The Creative Compulsion

Surviving the Work You Can't Stop Doing

Hi pals,

I’ve been nearing completion of the book manuscript that got me started on Substack in the first place. It started as a collection of craft lectures, given at various universities and festivals over the years, but then I realized my craft lectures are more like sermons, and don’t translate all that well on the printed page. Then it became a kind of memoir-of-a-writer project, which collapsed because I realize while I enjoy the confessional mode, I don’t love telling the truth. The most recent attempt turned into a new novel I’ve just finished called I Get Lonely in a Hurry. (The two short memoirs I wrote have been turned into an online project called Out of Order—which I’ll be launching later this year. Stay tuned.)

Then I started writing a series of essays on film, since I’m soon-to-be the new chair/director of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa, and I wanted to spend some time writing more deeply about film. I published a few essays on It’s A Wonderful Life and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which you can read here and here thanks to the recently departed but truly excellent Switchyard magazine.

The next essay in this series is almost done, and it’s about Hamnet, and why it deserves Best Picture, Best Director, Best Everything this year. I saw that with my Iowa City incredible writer pal Melissa Febos, and the two of us sobbed loudly for most of the film. It’s always good to have a pal who ENJOYS going to sit in the dark and ugly cry with you.

I will also be writing an essay about seeing with Waiting for Godot in New York City with Beth, which was a profound experience for a middle-aged Gen Xer struggling with the question of why make more art? Haven’t you made enough? And I will be writing a little bit about surrender in the next post, both in terms of giving up a deeply personal project and letting Hollywood take over.

I’ll be posting that essay later this month, but for now, I’d like to share with you the introduction to the new manuscript. The book is no longer called No Soul, No Dark Night, but the epigraph remains this quote from my longtime friend and truest mentor, Charles Baxter:

It seems a shame to say so, but the hardest part of being a writer is not the long hours of learning the craft, but learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul. There are many such nights, far too many, as you will discover. I hate to be the one to bring you this news, but someone should.

Part of the deal of having a soul at all includes the requirement that you go through several dark nights. No soul, no dark nights.

--Charles Baxter, “Letter to a Fiction Writer” from WONDERLANDS

The new title is The Creative Compulsion: Surviving the Work You Can’t Stop Doing

I am posting the introductory chapter of the new manuscript below. I would love your feedback, and also, if you find yourself nodding along, I would welcome your anecdotes and stories for possible inclusion in the book. I will protect your identity, and use your first name only, if I choose to include your struggle with The Creative Compulsion in my work! (Or I can assign you a cool alt-name!) I’m hoping to submit the manuscript to publishers this summer, though I may go ahead and do the whole series on Substack. Who knows what’s next? I never do!

Thanks for reading the chapter below. Let me know if it resonates with you!

Your pal,

DB

Introduction:

The Creative Compulsion

I believe that all humans are creative; but I believe a much smaller group of humans live with a compulsion—sometimes an obsessive compulsion—to create new things, to make art. This book is for that smaller group of humans—the ones that find themselves making art, late at night, when the house is finally, blissfully quiet. And the ones that find themselves waking up early—extra early—simply to be alone in the pre-dawn hush, writing sentences at the kitchen table. And the ones that are constantly thinking of that thing they’d love to create, if only they’d lived a different kind of life.

This book is for all the humans who seek extra space in the margins of a day already spoken for—a day filled with work and family and errands and relentless obligation, a day that will feel oppressive if they don’t find a brief reprieve here and there in their own headspace. It’s for the humans who finish the workout they need for physical health and immediately go to the notebook in their gym bag, free to return to the thing they’ve not been able to stop thinking about since stepping on the treadmill. It’s for those of you who craft elaborate daily routines meant to honor and center your creative practice, but who continually fritter away their time and energy. And it’s for those of you who are happiest at the cozy desk or in the studio or scrawling or sketching away in a quiet café or in a silent, clean hotel room where nobody can find you, and you have time to work. To do the real work.

It’s not that you don’t love the other parts of your life. It’s that the other parts of your life are harder to live if you’re not making work.

This book is for people who find some things harder than other people find them, things that seem easy to other people: making conversation after a long day with the person you love most in the world. Staying present with your children while they play, draw, sing, and bring swarms of joy into your life (and the occasional tantrum or panic attack.) Going out with friends and remaining grounded in conversations about their day jobs, hobbies, marriages, dating life, favorite TV shows; your mind wanders to the thing you wish you were making, the thing you wish you had stayed home to do.

It’s not a glamorous compulsion or a romantic obsession—although sometimes it can be and on Instagram it definitely is trying to be. Often it’s an irritating compulsion, a part of your brain you want to turn off but can’t. Sometimes it feels almost adversarial, as if the work is asking something unreasonable. But it has a particular gravity. It has undeniable presence in your life. It doesn’t go away simply because it would be more convenient if it did.

This book is about that pull, the creative compulsion.

It’s not necessarily a book about career success, or doing what you love, or manifesting external validation for your work. It’s a book about learning to live with this fucking thing you didn’t ask for, this thing you probably started feeling around the same age you learned to write and draw and sing.

It’s about the persistent internal pressure to write or make or shape something—even when the rewards are unclear, the timing is bad, or the world has given you plenty of reasons to stop.

I’m writing this book because this compulsion, at times, has ruined my life. It’s fucked up big things like relationships, professional opportunities, and my personal finances, and even smaller things like vacations and holiday parties and food. Sometimes, it’s even made me a bad parent, a bad teacher, a bad citizen, a bad friend, a bad lover. And, many times, when I was not honoring, respecting, and addressing this creative compulsion, it’s made me miserable.

I’m choosing to write this book to you now in my own midlife transition. I’m fifty years old. I’m a tenured professor at the University of Iowa. I’ve lectured at well over 100 universities and colleges, taught at summer writer’s conferences, and have been a writer and executive producer on several films and television shows.

I’ve published some books, won some fellowships and prizes, and even made some money along the way (which I’ve largely spent buying myself time and space to write). And my children are now 18 and 20—adults. I’m looking at an empty nest. I’m not married (I’ve done that twice) and my days move differently, more slowly, than they have in years. I’m able to see things about my life I never could see before, mainly that much of my life as been marked by what I am calling The Creative Compulsion.

I’m also writing this book because I’ve been a teacher of creative writing for over two decades now, teaching everyone from undergraduates eager for artistic success and retirees returning to creative practice after years away. I’ve taught for almost two decades in the highly-regarded MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a low-residency program that not only has me giving annual lectures about the writing life and its complications, but writing long, intense and sometimes confessional letters to my graduate students about writing and art and the complexities of the creative life. In turn, these students write to me with great vulnerability, talking not only about their work but the challenges of living and loving this work. My students in that program range from 25 to 75 years old. Some are parents, some are doctors, some are lawyers, some are carpenters, schoolteachers, federal bureaucrats, conservation officers, seasonal laborers, waiters, and acupuncturists and engineers.

They all have one thing in common: they’ve reached a point in their life where NOT making the work is starting to destroy them. They come to me, to my mentorship and the program where I teach, hungry not just for literary instruction, but for a new way of being.

In these long and cheerfully discursive but gut-wrenchingly honest letters I send to and receive from my students, one thing has been consistent: a feeling of pressure. Sometimes the pressure arrives early, and the artists I teach feel it acutely by the time they turn 18, and it guides many of their personal and professional decisions from their first days of adulthood. For others, it waits. This compulsion, this pressure goes quiet for years and then resurfaces at midlife, when responsibilities multiply but time feels newly finite. It often sends the mid-life artist careening into the ditch of a midlife crisis, a deeply Jungian process of individuation and shadow work, which feels hyper-mystical and esoteric, but, if not handled correctly, can have disastrous results (as me how I know).

For some people, the compulsion finally reveals itself fully late in life, when the psyche (The Greek word for soul) seeks to make meaning of the life that’s already been lived and the uncertainty of the undiscovered county to come.

Often this compulsion shows up as restlessness, irritation, a low-grade dissatisfaction that no amount of productivity or praise seems to fix. It can show up as a panic attack or a depressive spiral. It can show up in self-destructive behaviors—toxic relationships and addictions and not-stop doomscrolling on the numbing devices we all carry around in our pocket. It can even show up in ways that feel productive and creative at first—expensive hobbies like fly-fishing or yoga retreats or graduate degrees that people with a creative compulsion often start but don’t finish.

You may have tried to reason with your creative compulsion. You may have told yourself you’re being indulgent, unrealistic, and selfish. You may have told yourself you’re not talented or disciplined enough. You may have told yourself you’re too late and you’re already to far behind. You may have promised to return to it later, once life calms down (hint: it never does). You may have decided you’d resume writing once you dropped twenty pounds and you feel more confident, or once you find a new partner, or finish therapy, or pay off your debt.

And still the creative compulsion returns, unchanged by your explanations, your refusals, your procrastinations and rationalization.

This is what I mean by the creative compulsion. If you’re nodding your head, if you see yourself in these words, I wrote this book for you.

Compulsion is not the same thing as desire. Desire negotiates with you; it offers to come back later. Desire waits for conditions to improve; desire can be satisfied eventually.

Compulsion does not negotiate. It persists regardless of mood, outcome, or permission. It is manageable, yes, but it is unquenchable. It doesn’t go away after you make the work. It is constant. It defines your inner life and what can make the creative compulsion so lonesome, and challenging is that it is a compulsion you sit with alone. You rarely talk about it, because it feels frivolous or trivial. When you find time to honor the compulsion, it can come with shame or guily. When you don’t find time to honor it? That’s right—shame and guilt.

This compulsion can be confusing, especially in a culture that often treats creative work as either a hobby or a lottery ticket. We are told that making things should be fun, expressive, or profitable—preferably all three at once. Grind your way to financial freedom. Don’t chase, attract. When the compulsion is neither profitable or world-expanding, we assume we are doing the work wrong. We assume we lack discipline, or talent, or gratitude. We wonder why we can’t just be satisfied.

I said at the top of this chapter that all humans are creative, and I think that’s true. Many people find great joy in gardening, cooking, woodworking, bird watching, journaling, and dabbling in watercolors on summer vacation. I love this about humanity. I love seeing that every human—whether they’re crafting a scrapbook or whipping up a mousse or tying trout-fishing flies enjoys the release and comfort of creative expression.

I am talking to those of you who have a creative compulsion that doesn’t care about temporary satisfaction. I am talking to those of you with a creative drive that can’t be satisfied. A drive that operates on a different register. It’s closer to hunger than ambition. Closer to necessity than preference.

And it comes with a cost.

People rarely talk honestly about this part. The cost isn’t just time, though time is the first thing it takes. It’s attention. It’s emotional bandwidth. It’s the friction it introduces into relationships with people who don’t feel the same pull—or who feel it, but have learned to suppress it.

There is the guilt of choosing the work again. The guilt of being elsewhere while physically present. The guilt of resenting interruptions you know are reasonable. There is the private irritation that flares when the work goes untouched for too long, and the equal frustration when you finally return to it and it resists you.

For many people, the cost is shame—that familiar word. Shame for wanting something that doesn’t fit neatly into adult life. Shame for caring so much about something that doesn’t reliably pay back the investment. Shame for not being able to explain—clearly, cleanly—why this work matters so much, why this process matters so much, why this ritual is as important as all of your other basic and human needs. (In fact, you’d probably forego a few of those basic needs for time to create. We’ve all done that. Given up sleep, missed a meal, failed to hydrate and exercise and meditate because we felt we need to be creating, working, grinding.)

Most adults, when they start to feel that shame and guilt around a compulsion, will soften the language attendant to it. They call their creative practice it a passion project. A side hustle. A fun hobby. They talk about “getting back into it someday” or “fooling around with an idea.” They keep the compulsion in a kind of rhetorical quarantine, hoping it will either mature into something respectable or fade out on its own. They feel it must remain private; it can only become a public, vocalized, and acknowledged thing once they receive a vast amount of external validation. This is why writers and artists are the kings and queens of the social media “humble brag.” Validation makes us feel less insane.

It rarely lasts for long.

One of the quiet tragedies of creative life is how often people misdiagnose what they’re experiencing. They assume they need more motivation, more confidence, more validation. They assume that if the work were meant to matter, it would come with clearer signals: external encouragement, early success, a sense of arrival. They feel mentally unwell and physically weak and spiritually adrift.

But compulsion doesn’t announce itself with certainty. It announces itself with repetition and persistence. It returns after rejection. It returns after success. It returns after long pauses and busy years. It returns even when you tell yourself you’re done, that you have no time, that you’re being ridiculous, immature, self-indulgent, and weak.

If you recognize this pattern in yourself, you don’t need to prove anything. This is not a test. There is no threshold you have to cross to earn the title of The Compulsive Creative. If you recognize yourself in what I am saying here, then you have the compulsion.

So: why does this matter?

Because when you misname compulsion, you make bad bargains with it. You either indulge it recklessly—burning yourself out, sacrificing stability, demanding that the work justify every cost—or you suppress it entirely, telling yourself it’s immature or impractical, and then wonder why a low-level bitterness seeps into everything else.

In the pages ahead, I will tell you some secrets. I’ll reveal the personal failures and spectacular disasters that came into my life when I dishonored or ignored or misdirected my creative compulsion.

The Creative Compulsion is not something you let run your life, but it is a serious, formidable and undeniable aspect of your psyche that can ruin your life. For many readers of this book, that realization comes late. Often in the middle of life, when the old stories about “someday” lose their power. When the compulsion grows louder, not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve learned enough to hear it clearly.

For other readers, the compulsion is arriving now, making itself known to you just as you’re setting out into the world. The conventional path, the non-creative path, is right there, in front of you. All you have to do is start walking.

But that’s not the path you want to take. It’s not a pathc you can take.

This book addresses an important question: how do you live an honest, kind, full life while burdened with The Creative Compulsion. There’s a lot of hard-earned wisdom in the pages that follow, both from my own personal journey as a novelist and screenwriter, and from my observations teaching thousands of students at colleges, universities, summer conferences, and online workshops.

But first, let’s start with an understanding of where this compulsion comes from, and where it might be quietly wreaking havoc in your life. Let’s untangle it from the myths of talent and the demands of productivity culture and explore so many people spend years trying to negotiate the creative compulsion away.

Because once you see name the thing you’re fighting, you can stop fighting the wrong battles.

I always tell my students this on day one of every course or workshop: All good stories are about someone trying to get free.

Let’s start your story. Let’s get you free.