To create today is to create dangerously…. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is ... how ... the strange liberty of creation is possible. ~Albert Camus
Creativity Prompt #18: Out Of The Spotlight | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Cafe (1928) painting in high resolution by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I spent Saturday in conversation with the incomparable poet and memoirist Maggie Smith. What I didn’t mention is that I became very nervous in preparation for that public event (for which I felt not nearly famous enough, given that I am not at all famous while Maggie is quite famous, as have been her other conversation partners on this book tour).
To deal with my anxiety, I did what I normally do to in these circumstances, which is to prepare, prepare, prepare. For me, that looked like flagging a couple dozen passages from Maggie’s book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, then listening to and taking notes on several recent podcasts and interviews Maggie has done around the release of her book in order to formulate the most thoughtful questions possible. This was, as you can imagine, very pleasurable time spent.
And while immersed in all things Maggie, I also came across something she said in her own Substack recently about rejection—specifically in relation to her renowned, viral poem “Good Bones,” which ultimately changed her life in myriad ways. What Maggie said, in part, was this:
I sent “Good Bones” out to a few print journals I admired, and it was rejected by all of them. No, I’m not naming names. It was picked up by Waxwing … [and here’s] the thing: I didn’t know it at the time, but those early rejections were a gift. If “Good Bones” had been in one of those print journals, it never would have reached so many people. Sometimes you don’t know that a loss isn’t a loss, because what it makes space for is better—a good reminder for all of us working on creative projects, putting ourselves out there, trying, and then trying again.
I can’t tell you how deeply I resonate with this philosophy. In my own life, I’ve certainly experienced rejections that turned out, with hindsight, to be life-changing gifts. And it’s not just some trick of reframing or forced positivity. It’s truly, in a very real way, like this: “Whew, so lucky that thing I thought I wanted didn’t happen after all!”
For this reason and others, I am a passionate advocate for befriending (or at least, getting increasingly comfortable with) rejection as a part of our creative process.
Today, we’re going to work with this concept in our creativity prompt, which I hope will feel like a nice breather after a handful of more intricate and demanding writing prompts (and if you’ve missed those or not completed those prompts, which are, though complex, very rich, be sure to check out prompts #15 and #16).
Meanwhile, back to rejection: we can’t talk about rejection without talking about fear, because fear of rejection is baked into us as part of our programming for survival as a social species. It takes a lot of active, intentional work to desensitize ourselves to rejection in order to continue dangerously creating, as Camus says. And is this not, in large part, the point of a well-lived life: to create, and keep creating?
Jia Jang, who founded the website Rejection Therapy, set out to release fear of rejection by seeking it actively. That’s essentially what I do every couple of years when I embark upon my own “rejection challenge” with my writing submissions, which involves actively seeking and celebrating a certain number of rejections (usually 100, though I’ve never achieved that) in order to ensure I am actually submitting my work and, even more importantly, creating new work. Every time I do this, I also, naturally, score some good acceptances, which is also part of the point: we can’t get acceptances if we’re not willing to expose ourselves to rejection.
Of course, part of the problem for us—as social creatures—is that rejection tends to fill us with shame. Again, an evolutionary reaction to keep us invested in the approval and acceptance of our peers. But the thing is, that shame is an incredibly maladaptive response that, if not examined and released, can keep our lives small and shallow. Which is a terrible price to pay for “playing it safe” when the truth is that other people don’t actually know or care if our creative endeavors aren’t succeeding with acceptances, prizes, or other distinctions. We just think people notice because of something called the spotlight effect, which Wikipedia defines this way:
The spotlight effect is the psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are. Being that one is constantly in the center of one's own world, an accurate evaluation of how much one is noticed by others is uncommon. The reason for the spotlight effect is the innate tendency to forget that although one is the center of one's own world, one is not the center of everyone else's. This tendency is especially prominent when one does something atypical. Research has empirically shown that such drastic over-estimation of one's effect on others is widely common.
Jia Jang wrote recently on his blog about the spotlight effect, as well:
The spotlight effect causes us to be afraid of taking unconventional actions or risks because we fear other people will notice our failure and peculiarity, and judge us accordingly. But in reality, no one cares about what we do, let along judging us. And even if they do notice and judge, what’s the point of us caring about their judgment anyway?
The world has billions of people with billions of opinions. If we constantly worry about what other people think of us, we will inevitably conform to their expectations, or worse, to our imagination of their expectations. We will live mediocre lives and have forgettable careers.
Let’s worry about us and focus on what we do, and help others when they are in need. It’s time to say “go to hell” to the spotlight effect.
Or, as I put it rather less directly in my essay “Wingless Bodies”:
I never learned how to sing alone without looking over my shoulder. Not even in the shower. If you sing with me, though, I will find you. I will layer my voice on top of yours, inside of yours, like wax pooling in a candle, contained and alive in that column of light.
So, with all that in mind, may this week’s prompt be our collective column of light, allowing us to layer our voices in their most open and authentic versions. Here I offer you a variety of concrete, specific tools you can use to desensitize yourself to rejection and dim the spotlight effect’s control over your one wild and precious life. These tools include actions you can take right now, today, to reclaim just a little more freedom and wildness in your creative life. Enjoy!