Transcript: Episode 5

Hey, writer friends, and thank you for tuning in for this month’s episode of the Inspirited Word. I hope you’re doing well, wherever and whenever you’re listening.

This month, I’m sharing some thoughts about creative genius and how our subtle beliefs about genius shape the way we write and create. This is a topic that can seem very straightforward when you look at it in a sort of head-on, rational way: Very few of us believe that we are geniuses. If somebody were to ask you outright if you think you’re a creative genius, you’re probably going to be pretty comfortable saying no (and meaning it). And you’re also probably not going to rationally think that this means you shouldn’t be creating anything.

Although, who knows, maybe you’re listening right now and thinking “of course I believe that I’m a creative genius, what are you even talking about?” In which case

Number 1: I genuinely hope that level of confidence works out for you, and
Number 2: I also genuinely cannot relate to that at all.

This month’s choice of topic was partly inspired by a mildly neurotic reaction I experienced while putting together last month’s pod. At the end of that episode, I shared some advice about how to read and analyze stories as a storyteller, not just as a casual reader. This is something I’ve been taught indirectly by several people over the years, but I also studied this very directly with one of my undergrad writing professors, the novelist and short fiction author Andrea Barrett. She taught a whole course on breaking down stories and figuring out how they work in order to apply that to your own writing (and it completely changed the way I read and interact with stories).

(In addition to being a great teacher, her fiction is also incredibly beautiful, especially if you like stories in historical settings – so check out the show notes link if you’re not familiar with her work.)

To go along with the episode last month, I sent out a workbook to the pod newsletter actually walking through one way to do this type of close, analytical reading of a story. (If you missed out on that, you can still get access by becoming a subscriber, conveniently also in the show notes. Newsletter members get full access to the tools and resources for past episodes.)

As I was putting together that workbook, I went back to my old notes from Andrea Barrett’s course to help me decide what I wanted to include. Which was a totally reasonable thing to do, right? It’s exactly why I kept the notes, so that I could refer back to them and remember what she taught me.

Somehow, though, I decided that this was not in fact a reasonable thing to do, and that reading those notes as a reference meant that I was just regurgitating somebody else’s work. I decided that using those notes made me some sort of fraud, that I wasn’t doing my own thinking, that I might as well have been plagiarizing – basically I started telling myself I didn’t have the right to share any ideas on the topic because my ideas weren’t solely “mine.”

My ideas about how to read like a writer aren’t coming out of some pure, untouched creative and intellectual vacuum, but have been directly shaped by stuff other people taught me.

So, clearly I am a despicable fraud with nothing worthwhile or creative to contribute, and must share no more ideas about writing and literature and storytelling, ever again.

Luckily, I have a partner with a brain that isn’t fueled by clinical anxiety, and when I shared this little doom spiral I had stumbled into he just looked at me and said, very gently, “Okay, but isn’t that literally how knowledge works?”

Yes, it is literally how knowledge works. People share their ideas with other people, who then go on to come up with new versions and expressions and evolutions of that idea! It’s the entire basis of human culture and civilization!

And yet, in Western culture, we so often act like that’s not how knowledge or creativity works. Back in episode 2, I briefly mentioned the cultural construct of the genius who bestows their masterpieces on the world. This trope applies in the arts, but also in science and in business (especially right now in the tech industry, with some pretty hilarious but problematic effects – Steve Jobs’s black turtlenecks and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter are both built on the construct of the genius). It’s a trope that erases the reality of how ideas and invention and imagination work, in ways that I think hurt us and hold us back as creatives.

Even though most of us know we’re not geniuses, we still often have this feeling that our ideas and our work need to be special, by which we mean entirely unique yet universally brilliant. It’s like the dark flip side of the aphorism “you’re the only one who can tell your story.” It’s true that we are each a wholly unrepeatable convergence of nature and circumstance – nobody is ever going to be exactly like you. But that doesn’t actually mean your ideas and stories are solely yours, completely independent or creatively pure or divinely inspired. And what’s more, they don’t need to be.

I’m reading a book right now about Shakespeare that is turning out to be a great example of the sort of cultural weirdness we get up to around the concept of genius. The book is called Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, by Elizabeth Winkler, and it’s an exploration of the highly fraught debate over whether or not William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him.

Before anybody gets rankled: I don’t personally have a firm opinion on this question one way or another, because I’m very aware that I don’t have enough knowledge of Elizabethan history to be able to evaluate the claims that people make in this debate. From what I’ve read, everybody cherry-picks evidence and makes big speculative leaps when they talk about this topic – so it’s hard for a layman to know which narratives have more objective fact. And while there are some pretty wild shenanigans in some of the theories about alternative authors, there are also actual experts on both sides of the argument, so you can’t really use that as a way of evaluating it either.

Anyway, the thing that’s actually interesting to me (and to Winkler) about this debate is how *incredibly angry* people get about it, even though it’s really difficult to be completely sure about a lot of what happened over 400 years ago. Like, this historical question about literary authorship is very often compared to actually harmful conspiracy theories like Q-Anon and the antivax movement… which just *baffles my brain.*

I care a lot about literature, y’all, and yet it is not difficult for me to see that a debate about who wrote some plays 400 years ago is not the same as a debate about whether present-day vaccines have spyware computer chips inside them.

(I used to work at an arts nonprofit, and we had this internal motto that “there’s no such thing as a literary emergency,” because people get so wrapped up in this stuff sometimes that you have to give yourself a reality check.)

Winkler’s book suggests that the vitriol around the whole Shakespeare thing stems in part from the fact that Shakespeare is one of the foundational models of creative genius that we have in modern Western culture. And that concept of genius completely permeates our cultural discourse on art. It even popped up in last week’s Supreme Court ruling against the Andy Warhol Foundation, which I’ll circle back to later in this episode. So when people begin to make any sort of argument about who wrote the plays, the historical evidence (and the lack thereof) very quickly gets subsumed by ingrained narratives about genius and how it functions and what it means.

It’s a cultural trope that’s very hard for us to be objective about, even if we don’t think much about it on a day-to-day basis. The genius is the personal version of that trope of mastery and domination I keep circling around on this podcast – it’s the default artistic ideal, and we can’t help but be influenced by it, even if we don’t consciously or rationally aspire to be a genius.

The problem is that our contemporary concept of genius is really not the most conducive to actually creating stuff. We usually talk about genius in one of two ways: It’s something you are, something inborn that makes your work inherently superior. You either are a genius by birth, or you’re not. The other way we frame genius is that it’s a gift, a type of inspiration that comes out of the metaphysical ether and isn’t yours at all. This can be framed in religious terms (that the inspiration comes from god) or through more vague mystical terms (that it comes from, y’know… somewhere, and you were just lucky enough to catch it).

Both of these takes on the trope essentially introduce limits on creativity, instead of opening up possibility. And they encourage and feed that other ubiquitous trope about creativity: the suffering artist. If you’re born a genius, you’ll struggle with your own greatness, and if you’re born a mere normie, you’ll struggle with mediocrity. Or in the divine inspiration camp, you’re faced with proving your worthiness for the gift, often through hardship; creativity is something you desperately long for and might occasionally receive, based on the judgment or whim of the divine.

Again, I don’t think many of us actually worry about these tropes of genius in a conscious way when we’re doing creative work. We’re not sitting around beating our chests on a windswept moor like a Romantic poet, supplicating the muse. But the inherited cultural narrative of genius is still doing its work on us behind the scenes. I mean, think about how we describe people (and especially kids) who are deemed to be intellectually “special”: we call them gifted.

This mythology of genius is part of what makes each story idea or writing session or draft feel like a verdict on our value and significance as people. It’s part of what makes us feel like we’re proving something with our writing instead of creating something.

I have an idea of how we might reclaim the concept of genius for ourselves – and in the spirit of this topic, it’s directly inspired by somebody else’s idea about reclaiming genius.

There’s a TED Talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert that came out back in 2009 called “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” and it still circulates a lot on the writerly internet. Gilbert talks about reframing the concept of genius into something less like a punishing, unrealistic ideal and more like a psychological and spiritual helper. She bases this on the historical origins of the term, which comes from Greece and Rome and was originally a supernatural or spiritual concept.

I think she also wrote more about this in one of her nonfiction books, but for full disclosure, I haven’t read that book because Eat Pray Love kind of made me want to scream. But I do really like the TED Talk version, which is linked in the show notes. It’s only about 15 or 20 minutes, so worth checking out.

To summarize it: Gilbert proposes ditching the ideal of the innately born and often tortured genius. She instead asks us to consider genius in the ancient classical sense of a spiritual helper or guide who is essentially the inspirational force behind the actual hard work of writing a thing. We show up to do the work, and our genius friend helps us do it well (or not, sometimes). She compares the genius to being like Dobby the house elf in the Harry Potter books (which was a far less loaded reference back in 2009, before JK Rowling outed herself as a reprehensible human being).

Gilbert’s point isn’t to convince us that the classical concept of the genius is materially real. But she’s inviting us to use that concept to essentially cut ourselves some slack, while also putting in the labor of creating in a more joyful, playful way.

I think her reframing doesn’t actually go far enough, though. Her description is kind of just a delightfully whimsical example of option number two in the standard concept of genius – genius is a gift from somewhere beyond you, not yours at all, and all you can do is hope to channel it from time to time. And at least for me, that’s not really a more useful construct. It just doesn’t help me show up for my own creativity. It makes me feel sort of like I’m in a tedious Zoom meeting all by myself, waiting for a house elf to pop in (or not, as the case may be).

As it so happens, a few years after I first saw that TED Talk, I did a bunch of research on Roman religion. And it turns out the classical concept of genius is more nuanced than just what Gilbert references in that talk, in ways that are really interesting to compare to the modern idea of genius as either an inborn trait or a mystical gift.

(Just FYI, some sources for everything factual I’m about to say about ancient religion will be – yup, you guessed it – in the show notes.)

Gilbert isn’t wrong; the Roman genius was a type of personal helper spirit, essentially, and a genius could be connected to creative work. But the genius was a guardian that was active in all areas of life, and it was specifically an embodiment of the ideal way for someone to act in the world, based on the relationships they had to the world.

So when a Roman performed ritual acts to honor or petition a genius, they weren’t just sticking a quarter in the slot and asking for luck or inspiration from the house elf. (I mean, there could be an element of that, but that’s not all it was.) They were affirming their relationship to the genius as a kind of spiritual alter-ego or highest self, which in turn affirmed their relationship to the world around them. And they were declaring an intention to act virtuously in accordance with those relationships.

One of the surviving types of physical evidence we have about the Roman genius is a type of house shrine where rituals for the household genius were performed. Everybody had a genius, but the genius of each home was represented by the genius spirit of the current head of the household – so, typically the male head of a family (because yay, patriarchy!). Collective or personal offerings would be made to the household genius by everyone who lived and worked in that home. There are a good number of these shrines preserved from places like Pompeii, and they almost always show the genius in the same way.

The genius is a human figure standing at the center of the shrine image, and they’re decked out like an upstanding Roman would be to make public sacrifices to the gods. So the genius is itself  shown in the act of performing a communal ritual. The genius also typically has some companions in the shrine: two little dancing guys representing the ancestral spirits of the household, and one or two very large snakes, representing the generative and creative force of the world. (The origins of the little dancing guys and the snakes are really interesting [at least if you are, like me, a giant nerd], but sadly that’s not going to fit in this podcast.)

So, to bring this back around to the modern idea of genius… I’m going to move slightly away from strict historical evidence here and into the realm of interpretation. But one way to interpret the evidence is that the OG classical genius is not really about your inborn, innate talent. And it’s also not a disconnected, mysterious gift of inspiration. An individual’s genius is about how they behave in the world and how that behavior interacts with the creative force of the world.

In this framework, your genius is yours, individually. You’re not just a channel waiting for external greatness to be gifted to you. But there’s also no such thing as an isolated genius dispensing greatness out to everybody else. Your unique genius happens in relationship with everything around you, and everything that’s come before you.

These Roman house shrines are almost always found in communal and public areas of the home – the spaces where people were doing stuff like weaving cloth or cooking meals or meeting with clients. Places where the relational work of living was carried out. And I think that’s a parallel to the more commonly known ancient version of the genius, the genius loci or spirit of a place.

This convergent kind of genius isn’t a personality trait, and it’s not a gift (or a curse) handed out by something separate from you. It’s an emergent, embodied, embedded expression of your place in the world. And it’s an evolving, collective thing you tend like a growing and living ecosystem. It’s a household, or a garden.

Like Elizabeth Gilbert, I’m not suggesting that we have to start following the Roman practice of making offerings to genius spirits. (I mean, you absolutely can, and I would love to hear about your experience, but that’s not specifically what I’m getting at.)

And it goes without saying that there’s a lot of unideal stuff wrapped up in the classical concept of genius. Part of the reason the household genius was so important was because they symbolized the status and social power of whoever was head of the home. That status put them firmly (and legally) above everybody else who was part of that house, including any enslaved people living and doing labor there. So, not an entirely cool and inspiring spiritual concept.

However, there are a couple key aspects of the classical genius that I think can be a powerful and useful reframe for us. First, there’s the emphasis on genius as an expression of community and lineage. And second, there’s the idea that genius is a continuous, day-to-day way of being that’s accessible to everybody – not some virtuoso act of creative production that may only happen once in your life, and that’s just if you’re lucky.

The Roman genius is found hanging out with both ancestral spirits and with generative, protective spirits of the land. I think we can apply this to our own genius in a couple ways. First, by cultivating and celebrating a sense of lineage in our creative work. And second, by seeing our creativity as connected to where and how we live on a daily basis (not just connected to what happens when we’re actually writing).

Looking at that first idea of creative lineage – this could be an antidote to the type of intensely individualistic view of genius that was tripping me up when I made my workbook last month. I wasn’t sitting there at my computer like “Mary, you are a genius, and your divinely inspired work must not be contaminated or diluted by any external ideas!!” And yet, I still had that deeply ingrained instinct that if I was drawing directly from the teachings and creative ideas of others, that meant I was doing creativity wrong. Even if I gave them credit, and even if I was putting my own spin on things and adding my own perspective and voice.

The really weird bit was that this maladaptive instinct made me feel kind of unconsciously cagey about crediting my creative lineage – I did credit Andrea Barrett as an influence for the workbook when I sent it out in the newsletter, but I didn’t mention her in the actual podcast episode. I think I used the phrase “I have been taught,” or some other passive voice gymnastics like that, instead of just saying “one of my awesome writing professors taught me this, go look her up.” And it wasn’t an intentional omission, it just didn’t even occur to me to mention her by name when I made the recording.

Obviously, you can’t take the time and space to always mention everybody who’s inspired you every time you open your mouth or put written words out in the world. You can’t even always keep track of everything that’s influencing your creative ideas. But sometimes you can – and I think that awareness rubs awkwardly against the subconscious modern ideal of the genius. It makes us precious and guarded about our ideas and our creativity, like their specialness must be proven through how untainted and spontaneous and individual they are.

But what if we start to intentionally see our creative genius as something intrinsically woven in with our external influences and teachers? We’d probably feel more free to acknowledge and play with those influences, instead of always having some vague sense that being influenced lessens us. That it marks us as an inferior (or even fraudulent) creator.

And even deeper than that, what if instead of merely acknowledging our influences – instead of thinking or stating “my creativity has been influenced by XYZ awesome thing” – what if we thought “my creativity is part of that influence”? What if we saw everything we make as a new emergence of that lineage, in direct and reciprocal conversation with it? How could that kind of celebratory attitude change the way you feel about showing up to write, and about what you write?

One of the worst insults you can throw at a writer is to call their work “derivative.” This takedown makes a lot of sense if you’re following the model of the modern genius. But it becomes a bit of a head-scratcher if you’re creating under the guidance of a classical genius. How could your creativity not derive from the world it’s embedded in? Isn’t that literally how knowledge works?

To be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do stuff like citing sources, and I’m not making some sort of apology for plagiarism. Earlier, I mentioned the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on fair use, which has kicked off a lot of hot takes on how copyright law might now be misapplied to stifle creative expression and basically ruin art forever.

Condensing the ruling down to its most basic facts: SCOTUS ruled on a specific licensing question, and they found that the Andy Warhol Foundation must compensate Lynn Goldsmith, the creator of an original photograph of Prince that Warhol used to create his own series of artworks.

I’m not a copyright law expert, so I’m not going to attempt to analyze the court ruling in depth. But here’s what I understand from reading analysis by people who are experts in both copyright law and art history – especially a series of posts by Katherine De Vos Devine, which I’ve shared in the episode links.

A lot of the public commentary on this ruling is acting like the Court ruled on Warhol’s actual artworks, and therefore that the ruling will keep artists from drawing on the work of others to create their own art. So, in other words, people are saying that this ruling makes it literally illegal to draw directly on creative lineage or artistic influences. But here’s the thing: the Court didn’t actually do that. They ruled on a specific licensing issue within a specific context of reproducing an image in a magazine – they didn’t rule on the original Warhol artworks themselves.

Like I said, I don’t want to veer out of my lane by talking at length about the legal case. But here’s where the case intersects with what I’ve been saying about genius: Both the SCOTUS dissenting opinion and the hand-flailing hot takes are kind of saying that culturally established geniuses should be protected more than other creatives.

I’ve seen a lot of anxiety about how the ruling might stifle creative expression, but almost no acknowledgment that Lyn Goldsmith’s creative expression is actually being protected by the ruling. Basically, everybody’s acting like Andy Warhol, An Official Genius, is the only person in this scenario whose creativity matters.

And hey, Warhol’s artwork isn’t even the topic of this legal ruling in the first place! But we’re culturally so concerned about upholding the power and myth of the (typically white and cis-male) “genius” that we can’t make unemotional assessments. We don’t see all the other artists and creatives in the room (or in the legal filings, as the case may be).

This is why I think reframing our personal concepts about genius can be so powerful, even if it feels a bit abstract or even indulgent. The mainstream concept of genius is, in a nutshell, fraught AF. It’s both intrinsic to the way we feel about our own creativity – and it’s also an unattainable and unassailable symbol of cultural power that values a select few over what Katherine De Vos Devine calls “the Working Artist.” In typical neoliberal style, we’re encouraged to identify ourselves with an elite group we are almost certain to never actually be allowed into. Even though the reality is that our own interests probably don’t align with that group.

Ending that quasi-socialist rant and bringing all this back to the classical genius… I personally find a lot of power in reclaiming the Roman idea that genius is something inherent and accessible to all of us. And again, I’m not pretending that the classical genius didn’t have dimensions of oppression. But at its philosophical and spiritual core, there’s a tangible, day-to-day dimension of the Roman genius that I think can help us undercut the limitations and exclusions of both the inborn genius and the mythically inspired one.

Your genius isn’t out there, somewhere, waiting for you or withholding something from you. They’re here in your home, in the actions you take throughout your day. They’re in the place where you live and the people you choose to be in community with (virtually or literally). Your genius comes to the writing desk with you and they leave with you when you’re done.

Genius isn’t a thing you are or a thing you’re given – it’s a thing you do.

So when you have a less-than-ideal writing session, it doesn’t mean genius just didn’t show up for you today (again). It doesn’t mean that you just weren’t born with the elusive, extraordinary talent to create powerful work. It only means that today, the continuing work of doing genius was more about the process, and less about the product.

And what’s more, when genius is a thing you do, that opens up all sorts of ways to feed and make offerings to your creative self – even things that don’t immediately seem special, or unique, or transcendent. And that might mean your creativity starts to feel a lot less precious and a lot more prolific.

This month in the newsletter, I’m sharing some prompts to help you incorporate this more generative concept of genius into your own practices, so you can kick the Elon Musk-style bro genius out of your proverbial house. Because we don’t need any more bro geniuses. We need the kind of creator who knows they’re not a genius, and knows it’s actually better that way.

If you’d like to get in on the actionable tools for this month, scroll down on your phone for the link to join the newsletter circle. And if you have a creative friend who might enjoy this episode, please share it with them! The genius of the pod will appreciate the offering. And until next time – keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.