What you need for (a creative) summer
Comfort TV, a creative breakthrough and two very different summer reads
Whenever a new “What lives in your mind rent-free?” tweet makes the rounds, I know my answer.
I think The King of Queens, a conventional sitcom that transcends the sum of its parts, is the funniest TV show to have disappeared from the cultural consciousness. I’m pretty sure every cold open from its run is replaying somewhere in my brain on a loop. Unlike quotable shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and New Girl – the go-to TV comedies for gif reactions and meme-ready lines – the hilarity of The King of Queens relies almost entirely on context and inflection. It’s a show that always makes me laugh not because the dialogue on its own is funny, but because a character said a certain thing in a certain way at the exact right moment.
If you haven’t seen it, the show centers on Doug (Kevin James) and Carrie (Leah Remini), a couple living in Queens whose lives are disrupted when Carrie’s father-in-law (Jerry Stiller) moves in with them. Yes, you may ask: Why am I talking about a show that started its original run in 1998? I recently tried to watch a new Peacock Original TV show that sounded excellent on paper. Unfortunately, it was not excellent, and I stopped watching, but Peacock got me by finally being the platform to offer the watching experience I didn’t realize I needed when there are infinite hours of TV at our fingertips: every season of The King of Queens on demand.
TV is an important creative reset for me, and funny shows with pitch-perfect characters are where I turn when I feel myself edging toward burnout as a writer or in my reading life. Summer is a wonderful time to reset and check in with yourself as we near the midpoint of the year. Where are you at with your goals (creative and otherwise)? Do you need inspiration, or do you need a rest period?
If you’re looking for a reset and The King of Queens isn’t your cup of tea, I can also highly recommend People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, a standalone novel that I’d describe as a millennial burnout romantic comedy. Poppy and Alex are opposites in every way. They could never be together, but they’re best friends who take a vacation every summer. That is, until the trip to Croatia that changed their friendship forever. Breezy, readable and all the other adjectives that describe “beach reads,” People We Meet on Vacation is light but never lightweight. Pick it up if you enjoy thoughtful romantic comedies, alternating timelines, and/or stories about burnout and recovery.
My summer reading list includes what I think of as “big fiction” – bestselling books like last year’s Beach Read and Big Summer, as well as backlist titles from Tana French and Liane Moriarty that I haven’t gotten to yet – along with a strongly worded reminder to myself that I don’t have to finish every book on my list. As you know, I love to choose a reading theme to focus on for a month, but even I’ve found myself flirting with burnout in my reading life when I feel stuck finishing every title I’ve put on my own list.
Creative frameworks are important, but they should stay flexible. Thinking about the balance between supporting ideas with structure and not crushing them with too many rules helped me recently make a creative decision.
Two or three or four times, I came up with an idea for the next season of my book podcast, Reading Like an Adult, only to realize that the concept would be too thinly spread over a whole season, even for the limited series I was picturing. Finally, I realized that that was the idea – each of the approaches to reading that I was noodling around should be one installment of the new season, using the best of each idea for a rich, condensed 15-minute-or-so episode about the reading life.
One of my revelations about creativity in recent years is that there’s no need to hoard ideas. More will come. I’d rather burn through half a dozen of my best ideas in one season of my little reading podcast than keep them in an Evernote for “someday.”
I’m also learning to be less precious with my time. Yes, my most effortless creative hours happen first thing in the morning, and I try to use that early time as often as I can, but it doesn’t happen every day. I snatch 15 or 20 minutes to write whenever I can, showing up to see what happens.
I wrote a couple of months ago about needing quiet and stillness in my creative life. There’s been more noise lately – in a good way – stories and ideas and thoughts crowding my brain and demanding to be written down. I’m excited for a specific project this summer that’s been growing slowly.
But I think that tuning in remains important, which is why I’ve started Julia Cameron’s The Listening Path: The Creative Art of Attention. If you’ve already done The Artist’s Way and need a refresher, it’s a follow-up to Cameron’s famous 12-week course in creativity. If you’ve never done The Artist’s Way and would like to, but you need something shorter, you may want to try it (The Listening Path takes six weeks to complete).
So far, the course has been a reminder that I need to return to Cameron’s “Artist Date” tool. Morning Pages and walks are part of my routine, but I’ve lost sight of the importance of play. If you’re not familiar, an Artist Date is one hour spent doing something on your own for fun to encourage your inner artist. Some of my favorite Artist Dates (in pre-COVID times) included going to the movies for a matinee and lots of popcorn, checking out the vintage toy exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History, and taking a stack of books to the coffee shop so I could pair my reading time with a latte and a salted butter croissant.
We’re inundated with messages about productivity from a young age, and finding time for creative play goes against the grain of everything we’re taught. I know I need both, but it’s easier for me to show up for myself to put in the work of writing than it is for me to set aside time for fun.
I don’t pick up a lot of books about writing anymore, but I’m appreciating the slap in the face that is Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk. (He’s best known as the author of Fight Club.) This isn’t your typical book of writing advice – it’s visceral and punchy and, at times, shocking. Palahniuk doesn’t mess around with “write X number of words per day” platitudes, instead giving aspiring writers ways to find real stories in the world around them and not hold back when it’s time to dissect, exaggerate and transform them on the fictional page.
Sometimes creativity needs a jolt. Sometimes it needs comforting familiarity. I hope your summer so far has included some of both. Please keep sending me your stories of being inspired to create and your book recommendations, and I’ll see you around the inbox.