On the Fence (Becoming the Managing Editor of Your Creative Process)

A few weeks ago, my friend Jerry kidnapped me and took me sea kayaking in the San Juan Islands for a few days. I say “kidnapped” because that’s what it felt like … at least to my “busy” self.
“Kayaking?!” I protested. “But it’s October. And I’m really busy.“
I had just returned to Seattle from a week vacationing in New England, and really had to buckle down and get to work. So many people waiting for projects to be finished. So many projects waiting for next actions to be started. So many commitments … to others and to myself. Kayaking? In October?
Indeed. That first night on Lopez Island (after a challenging four-mile open-water paddle from Anacortes, after setting up the tent just before it started to rain, and after realizing that my iPhone got no cell signal at all) I lay in my sleeping bag and had a thought: “I have nothing to do.”
Actually , it was a series of thoughts. “I have nothing to do” was followed by “I can’t do anything except sleep, eat, pack, paddle, unpack, sleep, and repeat as necessary until we’re back on the mainland and I have cell coverage again.”
That night I had a dream in which things just didn’t feel right. I discovered (in a terrifying moment of dream horror) that things didn’t feel right because I wasn’t “on,” because I wasn’t getting any power. Because I was … literally … unplugged.
I woke up and things got worse. I tried checking my email again, to no avail. The rain pitter-pattered on the tent, my thoughts raced around my skull, and finally (in a moment of self-induced claustrophobic panic) … as if opening an airlock onto another world … I unzipped the tent door, climbed out, and gazed out across the water at the rising sun.
A different thought: “So this is what emptiness feels like.”
It was a familiar feeling, but it had been a long time since I’d felt it. I’d been off the grid many times since I’d left these islands in 1992, it was true. I’d been back before, and the San Juans hardly qualify as wilderness. Yet on this trip, something snapped.
When I got laid off back in January I began a phase of my life I’ve started referring to as “That time I thought I could do everything.” The word “No” vanished from my vocabulary, as I said “Yes,” “Sure,” or “Maybe” to any and every person, project, idea, and compulsion that came my way. Time management guru David Allen talks about “open loops” and the anxiety they create in our lives. I had become buried under open loops because I actually thought I could do everything.
So that morning on Lopez Island, something snapped. I realized in a moment of total clarity, that all of that stuff, all of those open loops, were just in my head. They were gone suddenly, because they were never there at all. It was liberating, and got even better over the next few days.
By the end of the trip I was a changed man … reconnected to something I had forgotten about, something that was there all along. Paddling through the San Juans for a few days, I felt like I’d been dropped back into my twenty-something sea kayak guide self: confident, composed, moving from my heart instead of my head.
Back in Seattle a few days later, of course, all my “stuff” came flooding back in. I could actually feel it happening too, as if I’d opened a valve and liquid saturated with data and tasks was flowing in. “No!” I shouted, still filled with fantasies of saying to hell with it all and driving to Baja in a VW bus to guide kayak tours for the rest of my days. I wondered: is this what a mid-life crisis feels like?
In the days that followed, I spent a lot of time pondering the space between empty and full, and in the process I intuitively pulled an old book off my shelf: A Writer’s Time.
The author, Ken Atchity, is a self-professed “story merchant:” a writer, producer, teacher, and literary manager who runs Atchity Entertainment International. Written in 1986 when Atchity was a college professor, A Writer’s Time is a book about how the creative mind works.
I curled up on the couch and started reading, wondering why my subconscious had led me back to this book. A few minutes later I had my answer.
On page 14, Atchity presents a metaphor. Inside our heads, he says, are “many islands of consciousness,” “the Continent,” and the “Managing Editor.” While the islands are free-floating and changeable, the Continent is immoveable. While each island presents its own vision of reality, the Continent presents the consensual reality of society and culture. “The writer’s awareness of himself and his consciousness of the interaction between islands and Continent is the third element of the creative mind,” writes Atchity. “The Managing Editor.”
There’s always tension between the islands and the Continent, he says, and out of this tension comes the energy that allows the Managing Editor to initiate the creative process. “Writing is the Editor’s ordering of materials from all the islands into the language and structure of the Continent,” Atchity explains, “managing the analytical mind to have it organize images from the nonanalytical mind.”
I kept reading. “If you want to be a writer, don’t hope to displace your anxiety. Instead, find ways of coping with it, tricking it, transforming it. To make anxiety productive you transform it to ‘productive elation.'”
And then, I read my favorite part of Atchity’s theory: “Non-artists cope with the pressures of division by allowing one part of the mind to dominate, that main Continent constructed by our interaction with and education by society. The writer refuses to allow one division to dominate: confusion may result, or even depression. Neat solutions are no longer acceptable. The writer is an explorer wanting to investigate and keep in touch with all the islands, no matter how depressing one might be, no matter how terrifying another.”
The book goes on to explain in some detail how to be an effective Managing Editor of your creative process, how to work with the islands and the Continent (and the tension between them) to create works of art. In those first pages though, I had found what I was looking for.
In spite of our fantasies to the contrary, we creative types (writers, artists, entrepreneurs) can’t run away to the islands forever if we want to actually be productive. Nor can we stay at home on the Continent, even (especially) if we feel like that’s where the real “work” gets done. We need to spend time transitioning back and forth between both places, even though that’s sometimes confusing, and often uncomfortable. We need to become the “Managing Editors” of our own lives, too, in order to step back and oversee the entire process.
In a later book, How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream, Atchity broadens his perspective from writing to creativity and entrepreneurship in general. He re-labels the “islands,” the “Continent,” and the “Managing Editor” as the “Visionary,” the “Accountant,” and the “Mind’s Eye.” I just ordered the book, as it seems to provide a roadmap that’s even more suited for my current journey.
For now though, I’ll continue to explore the metaphor of place presented in A Writer’s Time.  This sense I have of being on the fence between two worlds is, perhaps, not symptomatic of a mid-life crisis at all. I suspect Ken Atchity would tell me that there is no decision for me to make here, nothing to run from. Instead, he’d probably say, I need to learn how to dance on the fence itself, how to transmute my equally powerful urges to stay on the Continent and run to the islands … into something else entirely.
Mike Singer is the Publisher of No Map. No Guide. No Limits.