Creativity on demand

The power of a tight deadline

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Every project starts with a blank space. Given enough time, a writer puts down words where none existed. A songwriter captures a melody. A choreographer discovers a movement. A painter picks up a brush. A filmmaker hits upon a universal truth. But how do artists learn to open the space for inspiration? How do busy people find the confidence and the time to make art?

Questions like these have rolled around in my brain for the last two decades as I have moved in and out of jobs — writing, singing, acting and collaborating on multiple theater and music projects with other Madison artists.

A long, long time ago, I met Andrew Rohn, the man who would become my husband and collaborator, when I was shaking like a leaf in the driveway of Willy Street’s Broom Street Theater, preparing to audition for a musical. We fell in love while pursuing our artistic passions. We wrote and acted in Temp Slave, a musical that became a Madison favorite in the late 1990s. It was pre-kids, and when I look back, time seemed infinite, like one long summer Madison night.

But then came dogs and twins and house. The day jobs expanded and responsibilities mounted. I carried around a fair amount of self-doubt, and had little trouble putting my creative ambitions aside for more immediate and practical concerns. I had already spent some time with The Artist’s Way, a book designed to help people put aside inner critics and let ideas flow.

But in 2001, with a pair of 2-year-olds, I wasn’t feeling it.

Then we got the call. Mercury Players invited us to participate in the Blitz, a frenzied 24-hour play festival where the time between page and stage is a blink of an eye. On Friday, we drew a title — “To Gild the Lily” — and by Saturday night the Bartell Theater was packed with screaming fans watching eight shows that hadn’t existed before. In that time, we created a Roman tragi-comedy featuring a character, Lilly, who had been castrated by an evil uncle fixated on the throne. The cast nailed it. And my faith was restored.

Even though I love sleeping, a luxury not afforded to Blitz participants, we challenged ourselves to write these musicals year after year. We wrote an imaginary history of American cheese, a story of plus-sized male models performing on a cruise ship, a tale of a choir director stuck in purgatory, doomed to listen to disco, among others. None of these were masterpieces. Each beginning was rough, and it’s a wonder our marriage has survived. But they existed, and they led to more.

In some cases the small shows grew to become full-length epics. A one-act we created for Mercury Players’ 10th anniversary (by locking ourselves away at Holy Wisdom Monastery) became Walmartopia, an anti-corporate time travel musical. By the time our twins were in second grade, Walmartopia became a top seller at the New York Fringe Festival and ran four months off-Broadway.

In recent years, I’ve been delighted to perform as an ensemble member of Are We Delicious? In a process refined by Blitz veteran Tony Trout, the Delicious “impresario,” everyone writes, and everyone acts — and we get a whole blessed week to create the plays. I’ve written a play about a rock star having a meltdown and a musical about Franz Kafka pitching a movie based on “The Metamorphosis.” I’ve played a showgirl, a Christian grandma-to-be and an evil princess. I’ve sung ABBA-inspired songs, heavy metal and grunge.

It would be tough to overstate how important these projects have been for me as an artist. It takes a lot of effort for me to stop spinning in a hundred directions and focus on one thing. The limited timeframes of these projects have given me focus. They have taught me to be kind to myself and to the people I’m collaborating with. I have learned to trust my instincts and accept when an idea is “good enough.” I have fallen in love with the process and with the other people who take the risks inherent in doing them.

The projects I’ve embraced have been the short-term, local variety. But this sort of extreme creativity has exploded in the digital age. The granddaddy of writing challenges, National Novel Writing Month, grew from 21 participants in 1999 to nearly 400,000 in 2014. That effort inspired former Madisonian Burr Settles to launch in 2004 the phenomenon known as February Album Writing Month. The 48-Hour Film Project, an international organization with a Madison affiliate, has also grown by leaps and bounds.

Clearly I am not the only creative type who responds to these time-based challenges. For this story, I talked to others who also have found these deadline projects help create discipline and focus and nurture the soul.

Nurturing one’s creative side, though, is an ongoing process. Like so many artists I know, I never quite feel like I have arrived. But when opportunity knocks, I know to say “yes.” Just give me a deadline.

Jere Foley

National Novel Writing Month

For a creative guy, Jere Foley talks a lot about a practical matter: word counts. That’s because Foley, a trained Shakespearean actor who works as a production editor at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, needed to be very strict with himself to produce an entire novel in a month.

In 2010, a friend introduced Foley to National Novel Writing Month (known among insiders as “NaNoWriMo”). The folks at the nonprofit NaNoWriMo have designated November as the month when aspiring novelists are to get it done. The challenge is to complete a 50,000-word novel. “50,000 sounds huge,” says Foley. “But it breaks down to 1,666 words a day. It can feel daunting until you start to break it down like that.”

NaNoWriMo is huge. In 2013, more than 400,000 writers across 200 countries participated, including more than 80,000 students. Professional writers provide pep talks, and the nonprofit has developed a course in “Teaching Writing Self-Efficacy,” which sounds like a fancy was to say it helps writers believe in themselves. The project has led to more than 250 novels getting published by traditional publishers, including Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

The first year, Foley says, “I gave it a good, fair try. I think I only made it to 30,000.” But he stayed at it. And, without the deadline, he’s sure he wouldn’t have written that much.

What’s more, Foley’s opinion of himself began to change with participation in the challenge. “What stuck in my mind — and the reason I came back to it the next year — was [that] the legitimacy of having a contest allowed my family to understand that I needed writing time. Before, I think they would have wondered why I was ignoring them. They let me write. They encouraged me to write.”

Foley’s second November was even more fruitful. “I doubled my self-challenge, and increased to 3,333 words a day. I ended the month with an 86,000-word novel.” Foley has self-published that novel, Slumbersythe, an espionage fantasy with a protagonist described as a “slightly overweight, slightly narcoleptic, slightly middle-aged, chronically single and gay James.”

NaNoWriMo creates community, too, says Foley. At his workplace, several participants posted word counts on a hallway whiteboard. And the Madison Public Library hosted “write-ins” during November. “Authors were encouraged to bring their iPads, bring their laptops, bring their notepads and come to the library and write as a group,” says Foley. “They basically structured it as writing sprints. You’d write for 20 or 30 minutes, rest, check in. You had this network of people that were doing it with you. That network of people really made it easy.”

Chris Moehr

48-Hour Film Project

Film producer Chris Moehr credits the 48-hour Film Project with jumpstarting his production company, Firmament Films.

Moehr, who works days as an IT project manager, first participated in Madison’s version of the international event in 2010 with a group of friends. That time, he took on too much: He directed, edited and produced the film.

“The first year our movie was terrible. The second year, we thought it was decent, but it wasn’t groundbreaking,” says Moehr. But in subsequent years, working in a tight timeframe helped define roles and refine the process. Moehr and his colleagues used “the 48,” as he calls it, to build a team that could trust each other to get the job done.

The 48HFP is structured as a contest, with judges and audiences selecting a winner from the entries. On the Friday night when the 48HFP is launched, producers draw genres out of a hat, for example, “dark comedy,” “buddy film” or “fantasy.” Last year, Moehr drew “musical.”

“Musical is kind of considered the death sentence for this project,” says Moehr, because of the extra layers of work it takes to compose, arrange, record, teach songs and add choreography to an already full schedule. “To create a seven-minute musical with all original music that was sung by our cast and crew with a big dance number in 48 hours was by far the most frantic we’ve ever been,” says Moehr.

The result, Game Day, a baseball musical, won the Madison competition. It was Firmament’s third win, and it went on to take “best song” at Filmapalooza, the national competition.

The Firmament team is skipping the contest this year because they’re putting the finishing touches on a feature-length puppet musical called The Princess Knight. But Moehr says the competition both sparked the initial idea for the film and connected him with T.C. DeWitt, the film’s LA-based writer and director.

“If you look at Firmament today, it’s a conglomeration of about three different teams that were at the 48 originally,” says Moehr. “That’s how we found a lot of these people.”

Once acquainted, they learned to work together under pressure — and to trust each other. “One of the best people I ever worked for said, ‘you don’t need to be great. You just need to surround yourself with great people,’” says Moehr. “I sort of feel like my job is to make people feel welcome, to make people feel empowered, to make decisions, to feel creative, to make mistakes. And then work as a team.”

When that team spends years working on a project, as is the case with The Princess Knight, there are benefits to taking a weekend to work together on a short film. “It’s a reunion. It’s the one weekend that our whole team comes together,” says Moehr. “Everybody loves the 48 and the immediate response and the fact that they can see it in the theater, we can put something up online and that it doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Hannah Busse

February Album Writing Month

Unlike many Midwesterners, Hannah Busse looks forward to February. That’s when she writes and records an entire album as part of February Album Writing Month (FAWM).

Busse earned a music degree in oboe performance and choral education from the University of Wisconsin School of Music in 2006. These days, she works 30 hours a week as a worship pastor at Blackhawk Church.

She and her husband have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, which has made finding time for music all the more difficult. FAWM, which challenges aspiring songwriters to create a 14-song album in the 28 days of February, has kept the creative juices flowing.

Busse, who writes music she describes as a piano-driven blend of folk and pop, has participated in the project for the last five years. “It’s been a really crucial part for me in the rhythm of my year as a creative person,” says Busse. “It just kick-starts you into this mode every February. You just have to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and you don’t have time to be too self-critical.”

Busse began participating in the album-writing challenge in 2010, before her daughters were born. That first year, she completed the 14-song album. Back then, she had a room dedicated to music. “I was all set up, could take my day off from work and write all day long, making professional recordings with effects. Three years later, with two little girls at home, I’m just on my iPhone recording voice memos,” says Busse. Still, February is a fruitful time. She sets aside her Wednesday mornings (her day off) for music-making. “I might write four songs, one for every Wednesday, and if I do that, that’s great. Most often, I’ve actually done more than that,” says Busse. “I’ll be at 11 o’clock at night in the bathroom with my guitar being super-quiet because I just have a song that wants to come out.”

In addition to the structure and deadlines that Busse needs, FAWM provides a strong online community, where musicians encourage each other, listen to each other’s compositions and even collaborate, adding tracks to other people’s songs. A musician in Finland has added orchestrations to Busse’s compositions.

“It’s a confidence-builder,” says Busse. “I was not feeling very confident about it, and all of a sudden I’m hearing how people are connecting with it. And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had something help me bridge that initial fear.”

Busse calls herself a “recovering perfectionist.” She says her experiences with the project have helped her to trust her instincts and also to explore writing songs that aren’t designed to please an audience. She points out a song, “Sabbath,” that deals with feeling hurried. “That song comes from a pretty deep place for me,” says Busse. “It has to do with my lack of ability to just be still and stop the hamster wheel.” While writing the song, she gained some insight: “I discovered it’s a kind of a protective thing; it gives me my identity, feeling like I’m doing things, accomplishing things, makes me feel like that’s what justifies my existence.”

For Busse, sharing her songs is an intrinsic part of her faith. She believes in the power of creativity: “When you make time to explore your gifts and share your art, that can influence other people and be powerful in the world. And if you don’t do that, the rest of the world is missing out on something.”