There’s a lot you have to let go in order to be spontaneous in your art, which is really the creative act in its smallest movement: at some point, ideas seem to come from nowhere, and many artists have commented on how mysterious a process it is. To do creative work requires so much more than sitting down at a desk everyday—it calls for an openness toward the world rather than an attempt to organize or control it. 

But spontaneity is actually really hard to pull off for a lot of us—if we’re trying to think our way into a spontaneous act. Renowned poet and teacher Marie Howe says that the writing process is a mystery to her. “So much of writing is getting beyond the will,” she says in an episode of Billy Collins’ Master Class on writing poetry. You must give up the desire to look a certain way, to maintain your ego, and this, “depending on the amount of investment one has in that, takes a short or a very long time.” So to be spontaneous, you have to not think and not be in your egoic mind at all. How do we actually do this? 

In one of the most paradigm-shifting books about the creative act, Keith Johnstone begins Impro with the story of his career as a director and improv teacher, including all the ways his education had blocked him creatively and how he found ways to reignite the imagination and sense of spontaneity in himself and in the actors he taught. We’re often taught that being a creative person who’s good at their craft means to be critical, to select the “right” artistic choices, to have everything figured out before you commit anything to paper, and reject and discriminate ideas instead of accept and build on ideas so that something new emerges. And this is exactly what the artist or poet doesn’t do! (At least not at first.) A place to start would be to try doing the opposite of what we’ve been told to do, at least when it comes to creative work. 

It was interesting to read about Johnstone’s experiences as a student that so diminished his creative life, because it echoed my own, and I suspect it echoes many others’ experiences too. Formal education hasn’t changed much for the better (too much testing and competition rather than exploratory learning), and neither have most cultural expectations regarding how we make decisions and how we move through the world. We rarely feel safe enough to give up our egos or our personas, those protective barriers against failure and embarrassment and not knowing the answer in advance. No one ever tells you that you have to let all this go in order to be creative!

Of course if you decide to be an artist of any kind, it puts a kind of pressure on you to be a good one, if you’re going to devote so much time to an artistic practice and have any artistic career aspirations. To that Julia Cameron responds, “To write well, you have to be willing to write badly.” Who ever gives us permission to make “bad” art as a serious strategy?! I felt such a huge sense of relief when I stumbled onto Roxane Gay’s series of tweets to aspiring writers in which she encourages people to send out bad stories, that this is just part of the process. Making bad art is necessary for making good art, because you can’t be overly controlling of what you produce, you can only maximize your chances of success by producing a lot. 

Marie Howe says, “Often I have to write a lot, a lot, a lot…write into a poem if you will, until all the things that I thought I wanted to say finally get said and get exhausted and something begins to occur that has never happened before.” You’re aiming for a real voice, “a living voice”, that makes the reader or listener “feel spoken to.” She adds, “There’s a real encounter…a presence.” It’s not necessarily you coming through—but it’s a part of you that you’re bringing out, or a self you’re dropping into, a filter through which you can view the world. Making it up as you go along means to bring your full self to the work and not just the parts that are acceptable to you or ones you want to pick and choose. You’re making art to have an experience, not to simply record something. 

One thing I started doing when feeling blocked is to ask myself what I was resisting. Was I shoving down some unpleasant feelings because I wanted my writing to have a certain quality? Was I stifling my actual voice? Was I not allowing myself to write a certain way because I thought it wouldn’t be good enough, or because I anticipated criticism for it? 

That’s the danger in showing your work to others for feedback before it’s been properly cooked. If you don’t have this inner faith in your own abilities, then anything anyone will say will be just another reason to censor yourself or to present yourself in a certain way that may not be authentic. Spontaneity may thrive within creative constraints, but not under feelings like shame or fear.

Johnstone writes that we often fake the kind of imagination we think we’re supposed to have because of the way our education and culture have damaged us. Some of the dialogue in Impro—taken from the actual experiences and games in his class—is Johnstone asking questions and encouraging improvisers to say what words first came to them instead of choosing something that they thought sounded better or more normal somehow. People try to think up ideas rather than see them as existing potentially all around you. 

Actually, Johnstone points out, no two people are alike, so the more yourself you can be, the more you are tapping into your unique artistic point of view or voice. Which means it makes way more sense to be “obvious,” or do whatever first occurs to you, rather than wait and pick what seems “original.” He writes, “The improviser has to realize that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears,” and the more natural his response will be, instead of something random and inappropriate. Creativity is problem solving, after all—not an exercise in being weird for the sake of being weird. 

Think of all the times you saw or read a work that made you think you could have made that, or that you had that idea at one point. Clearly one barrier to making art is believing that the little seed-idea you had could have grown into an actual work of art, or believing that you needed more research, deliberation, control, or judgment to see it through. When you do get an idea, it’s better to just write it down, see it through or go as far as you can with it whenever you get a chance. For a long time, I thought I had to sit down in a disciplined way that many writers talk about and write regularly, but so much of the joy of making art and being spontaneous is that moment where it first came to life, where it felt urgent and big and luminous. Just because art requires practice doesn’t mean this kind of playful enthusiasm isn’t more important. Like Howe says, art is an encounter and an experience. 

Not knowing what’s going to happen in advance is part of the joy of creating. It’s the act and feeling of discovery. In my first improv class, after a few sessions the students were finally asked to just get up on stage when called and do a scene together, without any suggestions or ideas in advance. I remember walking onto the stage with a classmate, and the seconds just ticked by as we waited for an idea to occur, or for the other person to say something. The theater was dark, except for the lights on stage, and quiet. Our classmates stood to the side, and the silence started to grow in the room like a bubble where we stood, feet apart. I shuffled around, pretended to peer off into the distance, and suddenly it occurred to be that I might be reaching for a water bottle, based on the way I held my right hand. I dropped my right arm down and crouched to grab the nonexistent water bottle, took a sip. My classmate started pacing anxiously across the stage. I stood back up, looked around again, then said, “I think we’re lost.” Everyone immediately cracked up! We continued the scene, which went very well, and it took me a long time to figure out why this scene opener was so funny at the time: that simple, matter-of-fact statement was me just being obvious, using the fact that I felt a bit lost up there on stage, while also using that sense of being lost to create a story where I and a co-worker were lost in the woods together. And it felt like magic, but it was also so simple! After that, I started to trust my sense of spontaneity more. 

What Marie Howe and Keith Johnstone point us to is the need to do away with false or limited concepts we have about ourselves or the safe, orderly way we present ourselves—that we are so much more than those ideas, our imaginations so much more expansive. If you want to make art, you have to trust that there is stuff inside you or out there in the world with which you’re in collaboration, processed through your imagination. Ideas will spontaneously emerge if you just start where you are or notice what’s already there with you. And sometimes that means sticking with a task and not knowing how to do it slightly longer than feels comfortable, but with an open and receptive mind. 

TLDR version: 

  • Spontaneity is the heart of any creative act, and it means letting go of the egoic mind (aka our attachment to our thoughts, concepts, and stories) and being open to not knowing. 
  • Everyone has a deep, expansive, and original imagination just by virtue of being a human being with a unique combination of experiences.
  • You don’t need to “think up” good ideas, you just need to see them when they arise in daily life. 
  • Artists in a state of flow don’t discriminate and evaluate their work until after they make the art.
  • Which means making bad art is necessary for growth.
  • Making art is an experience, not the record of an experience.
  • It’s better to write the idea down or make the art when the impulse comes rather than wait for a better time—the idea-experience might go away and might not come back in the same way!