Book Reports For Grown Ups: Issue #1
Free Play: Improvisation in Life & Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch
For my first ever book report on the Check Engine Light Substack, I've chosen Free Play: Improvisation in Life & Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch (1990). This book found me while I was wandering in the Barbican on my recent trip to London.
What’s the Book About?
Nachmanovitch brought in his years of experience as a violinist to this book about harnessing the power of free-flowing creativity. While its central application is in creative endeavors, there is much to be gained for anybody interested in the power of inner creativity to improve your craft or your life.
Free Play is not your normal "How to Unlock Your Creativity in Five Easy Steps" type of book. Instead, it offers a thoughtful philosophical framework for uncovering ways to investigate and unravel creativity in everyday life.
What Are the Big Ideas? (Themes & Takeaways)
Free Play organizes its big idea wonderfully into four key sections of the book.
The Sources — Delves into the origins of free play and how to tap into them. In this section, I particularly enjoyed the chapter called Inspiration and Time's Flow. Here's a great quote that captures the feel of this chapter and section:
"We still engage in the important practice of planning and scheduling — not to rigidly lock in the future, but to tune up the self."
This was a great reminder that some planning can deliver us to the Muse and not take us away from her.
The Work — These chapters are all about the nuts and bolts of creativity and its place in the excavation of those forces from ourselves. In particular, I liked the chapter entitled Practice, which started with a beautiful Zen koan:
"Unless you have been thoroughly drenched in perspiration, you cannot expect to see a palace of pearls on a blade of grass."
Obstacles and Openings — This section invites the reader to explore, as the title suggests, obstacles or blocks to finding the core elements of creative expression. Free play, of course, is stunted when our energy is poorly managed through insidious coping mechanisms and bad habits, whether through "Vicious Circles" as the author puts it, or through the loss of our ability to tap into childlike states of play.
The Fruits — The closing of Free Play ties a bow on the book by inviting the reader to consider how creativity changes us when we allow it to grow. Nachmanovitch ties the process of free play back to a larger cycle — how the inner creative voice, once liberated, shapes not just our art, but our way of being. The fruits are not outcomes or products, but relationships: with the work, with others, and with the mystery itself.
What Did I Love / What Made Me Think?
There were a few ideas in this book that shifted my thinking or articulated something in a way that connected new points for me.
First, in the chapter called Vicious Circles, Nachmanovitch puts a magnifying glass over internal obstacles that stop us from finding our true creative potential. He highlights addiction and procrastination in particular, not as an investigation into medicine or neuroscience, but as an exploration of what he calls the "do loop" and the "don't do loop." In his view, compulsion and procrastination are polar symptoms of the same "disorder of self-regulation" — one moving us toward doing more and more that removes us from the Work and the other doing less and less for the same purpose.
The author also emphasizes how constraints — when used wisely — can deepen creative access. By limiting options, we’re often forced to uncover unexpected routes, novel approaches, or unexplored resources within ourselves. Creativity doesn’t thrive in infinite freedom; it often sharpens under pressure.*
Lastly, Chapter 8, Quality, is one of my favorite chapters I've read in any book in recent memory. It tackles an often ill-defined or altogether ignored topic that is an essential aspect of everything we care about. Quality is this intangible aspect that we know when we see, feel, or experience it, but cannot often articulate with sufficiency. While Nachmanovitch begins the chapter by saying he cannot and will not define quality, he beautifully illustrates the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that contribute to the emergence of quality and safeguards against blockades to it.
"If the work is created with the whole person, it will come out whole."
"One of the most insidious kinds of pressure an artist can succumb to is the pressure to be accessible."
I found the ideas in this chapter a helpful summation of the sentiments of this entire book as well as applicable to endeavors outside the bounds of what might be considered traditional creative professions.
If You Liked This, You Might Also Like...
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
Would I Recommend It? And to Whom?
Yes — Anybody who enjoys reading clear philosophy and wants to be inspired to find and express their core creativity in any endeavor.
No — Somebody looking for a step-by-step book to unearth creative blocks.
Wave Top Thoughts
A quote I loved:
"The danger to the artist is that under pressure of these institutions, one might internalize those demands and replace one's natural, immaculate voice with an artificially synthesized voice."
A surprising insight from this book was the role of purposefully constraining yourself to access deeper creative flow.
The vibe of Free Play is playfully philosophical. There are a few points of 90s New Age spirituality sprinkled in, but not enough to be distracting.
Read if you’re into: Unlocking inner creativity for performance or art.
Application to Performance Longevity, Coaching, and Teaching
The lessons of Free Play are most obviously congruent with the needs and temperaments of those directly involved in the arts or creative fields. Taken at face value, it might seem as though there may not be much to be gained in the realm of health, coaching, or performance as is the topic of many of the articles on this Substack.
I would disagree with that sentiment.
Ultimately, each of us is constantly forging our relationship with our own inner sense of how to navigate life — including how we approach solving the problem of maintaining health and performance. Free Play offers insight into how to listen to and maybe even play with those problems as we would an instrument.
Learning to remove obstacles of distraction, constrain our practice to force tangential approaches to problems we encounter, to balance childlike curiosity with rigorous experience — these are all qualities of creative thinking and practice that can help us regardless of our primary silo of exploration.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
If you liked reading this article consider pre-ordering my book:
Check Engine Light: Tuning Body and Mind For Performance Longevity