Rich Mintz  

I’ve been struggling off and on with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way over the past few months, as I’ve mentioned a few times on Twitter. The book feels a little dated — I bought it ten years ago, and it was already ten years old then, born in a time when there was no iPhone and no social media and barely an Internet at all. But the principles are sound, and as a method for unlocking your creativity and freeing your inner voice to say what it wants to say (regardless of what medium you wish to say it in, what it is you do for a living, etc.), it seems to make sense.

I like the program’s pragmatic focus — its first principle is to get up in the morning and write, establishing for yourself a routine of compliance and forward motion — and I like the fact that it’s a workshop and not a bunch of platitudes. But I’m still finding it hard to carve out the life space necessary to be creative.

(By way of digression, I should say here that I’m not particularly sure what flavor of creativity I’m seeking, I just know that the periods of my life when I’ve been “producing” have been the most fulfilling ones. At various points in my life I was writing poetry, essays, short stories, the bones of a novel; at another point I wrote and designed a catalog; at another point I learned Perl and wrote an extended module of a larger text processing system. In my childhood, I drew maps and imaginary cityscapes. All of that felt creative and fulfilling in a way that I’d like to recapture.)

Part of the challenge is that I’m busy, with a queue of work- and avocation-related “obligations” a mile long. Part of it is that I live in a one-room apartment, with another person who is usually home when I am. (It’s a large room, with five or six distinct “areas” that a person can be in, but ultimately it’s one room, and everything that happens in any part of it can be heard everywhere.) And part of it is simply that I’m not single (by choice!), and another person and his interests and needs have a claim on my time.

But if you want to do something, you need to do it. People with far more crippling constraints than mine have done it (Wallace Stevens bla bla, Kate Chopin bla bla, fucking David Foster fucking Wallace bla bla). And so I’m reading Dear Sugar’s amazing “Write Like a Motherfucker” column again, in which she says

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

What she said. Also, here’s Michael Copperman’s “Letter To My Talented Writer-Friend A., Who Fears She Will Never Be Published”:

Nobody else needs your work, though some may be moved by it or even changed it—but that will only happen if you stop waiting for someone to beg you to speak. To crib some lines from a poet I heard read a few months ago, “There is no one coming to save you. There is nothing from which to be saved.”

So, you know, dig the goddamn coal already. Make a workspace that makes sense, remove or set boundaries around distraction, buy pretty pencils, brew some coffee… but don’t (unlike so many) stop there. Take the next step and do something.

Tags: creativity, writing

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