Creative Sprints

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well.”

— Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast

The legendary music producer, Rick Rubin, has worked with many of the greatest artists we know — Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Linkin Park, Adele — the list goes on and on.

And with many of the artists he has worked with, his guidance played a key role in helping them create their finest albums, as he would challenge them to tap into the emotional essence of what they were trying to convey in their music.

But Rubin has learned just as much from the artists he’s worked with, as they have from him.

He could recall a time when he was younger and much more restless. He was working with the iconic Australian rock band, AC/DC, who, by then, had already amassed over two decades of experience in the industry. 

It was a frustrating experience for Rubin, as the band spent much of their time in the studio doing nothing but drinking coffee and smoking. One thought often crept into Rubin’s head, “Why are we not playing?” 

He would glare at the band and point at his watch. The rhythm guitarist, Malcolm Young, who was the boss and brains of the band, would hold up his cigarette and tell him, “Alright, let me finish my cigarette.”

And they still wouldn’t play for another hour. 

What Rubin didn’t understand at the time was that AC/DC knew precisely what they were doing. To them, writing and recording music was like a sprint. You can’t fill your entire day with a hundred sprints and expect the outcome to be good. But if you were to do just a few sprints where you are totally focused, the outcome would be of much greater quality.

That’s what AC/DC did. They would put their whole being into one session, and afterwards, they would just chill, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They would repeat this cycle one or two more times, and then call it a day. 

In other creative endeavors that are especially long and intense like writing, it’s not unusual for artists to work in similar sprints. Great writers, including Haruki Murakami, Stephen King, and Ernest Hemingway, are known to spend a few hours of uninterrupted writing in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day attending to other commitments, exercising, reading, or just chilling. 

Hemingway, in particular, often shared how he would stop writing when his creative juices were still flowing, allowing his subconscious to piece everything together for the next session. As he wrote in one of his letters: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel, you will never be stuck.”

Let’s try something new from now on. Instead of overexerting yourself with long hours of inconsistent work, try working in intense short bursts, where you’re focusing every iota of your being — and then spending the rest of that time sitting on your ass.

“The art life is a great life,” as the late filmmaker David Lynch once said. “It’s coffee and cigarettes.”