As a writer, I read a lot of books. In my alter ego as a youth librarian I also read a lot of books, which means I have a rather eclectic list of titles I read. Many adults never take the time to even consider picture books as part of their reading until they have children, and I think that’s a shame. There are a lot of great picture books out there that can really inspire us as adults, be it with the writing, the story or the artwork. Today I’d like to discuss one of them. A book which I think has an important life lesson for anyone involved in creative endeavors like writing, and which I have turned to many times to help keep me focused and remind me of what’s important since I discovered it. The book in question is “Magritte’s Marvelous Hat” by D.B. Johnson.
For those who haven’t read it, the book is about a painter named Magritte, after the real-life surrealist painter Rene Magritte whose art the book’s illustrations pay homage to. One day Magritte tries on a hat in a store and takes it home. The hat is no ordinary hat though, as it levitates above Magritte’s head rather than sitting on it, a wonderful situation because the hat doesn’t hurt his ears or mess up his hair. When Magritte gets home he finds that painting is suddenly very easy and paints his greatest work yet. He starts playing games with his remarkably human hat, like chasing after it when it pretends to blow away, and each day paints a picture even better than his last. Eventually, however, Magritte becomes so focused on painting that he forgets to play with his hat. One day the bored hat tries to get his attention and Magritte tells it to settle down and stop distracting him. The hat abandons Magritte, and with it his art.
“And all at once the colors splashed onto Magritte’s face. And his brush unpainted the picture.”
Any creative person who reads this wonderful picture book will recognize the situation that Magritte finds himself in. His muse has left him, and his work seems to have turned on him as a result.
We’ve all been there. You wake up one morning and suddenly find that you’re locked out of your own creativity; unable to produce a suitable piece of work no matter how hard you focus or try to conjure it up. The frustration that comes with knowing you can do better work and just not being able to is a familiar if unwelcome sensation to painters, writers and any other kind of artist you can think of.
Magritte’s reaction to the loss of his hat mirrors the reaction many writers and other artists have to this sudden loss of the muse. He immediately chases after the hat, running through the streets, calling out to it and asking if anyone has seen it. Very much similar to how creative individuals tend to react when they feel their muse has left them. They try to force it. They focus and work and try to conjure the muse back up through a sheer act of will. Sometimes that works and for many that’s all they need to get back on track. Some like poor Magritte though find that the harder they try to find the hat the more slippery and elusive it becomes. Trying to conjure the muse seems to do nothing but force it farther away until that creative force that once empowered us seems so ethereal and out of grasp that we wonder if perhaps it was only an illusion that we had it all along.
Hope is not lost, however, as Magritte teaches us. He quickly reasons that perhaps the hat will return if he plays its favorite game to make amends. He calls out a hide-and-go-seek challenge and immediately starts using the surrealist nature of the book’s setting to hide from the seeking hat. At last the hat and Magritte are reunited in his home, and once again painting is easy for Magritte and each picture is “better than his best”. This time Magritte does not forget about his hat, and plays games with it every day from then on.
The message here for creative people is clear, I think. The muse is not a bottomless well from which you can indefinitely draw. You cannot be creative to the exclusion of all other things in your life. You must take time to play with your hat. In other words, do something fun to recharge your creative batteries. Don’t neglect to spend time with your loved ones, and embrace your time with them as a chance to ground yourself and reflect on your own existence in the here and now, outside of your work. Time with loved ones and time at play to recharge are just as integral to the process of creativity as hard work, vision and perseverance.
There is one more lesson to be learned from this book, however. One that may be less obvious the first time one reads it. Magritte’s hat does not return and exist in exactly the same manner as it did before, you see. This time the hat sits directly on his head…not so desirable, seeing as it now pinches his ears and musses his hair. But, the hat then levitates Magritte into the air along with it allowing he and the hat to play exciting new games where they both pretend to blow away, and granting Magritte a whole new perspective from which to empower his work.
On the surface the change in the hat’s behavior may seem to be a cost imposed on Magritte for his earlier negligence, and admittedly that’s how I initially read the book myself. After multiple readings, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that the message is actually quite different. I think the hat’s changed behavior is encouraging us to be flexible in our pursuit of creativity. So many times we as writers get locked into a routine and a certain feeling for how the process has to work. Then we suffer a bout of writer’s block, or our muse abandons us for a time, or life gets in the way and we have to set a particular project aside for a time. When we return, somehow, things are different. A mental or emotional shift has occurred to pinch our ears and muss up our hair. Sometimes in an obvious way, sometimes in a way we really can’t explain and don’t fully understand. We just know that the process is not exactly what it was before.
So often, we fight that change. We stubbornly dig in and resist tooth and nail, insisting that things must be exactly as they were before. Ask yourself, what would have happened if Magritte had reacted this way to his hat levitating him in the air? Would the hat have obligingly returned to its old routines? Or would it have held its ground, perhaps even abandoned Magritte again just to prove its point? Thankfully, Magritte does the opposite and embraces the new perspective the hat grants him. This is the other message of “Magritte’s Marvelous Hat”. That we, as creative people, must learn to flow with changes in our own creativity and use them to our benefit. We must learn to change our routines when they need changing, accept that our mental state may not always be that perfect harmony we sometimes capture when we create, and learn to adapt to new perspectives when they’re shown to us.
I hope you’ll all take the time to find a copy of Magritte’s Marvelous Hat, whether it’s in ebook form, ordering yourself a hardback, or checking it out from your local library. As a creative person, you owe it to yourself to experience the lessons of this marvelous book for yourself.
