Writers Need Obstacles

​‘We need obstacles’ is likely not a statement that will receive wide support.  For as long as it takes you to read this blog I ask you to suspend your criticism and your natural bias and let me explain. 
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and popularizer of modern science.  He’s the Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and hosts the television program ‘Star Talk’.  He describes his television series as the cross roads for popular culture and science.  Recently he interviewed jazz greats Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.  Tyson asked his guests to compare creativity in music with creativity in science.
Hancock had an interesting response.  He said in music you create something that has never previously existed.  For example, a Bach fugue could only have been composed by Bach.  Art creates something new out of nothing.  Science, on the other hand, is to reveal and understand something that previously existed.  For example, the laws of physics.
The other difference is that artists need resistance or obstacles in order to refine and polish what they create.  The analogy he used is that an airplane is able to fly because of air resistance over the wings which creates lift.  Resistance or obstacles gives an artist “lift”.  Think about how critique groups can help with your writing.  Think about how we rely on editors to help polish our prose, correct our grammar, guide our plot and make our characters believable.
To be an artist means that we have resistance to our art, to what we create.  Without resistance our writing would be incomplete.  Resistance is how we hone our art.  A serious artist must learn not only to accept resistance but to embrace it as part of the creative process.  Steinbeck tried but couldn’t come up with a title for Grapes of Wrath.  His wife suggested the title based on the hymn, The Battle Ground of the Republic.