Creativity

An invitation to start

The following is part of a 12 part series based on the book 12 Tiny Things: Simple Ways to Live a More Intentional Life. We’re focusing on the 12 themes outlined in the book: Space, Work, Spirituality, Food, Style, Home, Sensuality, Nature, Creativity, Communication, Learning, and Community. Each offering includes a new reflection or early draft or deleted scene from the book along with a worksheet and/or an audio component to help you delve more fully into the theme in your own life.

What follows is partially excerpted from 12 Tiny Things and has been added to and modified to align with the present:

I walk down to the home office as the sun comes up, open the french doors, and switch on the lamp that sits atop the writing desk.  If it’s a warm day, I open the sliding door on the opposite wall to let in the breeze. After lighting a candle and stepping onto a well-worn yoga mat, I breathe deeply, reach my arms up to the ceiling, and move through a series of sun salutations.  Half an hour goes by as I flow through the postures that feel like a second skin. Tipping my head forward, chin and clasped-hands to chest, I set an intention for the day and extinguish the candle.  After rolling up the yoga mat, I settle into my desk chair, lay out a well-thumbed journal, line up some colored pencils. I pause for a moment to reflect on what’s happening in my immediate space and then turn to what I’d written/sketched in the journal a few days before. I pull up a word document and start typing. Inspirational items surround me – the most recent copy of Orion magazine, a photograph of a favorite alpine lake in Colorado, a rock I picked up in Malta, the book Spiritual Ecology, my pile of Writing the Wild goodies, and a stack of old issues of The Sun (for those times when I need to be a little more raw and edgy).  An hour later, I go upstairs to fetch a cup of coffee and a scone and enjoy them for a while as I do some light reading. Then head back down to continue working. Maybe I gaze out the window at the forest beyond from time to time. I take lunch midday, go out for an hour’s hike in the woods and resume writing until the school bus drops my daughter off at 3pm. We catch up on our day’s happenings and perhaps go out to engage in something in the community, like visiting a neighbor or a local cafe; or I tend the garden or do some shopping at a farmer’s market.  After that it’s time to prepare a nice dinner, enjoy it with my family, and depending on the season, spend the evening hours reading by the wood stove or out on the deck listening to the frogs sing their lullabies.  Everyone in my household, of course, is perfectly content and non-argumentative about all of this.

What I just described is what I tell myself my creative process, my writing experience, would be in my version of a perfect world.

Alas, those perfect writing days rarely happen. (Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a day go exactly as described above…)  For one, until earlier this year, I have always had a full time job.¹ Unless I find some buried treasure in the backyard or Taylor Swift discovers my books and starts telling people she likes them, I will need to get another one before too long. Two, I am the parent of a tween daughter.  Three, I have an old house, several acres of land with a lot of trees that like to drop their branches and/or topple in such a way that they need to be dealt with, and a huge vegetable garden. All of these things need more attention than I think they should.  So most of my writing has happened, and continues to happen, in the margins. 

Most of my first book was written in between appointments at my then full time day job – I’d hang up the phone, frantically type out some incoherent sentences, dial the phone for the next appointment, hang up 20 minutes later, re-work the sentences, and so on.  Somehow an entire book emerged from this pattern, along with a few longer writing sessions in the evenings when sleeping might have been a better choice. (Though I also had a baby during this period of time, so sleep wasn’t always easy to come by anyway..)

My second book [along with most of the other things I’ve produced since it came out in 2017, though I have had periods of dedicated writing time now and then over the years] was also written in little bits of down time at work –at that same phone job and then at the more digital focused job that came after– over the course of about seven years. Chapters came into being while the baby napped, after summer jogs around the lake when showering off the sweat would have been the more logical choice, as I mulled over a coaching response to a program participant that sparked a new thought about my writing, or as the onions left to languish in the saute pan started to burn. It emerged because I wove writing into the fabric of my days, whatever they looked like, even if they included no slow mornings of yoga or candles or well-thumbed journals whatsoever.  I told the truth as I saw it, even when I did it what felt like stolen moments.²

As Anne Lamott writes,

Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. [...] Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.³

So many days, weeks, months (even years..) in the life of a writer are frustrating: Waiting for ideas, for prose-worthy experiences, for the patience to stay still enough to notice the poetry in the mundane. Finding the drive to keep working on something that feels like it will always be a first draft. Waiting for responses to submissions, sometimes not knowing if they were even received. Waiting for reviews, for approval, for someone to say, “hey, I like this.”  Wondering if anyone benefits from anything I put energy into during the day.  Waiting for acknowledgement that what I’m doing is good, is ok, is important enough to be doing.  Using my words to encourage people to not let the actions of others dictate their happiness while I let other people’s actions, or lack thereof, dictate my happiness.   Holding on tight to things that want to stay slippery. Putting my contentment under condition.

“Things will be better once I hear either way from the editor.”  (or …about the job application status) 

‘Things will be better if I can just be more consistent with my running/yoga/green smoothies.” (I really hate green smoothies..do not recommend. But, some folks like them, and they do have a lot of good nutrients.) 

“Things will be better when I know what’s going on with or after that event later in the fall.” (There’s ALWAYS going to be another event going on at some later date, even if it’s not directly tied to writing.) 

“Things will be better when I think of a really great title.” (I mean, even really great titles get changed by marketing sometimes.) 

“Things will be better when one more person lets me know that they appreciate my efforts.” (Reminder to self–people so, so often just don’t tell you they appreciate things, even if they really, truly do.)

“Things will be better when [book] gets one more positive text review on Amazon. (Do I want you to buy your books on Amazon? No. Alas, the more reviews there are on there, the more the mighty algorithm shows it to people.)⁴ 

“Things will be better when I can really know that my efforts matter.” (They do. Full stop.)

“Things will be better when I have more time to write.” (Be a gardener of time.) 

It can feel desperate.  

I got back into creative writing almost twenty years ago⁵ when my sister-in-law invited the idea of starting a blog. So I started a blog and just kept returning to it month after month when I felt like I had something to say. Usually after writing something I’d think, “Well, that’s it. I will never again think of anything else to write.” Fast forward to the present, and I sometimes still think that, plenty of blog posts, articles, and nine books later.  Twenty years ago I remember thinking, “I wonder if anyone will ever even read this.” Fast forward to the present…. and I sometimes still think that, plenty of blog posts, social media activity, newsletters, reviews, book speaking engagements, bookstore events later.⁶

I’ve always been the quiet one. I used to fight it with my whole being and wish for nothing else than to be the one who always knew what to say and could say it without hesitation.  I don’t fall into that old pattern much anymore, the one of wanting to be what I’m not, and I’m thankful for that.  Somehow along the way writing evolved into an avenue for putting my perspective out there and making sure I do have a voice. It’s been my way of being seen and heard, and it’s been a way to try to make sense of what’s going on in life. It’s been like joining a conversation that I never knew how to join before I figured out how to speak without using my vocal chords. 

These days I do better at life as a verbal person – the day job I held for years, after all, required having conversations with up to 20 different people per day. And I’ve given too many book talks to groups of myriad sizes to try to tally them all up at this point. I’ve evolved, as people tend to do as they get older. Turns out you have to make yourself do things you don’t necessarily WANT to do on a fairly regular basis. Even still, my voice is still most effective when it’s in words on a page.

   We are a species that wants and needs to understand who we are. (-A. Lamott)

We so often tie our understanding of who we are to our perception of how others view us.  And when we do that, we give away the power to live rooted in our own truth. Creativity, and the process that brings it about, is telling the truth in a way that feels right, no matter what it looks like and even if it feels like it’s on stolen time.  Like Zadie Smith said, perhaps all we can do is, “tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it.”

For now, I continue writing in the little bits of space that I can grab when inspiration strikes;  the twenty minutes while my daughter is doing her math homework; the 30 minutes it takes the soup to simmer; the two hours between interviews; even the ten minutes it takes to jot down an idea I had on a quick jog around the lake before jumping in the shower. I just finished the final draft of my next poetry collection, and maybe one of these days I’ll have a perfect writing day like the one described earlier. But until then, I plan to continue letting giving voice to my truth – even when it feels like the last truth I’ll ever write down again – weave my days together.

What helps you weave your days together lately?

1. Turns out looking for a new full time job is also a full time job–though I did eek out a new poetry collection somehow amidst all the time spent on Indeed, LinkedIn, writing cover letters, and doing interview prep.

2. (....stolen from who…hmm. This could become a rabbit hole very quickly about corporate culture and the drive for productivity at any cost..)

3. Lamott, A. (1995). Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life (1st Anchor Books ed.). New York: Anchor Books.

4. If you've read Collisions of Earth and Sky and found it palatable, please leave a review on Amazon to counter the one star that somebody just left. (I know, I know…don’t read the reviews. But sometimes you just do.) The good news about this latest negative review, though, is that it ended explaining that the reader got more out of a visit to her rose garden than the book, so at the end of the day, it got them outside... so I count that as a win even they didn't like the way I wrote about doing so.

5. When I first wrote this essay, it was ten. This is why it’s a good idea to save old drafts of things–you might need them later for your substack newsletter when writing new things seems like too big a lift for the season of life you’re in

6. A version of this paragraph and the two after it shows up in Collisions of Earth and Sky…so if you’re reading and think, “I feel like I’ve read something like this before…”, you have.