Why Am I Disorganised?

OK, why don’t you tell me why you think you are disorganised? Letters on a postcard please.

The excuse I hear most often is “I’m disorganised because I’m artistic”. Really? Lets look at 5 artists, Beethoven, Turner, Piers Anthony, Damien Hirst and Elvis Costello.

Starting with Mr Hirst, I don’t like his works, but then I don’t believe I’m required to either. But, and it’s a big BUT, I do admire his organisational skills. After all do you really think a guy who employs between 150 and 200 people creating his “visions” is unorganised? He knows what’s going on, he knows what steps need to be done to get from A to Z. He knows who’s working on what and at what stage they are. To be blunt he’s artistic and organised. And successful. Successful enough to be able to employ all those people.

Then there’s Elvis Costello. I was told a tale by a publisher of one of Costellos visits to him. He had a file that contained what he’d been working on for the last two weeks. That was close to 200 songs. He pulled piece after piece out of the file finishing with “… and here’s one I did in the taxi on the way here”.

Like Schubert, who couldn’t stop writing and never got to actually hear most of what he wrote before he died. But then maybe some of it wasn’t that good right then. But it would nag on him until he pulled it out and rewrote it. Like Beethoven.

Now Ludwig was a man who carried a notebook with him every where he went. When he got an idea for a tune or a snippet of a melody he pulled out his notebook and pencil and sketched out the idea. Back home he’d perhaps work that into a sonata, or the 6th Symphony. Or maybe he decided he didn’t like it after all so did nothing with it. But it was there, in his notebook. Much has been written about Beethovens’ 9th Symphony with some arguing that because he was rewriting it, without the Choral elements, that he didn’t really intend those to be in the final cut. But then Beethoven was constantly rewriting pieces. A piano concert turns into a violin concert (or the other way around – you decide). Which did he intend to be “the one”? But the original themes are all there in his notebooks. Like Turner.

I seriously suggest you go have a look at Turners’ sketchbooks on the Tate website. You’ll find in there sketches that remind you of some of his work, because they were turned into some of his work. Sometimes several sketches would become a single piece, so several sketches of, say, a mill from different sides and angles becomes one single view in oils. Organised from the start.

But I’ve missed one. Piers Anthony. You may know him as a prolific author of what are often called Science Fantasy, but many of which I just think of as Fantasy – The Xanth novels, Blue Adept and the Tarot series. He has said that he never suffers from writers block, and that’s because he doesn’t work on a single book at any one time. He’ll have one in it’s initial stage where he’s outlining the story and the characters, another in 1st draft, another post editorial review and another in final pre-prelease mode. He allocates a set number of hours a day to each stage. If he gets stuck in one he goes on to the next.

All of these very successful artists have one thing in common. They’re organised. Well organised, and if you look at so many successful artists lives they are all well organised. So what’s your excuse? There are any number of methodologies out there to help you get organised, even project management disciplines like Prince 2 have ways to help you get organised, and Microsoft has a package called Project Manager that can help you with that. Or you can use Trello, as we do on this site. But have you checked out the help you can get in Microsoft Word if you’re a writer? You can start with an outline and then turn that into chapters then flesh each chapter out.

You can borrow that concept for music and work out how you want the piece to progress. There was a documentary on how Paul Simon wrote the songs for Graceland which gives insights as to how he wrote those, again organisation was the key.

So all these artists are organised and it could be argued that their success was because they were organised. So why aren’t you? What’s holding you back? Is it because you think it might stifle your creativity? Beethoven was organised, yet in demand because of his improvisational ability. He would rock up at a dinner, eat then play something that had never been heard before yet was of equal quality to his published material. Did being organised stifle his creativity or did it feed it? After all he had a wealth of material that he could call on.

All jazz musicians fall into a similar vein, blues and many rock musicians likewise. They develop a stock of phrases, changes, progressions, riffs. sequences, that they stitch together seemingly at random, but because they’re organised they can flow from one to another easily, or hearing something someone else has just played, create a variation. I saw a TV interview with Eric Clapton (as a young long-haired guitarist) where he stated precisely that he had built up a set of Stock Phrases. As a musician, jam sessions are a great stimulus for your creativity, but you’ve got to have some of those stock phrases at your beck and call to make it work. I’m not saying you always use that stock stuff, but it can inspire you, you can build on it.

Do you think Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift aren’t organised? Just look at what’s been written about both of them over the last few years. What comes out is that they are indeed well organised.

So! Just as you practise your scales and arpeggios, just as you hone your brushwork, or your carving skills (all examples of being organised) polish your organisational skills. Use a notebook or a notes app and catalogue and categorise what you write, or paint, or indeed any ideas you might have.

Terry Pratchett said that you can do what people tell you and follow your dream, but in the end you will still lose out to those who’ve worked hard and got themselves organised, and developed the skills. Till the ground, fertilise it, sow the seeds – if you want to reap the results. Otherwise you’re left to glean what grows wild, and that’s very slim pickings.