Many have attempted the doomed practice of comparing various aspects of San Francisco and New York, usually finding focus within the context of food or the arts (e.g. quality of restaurants, genesis of trends) and ending with heated exchanges over who has the better this or that. The whole process sounds like so much fun I think I will try one of my own: which city provides a more productive environment for its denizen artists?

While preparing a prior post on New York, I began thinking more pointedly about the tension between inspiration and creation and how each half of what we call the creative process requires arguably opposite psychological states. To allow yourself to be inspired, you have to be open to the world around you, aware of every minute detail of your day. Never knowing the source of potential inspiration, every encounter must be viewed as the departure point for a new flight of fancy.

The same is not true for creation, which demands your complete dedication to the task at hand and a rejection of any potential distraction. With the raw material of inspiration, the painful, sweaty, arduous, too-often-thankless task of creation attempts to make something tangible. Inspiration is entertaining and energizing; creation is boring and enervating.

But inspiration just gives you a shapeless mound of clay that must be manipulated and worked into something important and accessible. Michelangelo is purported to have said that he would view a hunk of marble and see the figure inside that merely needed to be freed. Such a quote uplifts the artistic spirit but dismisses the hours, days, weeks and months of hard work involved in chiseling, sanding and polishing required to create something even remotely akin to the David.

There is a school of thought regarding the artistic purity of the unexpurgated thought as representing pure art, which, for someone who hates editing, is indeed a Siren’s song. But no gem appears impeccably formed without our having to do a lot of digging, scrubbing and polishing. A finished creative work demands editing, dismissing ideas that don’t work, refining ideas that do, funneling out all the bits that sound so brilliant when reverberating inside the confines of the cranium but ring hollow when released into the greater world.

Looking at it another way, it’s as if your eccentric aunt who dances around the attic all day to music only she can hear had an idea for a new symphony and handed it over to your worker-bee uncle – the actuary who crunches numbers all day in the basement – to actually write the thing. After all, your aunt has dancing to do and can’t be bothered with the hard work of writing a symphony. But she does have every note in her head and only needs someone to write it all down, edit it, arrange it, and turn it into something cohesive, coherent and compelling. Isn’t it amazing that any artistic work is ever born?

To find success as an artist, meaning that you actually complete works you start, you have to combine both personality types. I’m probably more of a dancing aunt than an actuarial uncle, which is, I believe, why I struggle to be more prolific despite having an overflowing treasure-trove of inspiring ideas.

In E.B. White’s Here is New York, White wrote that creation is in part merely the business of forgoing distractions great and small, which is another way of saying that you must eschew the source of inspiration as inspiration can be so intoxicating that you never want to leave the state of being inspired. I feel that San Francisco is such an inspiring place that you can allow yourself to remain inspired without doing anything more, without ever moving on to the tough task of creation and is why so many innovative ideas leave San Francisco half-baked. The 2002 documentary on the Cockettes contains a sequence in which the troupe has a much-anticipated debut in Manhattan. Within the context of San Francisco, the Cockettes were viewed primarily as avant-garde, subversive. But in the shadow of Broadway, the group simply appeared as unpolished and amateurish, like a naughty grade-school play.

What are the types of settings that aid certain phases of the creative process? Occasionally, I will go on a one-man writer’s retreat to somewhere I feel is inspiring (one of my favorite such destinations is New Orleans), but I’ve found over the years that it isn’t quite that simple. Throughout human history, artists have fled to the country, eschewing the distractions of urban environs for peace and quiet. This Boston Globe article from earlier this year (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/04/how_the_city_hurts_your_brain/?page=full) considers some of the same issues from the perspective of cognitive science. What inspires us and what allows us the concentration to accomplish the hard work of creation are very different, even opposite.

Because of San Francisco’s microclimate, one can enjoy year-round inspirational distractions. Maybe I need a rural retreat to build on the overwhelming number of ideas I’ve had since moving back to San Francisco nine years ago. I have struggled with completing the necessary work of writing since I’ve lived here, so I understand first-hand the artistic challenges of the urban environment. At least in New York, a city with actual seasons and its own share of inspirational fodder, you are forced indoors to cohabitate with your nascent inspired thoughts for significant parts of the year and to recognize that boredom is an artist’s best friend.

Wherever you are, here’s to an inspiring AND creative New Year!