creativity

It's nice to think about the hows and the whys, and maybe that will get me there someday. Not fast enough. What do I do now to start writing again? Aside from exercising my word brain here.

There's a book I have been dipping into occasionally, and probably not as much as I should: The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp. Among her many recommendations: habit; collect.

Habit is almost everything, fuck. Why I'm in this position at all. Lots of things aren't that hard to do once you're doing them, but the starting feels as if it might kill you.

I'm a person who goes in cycles: I run for 2 years, then stop. I knit for 5 years, then stop. I lift weights for 18 months, then stop. I write for a decade, then dry up. Sometimes I start these things again (knitting), sometimes I don't (lifting weights), sometimes I really want to, but can't seem to make myself (writing).

Tharp suggests not thinking but doing. Your alarm goes off and you put your feet on the floor. You are already wet in the shower before your mind registers the indignity of being awake before 6 am. You sit and the keyboard and press your fingers fast before you realize you're scared of sounding like an ass, worse yet, a bad writer.

Frankly, that habit's not enough. Not for me. I got tired of re-hashing my daily life in blog. No real reason why, though I could come up with a half-dozen half-truths, I suppose, if I were pressed. I want something that is not my daily life to sink my teeth deep into. I want a project to plan and to push around, to push out when it's ready. I have some vague ideas, blurry outlines, but nothing that's coalescing.

What I will do until then is collect what my eye catches. Maybe all the bits will be too different to bring together, maybe they'll form too neat a pattern. Maybe I'll bring all my bits together and they'll make a pattern that no one else could have seen, but that rings true for people just the same.

There was a conversation I had with a roommate, oh so many homes ago, about creativity, innate talent, and hard work. It was a debate we had several times, and neither of us was ever able to bring the other onside.

He was a multi-talented kind of guy – great musician, good songwriter, fantastic artist. Walking by his room one day, I stopped to admire a portrait he was working on.

“Enh,” he said. “Anyone could do that. It’s all practice.”

I said, simply, “No.”

Not that he didn’t have a point – I could always see where he was coming from, and I also partially agree. When you see someone who’s really good at something, it’s highly unlikely that they just came like that. People who are really good at something have generally put a lot of effort into being that way. My roomie had gone to art school and had spent a lot of hours at the easel on his own because he loved it.

Next I asked him, “Why did you start?”

And he started, like most of us who get pretty good at something, because he enjoyed it, and because when he was finished doing what enjoyed, people saw something good in it and praised him. Which felt good, which made him want to do more, and so on. He had natural talent, and the relationship between that nascent talent, the innate joy of being creative and the societal reinforcement all lead him to put hours and hours of practice into becoming really really good.

Me, I couldn’t be an artist. Well, fine, maybe if I had three lifetimes of nothing else to do, sure, I could put in enough hours to train my eye to talk to my brain to talk to my hands a bit better. In this lifetime? Even if I had nothing else to do, artist is a long shot.

I could maybe have been a musician – I have some natural talent, and received a fair amount of praise when I was a kid. But the feeling I got when I played music was more often frustrated than satisfied.

But writing?

I have always loved words, as long as I can remember. The sounds of them separately and apart, the feeling they gave me of being somewhere else, even when I was tucked away in a corner at home or school. The prickle of them under my skin when they were particularly right.

It seemed, too, that I had a natural ear for the written word, if that makes sense. The words I put on the page sometimes sounded like they were supposed to when I thought them in my head. I was a good mimic – still am – and could make a fair facsimile of writing I liked, which garnered me praise from my peers and grown-ups alike.

And those things together, made me work hard. I played music when my mom made me. I wrote whenever I could, because I knew I could do it the best of all the things I could do, and there is pleasure in doing the thing you do best.