David Milch on imagination & ego
David Milch - creator, writer, and producer of the HBO series “Deadwood” - commented in an interview about “trusting the process of the active imagination. It entails suppression of the Ego. I am able to develop exercises where I can suppress that quickly. I am able to get to the work faster every day.”
He adds that he doesn’t “linger a lot in self-delusory exercises in control – don’t describe too much or even have to have an objective idea of what a scene is about. My only responsibility to an active imagination is to submit myself to a state of being where characters other than I move around and I try to serve that process.
“I just get to that – I don’t plan scenes. I don’t outline. I feel my way along because I have come to believe everything you believe about writing instead of writing is bullshit. It doesn’t apply. You can make an outline but an outline is not going to work because it doesn’t apply to what is actually written. I am content to work in uncertainty much more than I used to be – content to not know where I am going.”
From interview: David Milch’s Active Imagination, by David Boles, May 17, 2002
> related article: Ego and Creativity - by Douglas Eby
June 13th, 2006 at 10:31 am
Throughout my academic career, I was required to outline my work before I wrote it — including speeches I gave in a freshman public speaking class. I always had to create the work (or speech) first — then outline — because I had only a vague idea, before I sat down to write, what the work would look like.
Even when I was writing editorials and columns for the campus paper, I never knew what I was going to write until I wrote it — I would sit down thinking of one subject, and find an entirely different one forming under my fingers on the keyboard.
When I’m working as an actor, I call it “getting out of my own way.” If I’m thinking about what I’m doing, then I’m not doing it. I have to let go and trust my instincts and my intuition–trust that I know what I’m doing as an actor, trust that I will feel when it’s right and when it’s not.
There is a time for structure in the creative process — but there is also a time to let go and trust that what is needed will come.
June 20th, 2006 at 5:55 am
Morning, Douglas. Susan Kirkland led me to your blog after you referenced hers.
I was more particularly struck by your post about David Milch. I was reminded of something said by Mel Brooks in a Playboy interview perhaps 30 years ago, which I still recall. Brooks said, “I am the creator of the vision. I alone know what I want to achieve.” Or words to that effect.
Thanks for your collection of thoughts. RLB in Houston.