I have theories about stuff. All sorts of stuff, but mostly about art. It's still a complete mystery to me how a novel, a movie or a television series can bridge the gap between utilitarian survival (eat, sleep, work, reproduce) and self-consciousness. I find it to be a fascinating alchemy. One of my theories became so advanced recently that I gave it a name and thought of sharing it with you. Nothing is completely defined until it has a name, isn't it? So let me tell you about The Robb Flynn Syndrome, a disease that eats away at everybody's creative process at some point.
Robb Flynn is the talented, albeit extremely emotional frontman of thrash metal outfit Machine Head. Their first album BURN MY EYES was fantastic. The follow-up THE MORE THINGS CHANGE also rocked my face. The band had a catatrophic flirt with nu-metal at mid-career that almost obliterated them. It lead to the recording of their album THE BLACKENING, released in 2007. Robb Flynn talked SO MUCH SHIT about that album in magazines, saying it would be the most metal album recorded this century and that it would rival Metallica's ...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, yadda, yadda, yadda *. I owned every Machine Head record back then, the good ones and the bad ones, I thought that if anyone could record the most metal album on purpose, it was Robb Flynn.
The result was an utterly unlistenable pile of winded, directionless guitar solos that made no sense because I don't play guitar. My friends who did found some redeeming value to THE BLACKENING, but I didn't. I thought Lemmy Kilmister's cigarette smoke was way more metal. So how did that happen, exactly? How can the process of creation go so wrong? Robb Flynn fell victim to an ill that aims to destroy every creative mind at some point. Especially those who had success.
See, the act of creation must have purity of intent. You cannot create anything, thinking it's going to change the world. If your creation is solid enough, it'll change things anyway. Let's take literature for example, because it's the field I know best. Writing a story while thinking about how it'll change the world is overlooking the creation process. Thinking your work is going to move people will imbue it with the desire t and therefore it'll be devoid of anything else. It's like building a momument to your own ambitions. Does that make sense?
Here are two examples. David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST was so successful, it redefined the landscape of contemporary american literature? What was it born of? An inner necessity to share his experience as a recovering addict, his struggle against existential loneliness and his desire to continue the work of avant-garde authors, mainly. I don't think he ever imagined becoming a Kurt Cobain figure. In fact, Wallace was so self-conscious about straying from his creative process, it gnawed away at him in every single interview he gave but no one ever seemed to pay attention to it.
Here is an even better example. Before getting the Hollywood treatment and becoming a cultural phenomenon that would reach me and change my life, Chuck Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB was a humble novel. What made it successful is its seething rage against the way we lived our lives, from the obnoxious consumerism to our monolithic ideas about masculinity. It's a novel with such a blinding purity of intent, you can keep reading through its layers every couple of years. It evolves with you. Your own maturity and perspective shines a different light on FIGHT CLUB with every reading. It was hammered with great inspiration and made Chuck Palahnuik a superstar. He wrote good novels since, great ones even, but never came close to that level of transcendance again.
Creative guru Joe Rogan said: ''If you want to be the man, you can't ever possibly be the man. You have to enter that zone where there is no 'the man' and all that matters is the work.'' When you suffer from The Robb Flynn Syndrome, you stand in the way of your own creation. You want to direct your work in a direction it might not suppose to go in. When writing a story, the best thing you can do is just sit down, forget you exist and try to write the best story you can. Creative transcendance is achieved when a creator becomes one with his work.
I wanted to discuss The Robb Flynn Syndrome because it's huge in the crime fiction community. Every hardboiled/noir writer goes through this phase where he gets obsessed about writing the noirest thing he can. ''The bare bones of noir'' , like the cliché says. What usually transpires from such ambition is a bunch of depressed assholes characters who rob a bank for no reason whatsoever and, of course, it'll go wrong. Or maybe it'll be a love triangle story, which a treacherous woman on top. It's going to be something you've already read before, including some horrible character stereotype.
Never stand in the way of what you're creating. You know when you don't. It's like things create themselves, like you're just a vessel that transforms ideas into defined reality. Don't let The Robb Flynn Syndrome get the best of you.
* Unfortunately, I don't have that quote, but I found an INSANE quote about Machine Head's latest about UNTO THE LOCUST, which was described as ''polarizing'' by critics. I have yet to give it a go.