Writer Not Writing (Redirecting Your Creativity)
By Lisa Janice Cohen | June 22, 2020 |
Long before COVID-19 brought its new and grim reality, I was already struggling with what it meant to be a writer who wasn’t writing. So maybe that’s why I haven’t experienced the kind of acute anxiety many of my fellow creators are experiencing now. For the majority of the past year and a half, I have been picking away at a manuscript, but not feeling as if I’ve been making any sort of true progress. What was strange was that I didn’t feel much (if any) distress about it. I could easily go weeks without looking at the story. When I did open the file, while I pretty much liked what I had written so far, knew the rough shape of where the story needed to go, believed in the story, I had absolutely no urgency to do the work to get it there.
In the seventeen years since I started writing my first novel, I never anticipated there would come a time where I wouldn’t be upset by not being able to write. (That’s quite the convoluted sentence!) But here I am. Not writing.
And because I have to worry about something, I am concerned that I’m not concerned. Does that mean I’m fine with never writing a story again? Have I run out of stories to tell? Am I really depressed but not aware of it? Does my subconscious mind think this story is worthless?
When I examine those questions, the answers are no, no, no, and no. But for right now, my creativity is taking me down different paths and that’s okay.
What I’ve come to understand is that being a writer is only a small part of being a creative soul. Words may be the main way I express myself, but they are only one way. I am also a potter, a gardener, a fiber artist, and a cook. Each of these fulfills a need in my life both to create and to nurture. I get the same pleasure from a friend using a bowl I’ve thrown that I do harvesting and turning peaches into jars of peach butter, knitting a sweater for my husband, or making a meal for a neighbor that I get from a good review or a letter from a reader.
The difference is that I’ve monetized my writing. And turning a creative pursuit into a business changes things.
After finishing the fifth and final book of my Halcyone Space series, I hit a wall. I had been working continuously telling these stories for over five years and my sense of wellbeing and creative self-worth became conflated with their commercial success. That metric can all too easily be a never-fulfilled hunger. No matter how many books you sell, there is always someone selling better, winning awards, getting rave reviews, and more.
I think it took me until now to fully understand how much my process and my expectations had changed when I shifted from writing stories to being an author. The past year and a half has taught me that I need to practice creativity without expectation of the outcome. Or rather, to let the process guide me in at least some kind of creative exploration. Which has led me to focus on pottery, knitting and crocheting, canning jams, and making bread.
I give away far more pottery than I sell. I rarely take commissions and only if the specific commission is something I want to challenge myself to learn. If I make enough money to defray some of my kiln firing costs, that’s great. But I have no desire to set myself up as a production potter. It’s the same with my homemade jams. I enjoy giving them to people. To scale up to the point of a viable business would take the joy out of something that is inordinately time consuming and operates on impossible margins. And no one in their right mind would pay me enough to make it worth my time and materials cost to knit or crochet a bespoke sweater. Nor would I want to.
Living in a society so intensely focused on profit makes pursuing a creative life difficult. Not only are the basics of providing oneself and loved ones food, shelter, and clothing a challenge, but creative work is terribly undervalued. Add to that the external pressures of marketing oneself and one’s output for mere pennies in return. Add to that, a global crisis, and it’s no wonder so many of us are struggling.
But here’s the thing: we crave beauty in our lives. We need stories and music and art as much as we need anything else. Humans have been hungry for creativity since there have been humans. (We have been decorating our everyday use items since forever – just do an internet search for ancient Greek pottery.)
The tension between what we think we value and what we truly value is at the heart of our society’s struggles.
And while I can’t change the external world, I can focus on my personal choices. I suspect my subconscious knew I needed to step away from the work of writing for a little while. This hiatus is a way to reconfigure my internal sense of worth and the value of what I create. Until I can recapture with my writing the same joy I get turning a lump of wet clay into a finished piece of ware, this story will remain unformed.
In the meanwhile, I am concentrating on finding wonder in the small moments. And baking a lot of bread.
I hope you are all well, safe, and healthy. And that you hold to the creative activities that add beauty to your days.
What other creative outlets do you explore when you’re not writing? What do you truly value about the creative process?
LJ Cohen is a novelist, poet, fiber artist, potter, and relentless optimist. After almost twenty-five years as a physical therapist, LJ now uses real clinical skills to injure fictional characters. Find LJ at her writing website and blog or digging in the dirt at StarField Farm.
Lisa, you raise such an important question. What do we value? I do a lot of sewing. I make bags and clothes from tapestry fabric. I love the colors and textures. I sew everything by hand and finish seams with colorful tapestry threads. The work soothes me and frees up my subconscious. People have encouraged me to sell on line but when I think about doing it, my head hurts. I sell something now and then, but I take the greatest pleasure in giving things to people I like. Doing anything with the goal of cashing in at the end soils the process for me. Writing the story that burns in me by learning how best to craft it keeps me in the chair. It’s the love you put into what you create that people respond to, and that is gold. Thanks for a lovely post!
I have several friends who quilt and we have done art trades, which I find a lovely way to “use” my art.
:)
Thank you. I needed this.
{{{{Hugs}}}}
Very timely post.
At this time of great uncertainty, there are people who can’t focus on anything but finding a source of income and I am so mindful of that. But also grateful that my small business is still going and I find myself with little windows of time, for the first time in years, to really think about how I want to direct my creativity.
My mother was a master knitter. Could knit the most elaborate Fair Isle sweaters and any pattern you put in front of her. She knitted me a bear with his own little buttoned cardigan as if it was nothing (which I treasure more now that she’s gone). But, like you, suggesting that she could sell her craft would have been the kiss of death. She knitted for pure pleasure.
I’m currently rereading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and it’s such an inspiration to me as I’m writing. But for the first time in decades, I want to draw again. I can’t continue to let fear hold me back: fear of having lost the talent; fear of never being good enough in the first place. I need to do it just for me.
Creativity is innate to humans and finding an outlet, whatever that may be, is crucial to a happy existence.
When you wrote, “I need to practice creativity without expectation of the outcome. ” you nailed in one sentence what has been gnawing at me for more than a year while working on and off with novel revision. Everything you said in this article spoke to me. Thank you!
I love this post. So many time when we think about an author our perspective is narrowed by the fact they write books. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
I recently watched a documentary on a museum called Orchard House. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women there and the small desk her father made and attached to the wall where she actually wrote the book is preserved.
But the history of Louisa May Alcott, her family and that of Orchard House is so much more diverse and deeper. The Alcott family didn’t move into Orchard House until Louisa was 20. They were a family of vegetarian artists and abolitionists. They hung out and created with the poets and artists of their day. Orchard House is older than the American Revolution. Two Concord Minute Men lived in the house long before the Alcott family existed. The first battle of the American Revolution the Minute Men’s march was on the road just beyond the garden gates. Years and years later Louisa’s father founded the Concord School of Philosophy in the study. And after the Alcott’s a Comissioner of Education lived there.
Books are not isolated incidents. They happen along with the rest of life when the time calls for them. They are not the artist but an extension of the artist. And the artist is on the human journey we call life. Blessed be your journey, Lisa.
I’ve been getting an itch, here and there, to get out my violin and begin playing again. That’s easier said than done: the instrument absolutely needs new strings and some professional TLC, not something I can make happen quite yet. I have no idea if the nerve issues in my neck and shoulders will flare up if I try to play again. And at present, I don’t have a good space for playing, because with the pandemic we ended up delaying a move from our open-plan apartment for another year.
So there are some obstacles. *shrug* The kernel of truth in all of that is the desire to play music–or perhaps just start by listening to more instrumental music than I have been. I may start there. Part of what I am craving, I suspect, is the opportunity to use a different part of my brain, a different thought process. I already knit, and have dug out some old, half-finished cross-stitching this spring.
This year has really put even more emphasis on the question of what we find small-s spiritually meaningful, what (or who) is worth our time and energy. So often “worth” is directly associated with monetary value, in a way that obscures the value of a gift, a thoughtful gesture…either for someone else or for our selves.
Thank you for sharing your gifts! :-)
“But here’s the thing: we crave beauty in our lives. We need stories and music and art as much as we need anything else. Humans have been hungry for creativity since there have been humans.”
This. We are creative beings made in the image of God–we only have to look to nature to see His inexhaustible creativity. When JBS Haldane was asked what he could say about the mind of God, he said that He must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
As for me, besides the writing, there’s music and gardening and cooking. Above all, striving to make this one beautiful life I’ve been given a work of art.
“The tension between what we think we value and what we truly value is at the heart of our society’s struggles.” I thought this interesting, pointing to the hypocrisy in our very selves. I’m more inclined to agree with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn who said “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…”
Thank you for writing this post. You described exactly what I’ve been struggling with.