Creating Within a Framework: Why and How I Keep Making Things

(essay)

Work in progress

I get a lot of ideas in the shower. I know many people do.

Perry Farrell, Jane’s Addiction’s lead singer and songwriter, once wrote a song called Standing in the Shower…Thinking. There’s a reason he wrote it. The shower is its own zone. You’re naked. The water hits your skin with a kind of pressure and warmth that’s different from anything else in your day. There’s nothing performative about it. It’s primal. Maybe that’s why it breaks open something in the brain. It shifts us—just enough to loosen the grip of whatever was holding our thoughts down.

It was in the shower that I started thinking about this essay.

People ask me questions from time to time. One is:

Why do you do all this stuff?

By “stuff,” I guess they mean: I paint. I write songs and books. I score films and TV shows. I write essays, poems, stories, I’ve recorded more albums than I can easily recall.

I’ve been making things as long as I can remember. As a kid of six or seven, I had a crayon-drawn graphic-novel-style series called Glirchville, about a little village of blobby monsters I invented. I liked Glirches. They looked cool and, honestly, they were easy to draw.

But more than that, when I drew them, I’d go somewhere else—some kind of dreamlike space that felt better than the one I was living in.

The psychoanalyst D.W. (Donald) Winnicott once described the space of childhood play as the essential ground of creativity. In that state, a child isn’t fully “inside” or “outside”—they’re in a third space, a transitional zone between inner and outer life. It’s where real creativity happens. I don’t think I’ve ever really stopped that sort of playing. That feeling of immersion is still how it feels when I write a song, begin a story, or lose track of time painting in my studio.

So why do I do it?

It’s not something I thought much about in the past. I just did it. But lately, I’ve been looking at it differently. I’ve become more curious about what actually drives me. I came up with all kinds of theories. Most didn’t hold up. But one answer stuck, and it’s embarrassingly simple:

I do it because it feels good.

Not good like an indulgence. Not dopamine-hit-good. But good in a calm, settled way. Like a piece of me that had been out of place gets gently pushed back in.

If I follow that feeling down a few more layers, it gets more specific: it feels good because it gives me a way to order the chaos that’s around everyone at every moment, whether I’m aware of it or not—and maybe, especially when I’m not. As a response to a world that’s always shifting and fraying and throwing things off balance, creating things is one of the best ways I know to bring any of it into coherence.

And if I go deeper still—into the spiritual layer—I’d say I’m responding to a tension I’ve probably always carried. A tension between the physical and the essential. The visible and the invisible. My body and my soul, to use old language.

Creative work doesn’t resolve that tension, but it does acknowledge it. And in acknowledging it, the pressure lifts—just a little. The lifting feels good.

Another thought: I don’t create for some broad, faceless audience, I create for myself and maybe one or two other people. That’s about it. But when I share my work with others and they respond—that feels really good too.

The second question people ask is: How do you do it? How do you keep going?

This is the part that came to me, as I’d mentioned—in the shower.

I’m able to do it because I have a framework. You could call it a house. A little inner room I’ve built. It’s not made of ambition or discipline or even great inspiration. It’s made of safety. And without it, I’d be too scattered by the chaos to make anything at all. I wouldn’t be ordering the chaos—I’d be stuck just trying to survive it.

This framework has several pillars.

One is my Jewish tradition. The predictability of Shabbat. Every week, without fail—and that part really matters—I step away from creative labor. For nearly forty years, I’ve observed this pause. I don’t write, don’t record, don’t build anything. I pray. I read. I sit down to eat with people. I talk, I listen.

The Torah lists 39 melachot—creative labors—forbidden on Shabbat. These were originally the tasks involved in building the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary the Israelites carried through the wilderness after leaving their enslavement in Egypt. So, the idea is: once a week, I stop building. I stop shaping the world. I sit back and observe it.

I have a chance to look at my life and my place in it. The same way a painter steps back from her canvas, or the way a musician stops playing to listen to what he has composed.

This is how an artist or any person (we are, in some ways, all artists) gains perspective on what we’ve made. We see what’s working and what isn’t. Sometimes, that pause—that moment of silence—is the most important part of the entire process.

And paradoxically, that stopping, that intentional rest, is what allows me to keep creating. It gives me an inviolable weekly pause, which I sometimes think of as a sacred interruption.

Another pillar of the framework is family.

I grew up in a loving home. I was safe, I was seen. That’s not something I earned—it’s a gift, and I know not everyone receives it. It grounded me in a way that let me soar. And later, I built a home of my own. A family of my own. And within that, my wife Maria is the central beam of the whole structure. She made our house into a place of comfort, of stability; a place to come home to. She gives me shelter in the deepest sense.

And when you have a place like that, one that holds you, you feel brave enough to reach outward, and upward. To make something beautiful or meaningful. Even—and perhaps most critically—something that might embarrass you..

Which brings me to this: point:

Creativity isn’t the same thing as art. It isn’t a painting or a song or a film. It’s not a product. It’s a condition. A way of being. A disposition toward openness. Toward play.

Creativity is what happens when something in you wants release—and you give it permission.

And the framework I’m describing is what gives me that permission. That room. That safety. It’s what lets me risk making something instead of collapsing under the noise of everything that swirls around me.

That doesn’t mean the framework never wobbles. It bends. Sometimes it cracks. There are weeks when I wonder if it’s still there at all. But even then, some part of it holds. Or maybe I hold it. Or maybe we hold each other.

And that’s really it.
That’s why I keep making things.
And in a broader sense, maybe it’s why any of us do.

POP UP Q&A This Thursday Evening July 24 For Paid Subscribers!

I’m inviting you to a spontaneous gathering—this Thursday night July 24 at 5:00 PM Pacific—just for paid subscribers.

We’ll meet live on Zoom, and I’ll be responding to your questions about: songwriting, creativity, writer’s block, Jewish thought, Israel/Hamas, prayer, doubt, grief, hope, love —and whatever else we find ourselves wrestling with. (It’s possible I’ll play a few songs too, for good measure.)

It’ll be informal. Honest. Intimate.

Just a small room, a screen (of course), and a few people willing to speak and to listen.

• To attend: Be a paid subscriber

• Send me your question by email (thebigmuse@gmail.com) this Thursday evening, July 24 at 5:00 PM Pacific)

• Check your inbox Thursday afternoon for the Zoom link

• I’ll try to get to as many questions as I can.

If you’ve ever wanted to ask me something—anything!—I’d love to hear from you.

I hope see you soon,

–Peter

“Hold The Things That I Can’t Carry,” from my latest recording At The Emergence Of Stars

Suspended By No String