Scattershot

Creative U-turns

Every artist—writer, painter, composer, singer, actor, whatever—encounters creative U-turns. Something doesn't go the way you expect, and you lose your way. You lose your courage.

    I've been thinking about courage and creativity a lot lately. Though writers have written about it for years (Rollo May's The Courage to Create, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, for example), I don't think most people realize the importance of courage in creativity. It is key.

    I know. I've encountered one of those creative U-turns recently and lost my courage. I look back at some of the crazy things I've done in the past, and I marvel that I ever had the guts to leap in and try what I had no reason to think I could do. I wrote plays. I wrote poems. I wrote music. I wrote books. I started a company. At some moment, for each effort, I somehow found a spark of courage and made a leap. I just did it.

    But for the last few months, I've allowed fear to extinguish my creative side. I encountered a U-turn and let it rule. Getting bronchitis and being sick for the last two and a half weeks made me take a look at a few things. I remembered that sickness, for me, is often a sign of something—exhaustion, depression, something wrong. It hit me that the something wrong right now is my fear of creating. I've been afraid of failure, of leaping and falling. I've been allowing fear to stop me from what I love doing most—creating.

    I decided that the only way to get my courage back is to leap again and remember that the process, the doing, is what I most love, regardless of the results. I have been needing at least one of what I think of as my "crazy projects." And as soon as I decided to find one, serendipity stepped in. Someone mentioned the same idea that had occurred to me recently, and we are pursuing it. We're brainstorming, playing, seeing what will develop.

    And in the instant, the very instant, that I decided I must ignore my fear and leap back into the creative process, I felt joyful again. I'm still coughing, but at least I'm smiling while I do it!

Messiness

One of my favorite quotes is, "I'd rather learn to play the piano than have a clean piano." My husband, I suspect, would rather have a clean piano. He is tidy. Very tidy. I veer more toward a bit messy.

     Okay, sometimes I veer toward very messy. If I'm creating something—a casserole, a song, a book, a costume, a brochure, a play, whatever—I make a mess. I'll have piles of paper or vegetables or sequins, stacks of notes, a tape recorder, music, glue, colored pens, recipe books, glitter, paint, etc. My brain works that way, grabbing loose ends of this and that, tying them together, physically or mentally. Being ordered and neat is alien to my process of creating.

     Because of this, I become rather frustrated with those who insist that students should outline before they create anything in writing. Intellectually, it seems like a good idea. But in reality, for me and probably for many students, it doesn't work.

     What does work is what a professor once told me was most valuable in the writing process—outlining after you write. Yes! That works perfectly for me. It helps me see that my work does have an appropriate organization or, if not, it helps me see how I can correct it.

     We're all different, though. My tidy husband is creative in a different way. Instead of songs or books or plays, he creates systems that make machines and robots and production lines work. And he does it neatly. For all I know, he even outlines first.

     Opposites do attract, after all. 

A test with an impact

When I was in ninth grade, Mrs. Hammond, just for the fun of it, gave us a "creativity" test in our art class. It purported to determine how creative we were.

     It determined that I wasn't.

     Fast forward to the present. Today I make a living doing work that most would call creative. People who know me almost always use the word "creative" to describe me. Trying to create things makes me happier than just about anything.

     Deep down, though, I know I'm a fraud. I know I'm just a plodder, someone who—with tenacity and hard work—manages, sometimes, to put a new twist on an idea or generate a product that is sort of different, kind of, maybe.

     Who says testing isn't effective?

     At something...

A cure for grumpiness

Some time ago, I discovered a cure for grumpiness—my own, at least. I discovered that when I start feeling cranky and out of sorts, it's usually because I haven't been doing anything creative. If I want to feel better, I sit down and write some song lyrics or doodle designs for new kitchen curtains or write a funny e-mail to a friend.

     It works. My grumpiness disappears.

     The same approach can cure classroom grumpiness. Kids become cranky and out-of-sorts when they are just receiving information passively. Giving them a creative challenge, no matter how simple, can inject life into the classroom. When I was teaching, for example, students' eyes glazed over whenever I had to go anywhere near the subject of "grammar." Having to go through a paragraph and underline the verbs did not exactly thrill them. However, they became much more involved if I asked them to write an entire paragraph using only verbs that begin with "s" or a whole story with verbs beginning with each successive letter of the alphabet (Bruno ate an entire pizza and then barfed. His friends came to his aid and dragged him to the couch...etc.)

     Kids do respond to assignments that involve imagination—their own.