What is your Creativity Myth?

All creative people use their imaginations to develop their work. But we can also use imagination in how we approach the creative process and in our relationship with our work.

Here’s an example.

A common approach is to think of “conquering” your novel, or poem, or art. As though the work is something to be dominated. This more traditionally “masculine” approach tends to create a sense of urgency, worry, and even manipulation, which can undermine the creative process. Instead, I encourage the writers I mentor to think of themselves as explorers instead of conquerors. Explore the problem before you, the letting, character, plot, image, etc. This immediately allows your to relax, to take a gentler, more inquisitive approach to writing.

This week I read an interview with Evelyn Fox Keller, who wrote the biography of geneticist Barbara McClintock, winner of a Nobel Prize. The title, chosen by McClintock, is A Feeling for the Organism. “It’s her (McClintock’s) deepest belief that you cannot do good research without a feeling for the organism.”* That resonated with my own idea of being an explorer of your work. Think of your writing as an organism, as it’s own living self that you are discovering or coaxing into existence.

I invite you to use your own imagination to work with metaphors in your approach to creative work. What underlying metaphors do you use that you may not even be aware of? What is your creative “myth?” I like Sam Keen’s definition of myth. A myth is simply the “unconscious systematic way in which your experience is formed.” Once you're aware of your creativity myth, use your imagination to shape it.

*The interview with Evelyn Fox Keller is on p 77 of Bill Moyers A World of Ideas

Kiss Your Inspiration Goodbye

Inspiration is an important, but ultimately small part of writing a novel. Story blossoms are everywhere—in the lines of a book I’ve read, the shape of a tree I’ve seen, the experiences I’ve had, and the lifelong sojourning of my imagination. Inspiration is the wind that comes and sprinkles pollen onto one particular blossom. Then the capricious wind flits away, leaving me with the job of growing that blossom into a lush piece of fruit. I have to water the tree. Protect the blossom from frost. Keep the insects away. I have to stop the birds from pecking the fruit. Pray that the hail will not come, and that the well will not run dry. This has little to do with inspiration and everything to do with steadfast work.

What keeps me writing after the initial inspiration is the great glory of revelation— those flashes of insight where I suddenly see what the story is really about, suddenly see who the character really is, suddenly see what that character should really be doing. Such revelations mean that my story has come alive and is now running on ahead of me. If I’m lucky, if the work is a true one, the revelations come again and again as I chase after the true story.

Often this coming alive of the story means I have to abandon my initial inspiration. Perhaps I thought the blossom would become an apple, only to find it is really a peach. It can be gut-wrenching to abandon my inspiration. But I must, in order to see what is actually in front of me now, to see what the story has become and wants to become, rather than what I thought it was going to be. As a result of my own work and care, the story declares its independence. Like any parent, I must help it become what it was born to be, and must fight my reluctance to let it go,

If a writer honors the wonder and glory and kicking life of what she has miraculously created, then, with a kiss of blessing and thanks, she can let the capricious wind of inspiration blow away over another hill, and get on with the work at hand.

730 BELLS: Embracing the Rogues in Our Lives

On my last morning in the house I’d lived in for twenty-three years, I opened my eyes to the rogue cherry tree fat with blossoms outside my bedroom window. That tree grows in the neighbor’s yard. I resented it when it first popped up, in spite of a paucity of trees in our urban neighborhood, because it blocked the wee bit of sun in our light-starved yard.

Over the years, the tree grew to the second story, where it hid the ugly power lines outside my bedroom window. The Rogue Cherry became a friend I celebrated from blossom to leaf-fall to tree-bone time. Some of my best creative ideas came from the day dream consciousness induced by its swaying. Who would have guessed?

How I will miss seeing that tree every morning. It was a bell in my life. Transitions, even good ones, are hard.

But here on my first morning writing at my new house on three acres in the Nisqually Valley, I sit outside under another cherry tree fat with blossoms. My world is now filled with trees—Douglas Firs, maples, cottonwoods, magnolias, and more. Filled with birds. Filled with the roar of the Nisqually River in my backyard. All of them are bells for a light-starved heart. 

Making friends with a place requires time and attention, as it does with a person. But this cherry tree I already love, for it will forever remind me of the Rogue Cherry that once comforted a heart aching for the light and the green. 

If there are rogues in your life, maybe it’s time to embrace them.

LORE OF THE BELL

If there are rogues in your life,

embrace them, and see what happens.

7:30 BELLS Posts run every Tuesday.

7:30 BELLS Guest Posts run on the second Tuesdays of every month. Join me on May 12 for a guest post with children's author and legendary children's book editor Margery Cuyler.

7:30 BELLS: Behold and Bring Forth. Then Let Go.

Do you see the flying stone figure grappling forward from rock and root? Do you see the chisled face reaching toward the waterfall, the wing bursting out behind the ivy?

I did. 

Here, I thought, is a poem. Here is the root of all poems, stories, art—of anything trying to emerge into this world.

The only attention the stone figure needs to emerge is mine. Mine to behold it. Mine to encourage and coax it out into the world. Wherever it flies then, whatever become of it in the world, is its own adventure. Let it go.

More and more, art is like that to me. All that matters is the creation, because that's where the life and ringing happens. Every artist struggles to learn this. (Great athletes do, too, in a different way.) Bring forth your best. Learn to let go of what you've made and your expectations for it.  In this season of the Olympics, literary awards, Superbowls, remember: No gold medal, no award, no review, no trophy matters. They may be sweet icing, but they have nothing to do with the essential. Only the joyously skated program is essential. Only winged bursting forth. 

So behold and bring forth. Then let it fly. Turn your best attention toward beholding the next winged figure, wherever it awaits, whether in stone, paint, word, cloud . . . .

LORE OF THE BELL

Behold, Bring Forth, Let Fly!

7:30 BELLS is posted every Tuesday. 

Join me on February 11 for a 7:30 BELLS Guest Post by Newbery Honor author Margarita Engle.

Creative Drift Raises Continents

Raised in the high discipline world of ballet, I grew up believing that results were achieved by hard, grinding, relentless work. Work at the barre, work at center floor--always driving, pushing, straining. Some of this was useful training for a writer, or for anyone who must work daily to accomplish a goal (writing a novel) that may take years.

Some of it was not.

It took me years to understand that such an attitude toward work, beneficial as it may be for muscle training, can be counter-productive to an art form that demands a high level of creativity—such as fiction writing. Gradually, I’ve redefined my definition of hard work. Here is what I’ve learned.

Swinging in a hammock under a maple tree while turning over some story problem in my mind is far more likely to result in a creative solution than beating my head against the computer. So is taking a walk or gardening, or any other activity where I consciously allow my mind to drift and hover over my story.

Consciously is the critical word here. I’m not talking about the popular notion of “refilling your well” though that’s important, too. I mean holding an idea about plot or character or concept loosely in my mind and playing with it in order to generate new ideas. This is like a child holding a marble in her hand and turning it randomly to see the different ways the light catches the colored depths. Sometimes my thoughts do stray from the story, and that’s fine--drifting is part of the process. As soon as I realize I’ve strayed too far, I gently bring my thoughts back to the story problem.

Because this process is conscious, because it produces results, such time certainly counts as work. It COUNTS. Almost always, after fifteen minutes in the hammock, I find a new solution. My BEST work is now done in this manner.

Our culture has conditioned us to believe in the “ballet” method of working because it can easily be seen and monitored by others. A person in a job at a company typing away at a screen “appears” to be working. Put her in a hammock under a tree—there you can’t measure or monitor her the activity of her  mind and subconscious. People watching believe she is just being lazy. But I believe new continents rise from such creative drift.

Imagine a company where people do creative work. Imagine that each employee has not only a desk but a hammock. And each person has been taught to consciously drift to solve problems and generate new ideas. Now stretch your imagination to the limit and imagine the company actually valuing this method of working. How dazzling forward the world would leap.