Artist Patricia Roshaven asked in a recent comment here how I get access to my own creativity.
In the course of working with other folks, I've put together dozens of tricks for doing that, but I'm going to ponder here what I regularly do myself to GET TO THE DEEPEST, WILDEST STUFF:
1. I start work, in my case, writing. The result may be awful for a while and then get better. And ideas emerge while I'm working.
2. After working--maybe later in the day--I do something physical and mindless: exercise, take a shower, eat lunch, do the laundry, run errands. After I've been writing, ideas pop up when I'm doing something physical and routine.
3. I've learned this one only in the last year: Keep a little sign on my computer that helps me remember the point of what I'm writing: insofar as I know the point. This may seem obvious, but what I write seems to come from preconscious material, and it slips away very easily. Here's a post about the therapy session I had that brought me to a breakthrough on this.
4. At times when I've felt gripped by fear, I've taken short breaks every hour and read something that helped me keep the floodgates open: in writing the first chapter of Sister India, I kept stopping to read a couple of pages of Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind. At another point when I was feeling shocked by what I was writing, I read bits of an autobiography by a friend, Lucy Daniels, With a Woman's Voice, which was startlingly personal and disclosing. I kept thinking: if she can do this, I can surely keep on spinning this fiction.
5. Having lots of toys and visual stimulation has helped me when I needed to write an ad on a deadline. (I used to do a lot of this kind of work.) Also, meditation has worked well for this: read the basic information, then sit and not-think about it for half an hour. Several times I've opened my eyes and had the idea present itself full-blown.
Part Two of Patricia's question was: what causes creativity to stop for me. One word answer: overwork.
Please suggest some of your own creativity tricks in the comments section, if you will.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Read inspiring blogs and comment on them. :))
I do much of what you describe - getting to the work first to get things moving, taking breaks as needed to let the flow happen w/o pushing too hard. I often muck stalls and do laundry as a way to get my mind quiet, then come back to the desk. Today, it worked well - a little stuck place came unstuck in the writing, and then, as often happens when I let things flow instead of forcing them, I realized the way the story turned matched up perfectly with what comes next, in a way I hadn't even thought of when I was writing it.
I rewarded myself for that by going out to the barn to ride, a bit nervously b/c my horse had a mild injury last week and has been on rest. I was worried something might be off today. But coming off the good writing session, I let go of the worry and we warmed up, he was fine, and we went on to do a training level dressage test sequence the best we've ever done it together.
So, now I'm back up here, hoping to build on that in the writing.
Other things: I listen to music. Each book I've written has its own "CD" of songs - some are songs that mean something to the characters, some songs I find make me think of the book, etc. Sort of my own personal soundtrack to the novel I'm working on.
I play, in the sandtrays in my office, read poetry that inspires me, make collages, set up little mini-shrines with candles, etc.
If in doubt, take a long bath! I turn on all the jets and just lose myself in the sound of water.
Go for a long solitary walk out in nature.
hey there me again....yes, Celeste is my 12 y/o daughter, she lives near Wilkesboro with her mother and stepdad. We spend as much time as we can together, taking advantage of long weekends and school breaks to hang out, either here at the farm or at our property near Boone that I aquired last fall.
Your friend Billie reminded me of a saying I used to use a long time ago that went..."if horses were wishes we'd all be carrying shovels"... don't know why that came to mind, but for about 16-17 years I spent two times a day mucking my horse stalls and using it as a time to think, a time to dream I guess. Then the day came when I decided to open the stall doors and let those darn horses come and go as they wished and stopped spending so much time with a shovel in my hands. Many months passed and just for kicks one day I went out to the barn and picked up the shovel to clean up a little. It was storming out and lightning hit nearby, went under the ground and came out underneath me, into my shovel and knocked me across the stall. !!Clearly, I was not to be doing that anymore!!
I sometimes wish I still mucked stalls, well not really, but I miss all that seroius thinking I use to do...! It's not the same just walking in the woods, just thinking. No shit to deal with anymore, I guess that was what it was all about.
Well, we've talked a lot about "literary lightning" on this blog, but you're the first, David, who has reported being struck by the electric kind. Glad you survived to keep shooting pictures.
Congratulations on Celeste. A lot has happened since we last spoke.
Even with an open stall door policy, my guys still use the stalls during the day/night for hanging out... and so the mucking still has to get done...!
Three words re: lightning and mucking: plastic-forked muckrakes! We have a bright purple one, a turquoise one, and they also come in a beautiful COBALT BLUE, Peggy. :)
David, glad you made it through the lightning hit. It sounds like you are still enjoying your horses, and that's the important thing.
Lightning and mucking do sound like the writing process. I alternate periods of what I've thought of as wading through waist-deep water, with periods of speed and ease.
Is their a photographer or painter equivalent to that process?
Thanks for a painter's point of view, Patricia. Music works for me too, though not every writer likes to have music going. A tape that was a mixture of African and gospel music helped me a lot when I was writing Sister India. I probably played it 500 times.
"Access to creativity" has always interested me because when I was an Artspace artist, I'd get the question constantly: what inspires you--how are you inspired. There's such a Hollywood image out there of the great thunderbolt coming from the Divine and touching the frizzled ends of the poor disturbed artist's brain. Frankenstein's monsters, we are.
Sorry. Got sidetracked. What I meant to add here is that I addressed what it is like to discover that accessibility is a bit of problem on a blog I penned at andreagomez.wordpress.com. Just thought I'd throw that in for whatever it may be worth. It's a frustration that artists might have some interest in.
Post a Comment