I thought my urge to set aside creative time was completely related to the lack of writing I have produced over the last few years. Yet the more I try to commit to my plan for creativity in 2009, the more I struggle to make it work just the way I wanted and produce the writing I expected. My attempts to write fiction and poetry have been poor, and not just because I’m still working on a creative routine. It feels as though creative writing is actually boring me a little.
I know that I’m making excuses to some extent. Saying something is boring is a convenient way to practice avoidance… I know that if I churned out more crappy poetry, I would (or I trust I would?) eventually start digging up meaningful words again. I have yet to “walk off” the creative stinger I’ve been hit with over the past three or four years.
But coupled with these natural pains of starting again is an urge I did not expect at the beginning of this process. A lot of my creative energy seems to be bubbling up around potential business ideas. I spend more time thinking about business ideas than I do writing, and I find that thinking more interesting than I do the creative writing. I’ve also been taking on additional freelance work, pulling back to only a couple days a week working at the family business.
I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to be more intentional about this, create a business plan, and form a company. In addition to freelance consulting, I’d like to dabble in developing some of the web and knowledge sharing ideas I’ve had. It’s been established that an economy like this is good for entrepreneurial risk-taking… although I don’t view these potential directions as risks. I view them as natural extensions of opportunities I already have, a way to capitalize on relationships and strengths I’m already developing. If anything, I wonder what would happen if I didn’t get serious and formalize my work as a business now. Would I miss opportunities? Would I lose the chance to leverage connections or knowledge that could help me be more successful?
These are broad hypothetical questions, but I find myself asking them a lot. I’ve asked them ever since I was 14. I feel so fortunate to have had early, ample exposure to entrepreneurs. These included my dad, who started his business when I was 14. Since that time, I’ve watched him grow it carefully to the humble, strong company it is now. In some ways, the company was wildly ahead of its time. In other ways, we are a few years too late on some innovations, like our emerging green product line. My dad started using green cleaners for pest management in a local school district in the 1990s. Instead of innovating a company and a product line at that time (he had three little kids and was obviously more risk averse), he shared the idea with others. Now it feels like we are playing a bit of catch-up in that regard.
Given these experiences, and knowing that I am already semi-invested in a consulting career, I feel a strong pull to let myself dive in more intentionally. And that can be creative in its own right, I think. Maybe it’s actually the best way for me to express and merge my creative and analytical sides? I’m just not completely sure what it looks like yet. I’ve been browsing a lot of websites, comparing my skills to those of other communications consultants, thinking about a target audience of potential clients (presumably non-profits, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions), and drafting summaries of my strengths and capabilities.
I’d be interested to hear from others who have gone through a similar process, or those who care to speculate on what they might do in the same situation! If you are a full-time business owner now and were once a casual freelancer, how did you make that leap? What were the indicators that told you it was time to get more serious?
I believe in soul mates the way Anne of Green Gables swoons over “kindred spirits”. There are some people you meet who seem to be singing to you when the rest of the room is humming in a mess of sporadic conversations.
Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I volunteer, blog, or otherwise engage in community is because I’m a lush for these kinds of connections. Above the din of the work itself, I’ve discovered a few relationships that leave me truly energized, rile my curiosity, and make me believe I’m just one part of a bigger thing, trying to reconnect myself to the whole through other people.
There are primary soul mates, like my husband Carl, who knows me more holistically than anyone ever will. And then there are secondary or supporting soul mates, with whom I connect individually in a particular area of my life, and as a whole, I would say we’re universally connected by a shared understanding of or appreciation for how the world works.
This notion of soul mates always seems to grow in importance to me as I focus on creativity. I think this is partially because I need human connection to tackle creativity. I’ve learned that I can’t do it alone. When I create in isolation, I start to replace my creative outlets with more practical ones. Before I even realize I’ve made this decision (because it’s not a decision – it just happens), my creative side is quiet again.
I guess I’m learning that relationships are an important part of my creative process. Tania, one of my closest friends from college, is teaching me this. I e-mail her one afternoon wondering what’s wrong with me, and she replies telling me exactly what it is. She lives on the other side of the state, and she’s given up on calling me because I hate the telephone and never call anyone back. Yet a couple times a week, through Twitter or our blogs or e-mail, we have these moments where I feel like we must still brush our teeth together in the community bathroom on the third floor of Phillips Hall.
I didn’t know it when we sat next to each other through Diane Wakoski’s grueling critiques of our poetry, but Tania is one of my creative soul mates.
I’m positive you can’t “find” soul mates. You can only put yourself in situations where you are accessible to these connections. This is why soul mates are not the same thing as community, and vice versa. There are many online communities where the whole point is to connect with others who have a shared concern or passion. But connection is not the only variable in being creative, supportive soul mates.
Similarly, inspiration is not the only variable. Inspiration comes from your muse, if you believe in that sort of thing. I believe real people can be muses too – there was a woman in one of my poetry classes in college who had a beautiful name, who read with the most humble, plant-me-in-the-ground-and-I’d-grow-sunflowers voice, whose life experience seemed so big and wise for her being so young. But we rarely talked. She was not a creative soul mate, although I found her incredibly inspiring.
A creative soul mate is a hybrid of these qualities, but with a level of intuition added to the mix. You connect, you inspire each other, but soul mates have an innate ability to anticipate one another. This is what makes the relationship impossible to predict or plan. It is your intuition about what the other person believes, and your sense that it aligns with your own beliefs, that makes you sigh “oh, we’re kindred spirits” like Anne of Green Gables.
Now that I’ve noodled through this and started to take inventory of the other kinds of soul mates in my life, my inevitable next question is: what can I do with them? Maybe they are not a relationship to be managed – maybe I shouldn’t levy that kind of expectation, just like I can’t “find” a soul mate. But I do wonder what the potential creative results are if I am more intentional about building relationships with the creative soul mates I do have?
I am struggling with my resolutions. Part of me feels the slow beginnings of a good routine, but part of me chides, “You have next to nothing show for almost a month of trying to be more creative. You suck, and I knew you would suck.” (Oh, the wisdom of self-fulfilling prophecies.)
I have written. I’m about half-way to my target of 10,000 words for the month, and if this exercise in creativity is anything like college, I’ll probably always be writing at least 5,000 words the night before the new month. I make deadlines just so I can enjoy the thrill of pushing myself up against them.
But I can’t help but feel like I should have built in some training wheels for these resolutions. And because it’s too late to change the rules, I have to seek other supports. This weekend I resorted to watching Little Women, which is the quintessential Emily cry for help when I want to write but am too scared, distracted, or defeated to start.
Little Women came out when I was starting to realize that writing, an activity I loved, could actually be an identity. Watching it again this weekend, I realized Little Women fed all the emerging parts of my identity when I first saw it… beyond the craft of writing, it appealed to my curiosity about humanity and equality, my sense of family, and my pursuit of meaning in such a big world. (Little Women came out in 1994. I was a very serious 10 year old.)
Knowing more of who I am now, and knowing why writing still matters to me, I was struck by a thread of the story my inexperienced 10-year-old self didn’t totally appreciate. Early on, Jo claims the most important part of writing is writing what you don’t know.
Admittedly, in my urge to latch on to any kind of direction right now with my writing, I thought, “Aha! I will write something I know nothing about. It would be easy to write 10,000 words every month if I did that.”
I forgot a major part of the story is Jo discovering that her own story, of her sisters and her life, is the most powerful thing she brings to her writing. After all, the movie culminates with her writing Little Women and getting it published. Yeah, duh. This quickly put my epiphany about writing what I don’t know back in perspective.
So now I’ve been thinking about what it is I do know. I get myself tangled up in the expectation that my writing must dutifully package and present some kind of nugget. I too often end up writing as a service to progress. When I think about writing what I know, I’m actually asking, What do I have that I can package? As if I am a grocery store, and if I just wheeled a cart around, I could fill it with the contents of my mind and apply them with the kind of rigor that produces a polished three-course meal.
Yet writing is not so precise an exercise, at least not for me. Writing what you know shouldn’t equate to identifying and exploiting life experience. In all likelihood, part of my fear of getting started is actually the messiness. I’m looking at a pile of experiences and questions – good and bad – and wondering how the hell I’m going to transform it into something I can stomach.
So I decided I am going to worry a little less about writing what I know and what I can package. Instead, I want to write to understand, rather than writing to be understood.
I think this is why Jo March’s/Louisa May Alcott’s experiences became so powerful. It was not simply that she had lived them, but she had reached a point in her life where she needed to understand them. She could lend herself to them more as a student and less as a curator of them.
This thinking has led me to three conclusions:
- I should put aside the draft of the children’s story I was working on – it’s a convenient way for me to hide from the things I still need to understand, and the experiences I need to be writing.
- I need to recommit myself to writing poetry, because that is the one kind of writing that has always helped me tap into my experiences.
- I need to get over the fact that one of my college professors essentially told me I’m the world’s worst essayist and just start writing some personal essays… I never exactly thought she was God’s gift to writing anyway, so it’s silly to let her hold me back.
I have little idea where I’m going to start, but I think this is still helpful process?
