How does one sustain creative work? I’ve hit that point in the development of this blog (and I knew I would hit it because I do in every project I’ve ever undertaken) where the shine has worn a bit and I’ve begun to stutter and then to stop creating. This week was filled with failures. I failed to keep up with my daily sketching. I failed to do any watercolor exercises. I failed to plan ahead on what I wanted to blog about this week. And it wasn’t due to being too busy or any good excuse, I just didn’t feel inspired. Hello, sloth, my old friend…
I’m not sure if everyone struggles with sustaining effort to the same degree that I do, but I know it’s been the bane of many an artist. The main piece of advice seems to be DO ART ANYWAYS NO MATTER WHAT. For a bit more elaborate and bizarre advice I turned to a chapter in the fantastic book A Natural History of the Senses, in which author Diane Ackerman describes different tricks and rituals that many writers and artists have enacted to try to keep the fire alive:
“Katherine Mansfield once said that it took ‘terrific hard gardening’ to produce inspiration… Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s writing… The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word… Amy Lowell, like George Sand, enjoyed smoking cigars while writing… Both Dr. Samuel Johnson and the poet W.H. Auden drank colossal amounts of tea—Johnson was reported to have frequently drunk twenty-four cups in one sitting… Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin, and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote in the nude… The Romantics, of course, were fond of opium… The list of writers triggered to inspirational highs by alcohol would occupy a small, damp book. T.S. Eliot’s tonic was viral—he preferred writing when he had a head cold… Many writers I know become fixated on a single piece of music when they are writing a book, and play the same piece of music perhaps a thousand times in the course of a year… The poets May Swenson and Howard Nemerov both told me that they like to sit for a short spell each day and copy down whatever pours through their heads from ‘the Great Dictator,’ as Nemerov labels it, then plow through to see what gems may lie hidden in the rock.”
While I won’t be going out to buy my very own coffin, I love the variety of ways people have found to cultivate their creative endeavors. I used to think that one day I’d “find” my true passion and then I’d doggedly follow that unending desire with the ease of an addict. But I’ve begun to believe that such thinking was all wrong, and that passion for me is about cultivation and will require real effort and intention, not just the ease of “this is all I want to do for always.”
Now I just need to discover my own rituals, structures, and idiosyncrasies that will allow the chaos of creativity to become a sustaining force in my daily life, not just a new shiny toy that quickly dulls. The one productive creative endeavor I did complete this week was to set up a new notebook dedicated to this project and any inspirations, thoughts, questions that may arise. I’ve also discovered that my daily sketchings are best when done right in the morning with my coffee lest I forget to draw the rest of the day. Not as exciting as huffing rotten apples or drinking dangerous amounts of tea, but a gal’s got to start courting creativity somewhere.
BONUS for reading this far: next week, I’m going to share with you something amazing about… MOSQUITOES!!!
Compulsive Creation 