and they tell you it has no function, don't believe this. The information I needed was made available to me in that moment. And I still have my appendix.”

Don't take medical advice from this guy. Probably not from the nutjob book he picked up, either.