Losing Our Creativity "in the Welter of Other Things"
On pressing into the work
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It’s late on a Thursday night and my mind is ruminating over so many things after a wonderful conversation at Nooks with one of our book clubs. We read Percival Everett’s book Erasure, a fabulous book that peels back layers of race and creativity, relationships and motivation. I’m pondering the nature of writing fiction, the vulnerability of the process, and how sometimes we can create something that isn’t true to ourselves…and where that leaves us: Fractured. Confused. Lonely.
Most of all, Erasure has me thinking back over some of my favorite things that I’ve learned about creativity from others.
There’s Anne Lamott’s “shitty first draft” and “just do it bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird.”
There’s Rick Rubin’s “the audience comes last.”
There’s Madeleine L’Engle’s insistence that we not forget how to walk on water.
There’s
’s dead grandmother’s voice telling him that “this is why we’re alive. We come to earth to have these adventures.”Perhaps my favorite concepts have come from George Saunders’ book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, and what I now think of as storytelling’s Big Three: specificity, causation, and escalation.
But when I really want to get inside the mind of a creator, I grab Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel or Working Days from the ledge above my desk and scan the pages. I track with this man as he writes some of the best stories I’ve ever read, watching his normal life collide with creativity.
“This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy,” Steinbeck writes in Working Days, the journal he kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath. “And I’m frightened that I’m losing this book in the welter of other things.”
I, too, am frightened that I might lose this latest novel I’m working on “in the welter of other things.”
I have the revisions for two collaborations I need to finish by next week. A fairly time-consuming edit for another. A 15,000-word booklet I’m writing for an organization, due in two weeks. Another revision due by April 1. A bookstore to help run. Six children to shuttle here and there and everywhere, to shepherd and to release into the world. A wife to love, a dog to dote on. A house that’s very needy right now, with piles of laundry and disorganized rooms and boxes to go through that neither Maile nor I have the time to deal with.
Life is full.
And yet this story keeps knocking on the door to my mind. Don’t forget about me. Don’t leave me out here in the cold. Don’t lose me in the welter of other things.