How to Know When You're Done

Notes on Creativity

M shredding (photo by Ava Allen)

We brought in — or, better, were thrown into — 2024 in a new apartment after 20 years in our previous building and three weeks to find and commit to another. Thankfully, this calendar flip had more regular rhythms of holiday and break. Our daughter Q was home after finishing her third semester of college; my wife and I had that typical December work where most people had abandoned the old year and weren’t ready to take up the new one quite yet.

Our son M was also on break from school for the first time in a while. He began college at USC right out of high school, but neither LA or the program was a good fit. He came back to New York to figure things out, and after much figuring, M transferred into the Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music at NYU, a program designed to mix artistry and industry to position graduates to be successful in their preferred niche of the music industry (artist, label head, producer, etc.).

Arts programs are a little different than other forms of education in that most students are always already doing the thing they’re going to school for. M’s program is full of musicians and music makers who arrived at freshman orientation with 50,000 Instagram followers and thousands or millions of streams. These kinds of programs exist to concentrate talent and drive in a shared space. And, like most creative academic communities, so much of the learning and doing happens outside of class.

M has been a professional musician and creative for a while now, and he wants to make of life of it. He is always making something — songs, beats, photos, videos, posters, merch. He can’t walk from couch to kitchen without humming. But returning to college after stopping out changes the way you look at it. After a year and a half working hourly wage jobs while trying to advance his music career, M has had a taste of how tough it is to sustain himself as a creative. He has always been thoughtful, but now he thinks a lot, probably too much, about what it takes to survive in the music and creative industries at a time when the main winners are everyone but the makers.

I love talking with him about creativity and being a creative. Recently, he told me about how he's trying to develop his artistic practice. M has been working with a fellow Clive student who makes beats and produces music, largely rap and hip hop. This student, a first-year, makes around 1,000 beats and samples a year and has a robust network of musicians and producers that listen to and buy them. M also makes beats and writes and produces music, but he usually takes a while to finish something, and he doesn't always know what to do with it when he does finish.

M knows that to make it as a creative, you not only have to be good, you have to get good work out regularly and quickly. M was amazed by this student's productivity and success with people using and paying for his work. In working with him, he found the secret to his superpower: Knowing when something is done.

I am still unsure how to know this.

I’ve wanted to be a capital-‘W’ Writer for a long time. By “Writer” I mean someone who routinely produces work recognized as worthy (enough) by both others and me to publish in print/online and on which to spend attention. I have been writing for a long time, sure, but like M, I’m slow at making, and I usually don’t know what to do with stuff.

I think I am pretty good at beginnings. In my academic work, teaching, or creative nonfiction, I feel comfortable (mostly) with what questions I pick up and chase, particularly the ones you have to put your shoulder against to get even a little movement. But these are also the questions and ideas — e.g., how we think about ourselves and our fit in the world — that have no natural ending. Pair those with mild perfectionism about craft, and that bit of grit in your shell will always seem to need another layer of nacre.

To make myself actually let go of some writing, I started blogging back in 2005 when Q fell into the world and when she, her older brother, and my wife and I together seemed like a new constellation worth gazing up at. I’m still puzzled, in a good way, by how the universal experience of childhood and the common experience of having children continues to be great raw material for understanding, and rich because so universal and common but also individual. I loved — and still love — the informality and intimacy of the blog post and the newsletter, the low but still real stakes of clicking “publish.” You have to contend with and trust the fact that someone will read you; you have to believe that you have something to say, or at least have an interesting way of saying something.

But back to M’s teaching. He continued with an example: He and this productive student from his program wanted to create a soul-style loop. M played what he described as a fairly simple blues phrase on the guitar. As usual, he wanted to make it more musically interesting, more complicated, but the student said no it’s great as it is. He immediately sent the track out to his network, and within half an hour (!) they were hearing back from other musicians who loved it and wanted to hop on it.

Could M have made the track more musically interesting? Undoubtedly. Would the more interesting track have been better and found a wider audience? Unclear. But once you start tinkering with something that’s done only when you say, it's difficult to stop. Even now, M can do things with an instrument that few people can, which makes his work unique, but knowing when something — an idea, an artifact — is ready enough to go out to others is just as important.

Something else M said sticks with me: When making something, you have to believe to the point of knowing that you’re great, if not the best, for a moment. Or, as the great essayist Charles D’Ambrosio puts it, to write is to assume the right to be exact about your life.

Thank you, Dear Reader, for being here with me, whether again or for the first time, as we keep on learning how to talk to ourselves. I still want to work at being exact about my life, to keep my shoulder against the boulder of living, especially at a time when those in power strive to make living harder for everyone but themselves. Even as I fret over how this very piece could be better, more interesting, I’m clicking “publish”: Though I am always unfinished, this is the year that I learn how I can be done.

BONUS

Here’s a moment of joy from M. Dang, son.