I held my desire to write like a jagged piece of volcanic rock inside my chest. I held it so close that I didn’t actually write — or when I did, I dismissed what appeared on the page because it was never as good as what lived in my head.
I think we all have our little stone we clutch tightly. Yours might manifest differently — you want to sing, or paint, or design homes. Some of us are lucky or unlucky enough to use this desire in our work. I say unlucky because sometimes it becomes a perversion of your true creative nature: you pour all your love into something for money that doesn’t soothe the true desire to usher something new into the world.
Let me give you some background. I dreamt of writing since I was young. I had a hard time learning to read because of dyslexia, but once I could read it became a passion, and along with that passion came a desire to write myself — to participate in this incredible, time-spanning, globe-spanning activity. I scribbled in notebooks, my terrible printing making me despair that nothing I did was right. But some great energy kept telling me I had to write.
I would take my dogs for walks in the wide field behind our house, bending through barbed wire to the wide-open prairie, finding a spot to lay flat and let words come through my mind. Words, words, words. Sometimes I would speak them aloud if I discovered a particular progression I liked, my mouth moving and each word almost having a taste.
Sadly, I don’t have those first attempts. I would purge my messy notebooks hoping the next one would be prettier, less of a mess.
So here’s the first thing I’ve learned about creativity: it comes from something outside of you and guides you toward what you need, what you will circle back to again and again. If you’re able, keep your work somewhere. Have a library of yourself and your attempts — no matter how messy, no matter how pathetic — because you will start to see what it is that you circle. You’ll see your progression, but more importantly, your obsessions.
I am obsessed with sex, drugs, painful relationships, trauma and their relationship to the deep ecstatic parts of ourselves. The way these complex and dark-light activities reveal us more deeply while also taking us away from ourselves. This obsession has been with me since I was that young girl in the field, stringing together words about my father’s demons, my mother’s tears. It’s been with me since I was a troubled and impulsive teen, scribbling raw poetry about my first sexual encounter.
I wish I’d kept those original messy notebooks so I could compare them to what I write now, so I could see what stayed the same and what I’ve refined in the circling back. Because that circling back — I believe — is where we find our voice. Where the part of us that is unique in this body, at this time, from this family gets to work itself out on the page. And when you find it, it feels like home.
I love when I recognize an author’s voice without knowing who they are. Rumi and Toni Morrison. Alice Munro and Florence and the Machine. These powerful creators who have found their voice, their passions, their obsessions — what they circle back to again and again, each time with more purpose and clarity, or with a new perspective.
But here’s the contradictory thing about the thing we’re passionate about enough to circle endlessly back to: it feels so important that it can be paralyzing. Why do I groan and moan about writing every day when it feels like this difficult and trying thing I have to get over? Why, of all the habits I try to cultivate, is it always the one that feels so heavy?
Of course. It’s because I care so much. The stakes seem so high.
Do high stakes kill creativity? Certainly, a lot of people I read on creativity seem to say so — but just as many say the opposite, that you need high stakes, that you have to push on those things that feel so important you want to abandon them. I do not want my writing to sit in obscurity, a meager five minutes of generative writing that I never return to, never develop. And yet without those starting five minutes a day, I will forever be caught in that dreamy phase where I’ve written the most incredible book in my head but don’t have a single word on the page.
So the next bit of advice I would have given myself: begin again.
Because after those fitful teenage forays into writing, I stopped. I spent most of my twenties desperately wanting to write creatively. I talked about it with friends, ran words over in my head, wrote sometimes a few sentences that seemed absolutely abysmal, beat myself up that I wasn’t good enough, and then focused my attention on school — which had all the channels and guardrails in place to ensure I did the work, even as my small and infinitely powerful perfectionist raged that nothing was good enough.
The reality is that you can build a million castles in your head, but they mean nothing. They disappear like the clouds that they are. Or rather, they can only mean something if you get them down on paper, record them somehow. They are remnants of life that worm their way into your heart and ask to be represented, ask to be shared.
And who are you in this process of creation? You are the director of the creativity, of the flow, of the energy and thoughts that come unbidden. You are the one who writes them down. You are the one who works them into being.
And it is work. Writing, creativity, doing. Hard work that challenges. When I was in my twenties and thirties dreaming of writing but hardly doing it, I never really thought of the time and energy it needed. I dreamed it was a thing that grew up and carried me away because I sensed it was this force outside of me, and so I trusted it would take the lead and pull me into something wonderful, manifest all those thoughts in my head into reality.
But she will not walk with you unless you are already walking. Her voice will not join you, give you breath, until you have squeaked out over and over your own awkward, flawed song. And then, after much of your own pathetic music, you will hear it — that clear and shallow spark from everything, guided into your art, turning your attempts to brilliant light.
She demands work. Work that feels slow and grindy, work you return to day after day even as it looms as worthless, unworthy, cringy. She demands that you go back and keep putting down word after word, and it’s up to her whimsical and wise design when she will join you and you will sit back and read what you wrote and think: That. That is good.
My experience with creativity is unique to me, as yours is to you. And yet I wanted guidance. I wanted to hear that other people feel this soul stretching, these many moments of uncertainty. My three small contributions — to begin, to circle, and to persevere — perhaps will make you think of some of the things you’ve learned about creativity, will remind you to return again to the things that draw you so deep into life that you have that brief and momentary thrill of knowing, at least in this moment, what you came to this earth to do.
Because creativity is a matter of life or death. Tyranny or freedom. The right and the wrong way to exist.