Wow. It has been a while. Apologies for that.
Since we were last together, I got caught up—like everyone else—in figuring out the new “normal.” I got involved in trying to organize all the loose papers here in the house, and get some rhythms of our daily life under control, and I tried (and failed) to figure out a sustainable rhythm with my new job.
It seemed strange to try and write about creativity on top of that, in part because I did not know what creativity “looks like” in a pandemic. Is it a necessity? Is it a luxury? Is it an impossibility?
I’ll be honest. For a long time, it felt like an impossibility.
A lot of my life is tied up in putting out “content.” I produce a weekly radio show, and several podcasts for clients, as well as my teaching duties. All of that required me to grind and churn out a lot of content each week.
But I hope you will understand that—for me at least—there is a real difference between putting out reliable content and doing things that are genuinely creative.
And so I’ve been wondering where this distinction comes from in my head.
I think in part it comes from the fact that a lot of the content creation I do is very rote. After making a few hundred radio show episodes, I have a real process in place for how it gets done. It doesn’t feel creative; it feels workaday. Similarly with my client work. Most of what I do feels like cleaning up audio and fixing minor problems along the way. I clear out the debris so my clients can see clearly what creative decisions need to be made. Perhaps they would describe the process differently, but that is how it has felt lately from my vantage point.
I have been writing, of course. Along with my co-conspirator, Katy Scrogin, I have been logging in a weekly post over at Walking the Wire. But even with this, I managed to find a way to have this feel less creative and more mechanical. I decided to write a series of “process” oriented articles, looking at how recovery from trauma affects my work in the classroom. So for the past six weeks or so, I had a trajectory I could rely on for the output.
All this is to say that I have been actively avoiding what we might call the “meta-questions” of the creative process. Those questions are things like “where do these ideas come from?” but also “How do you maneuver a story from a rough idea to a finished product.” Those kinds of things.
After several weeks away, however, I feel like the tanks are finally getting charged back up. Some circumstances have shifted—including the successful completion of the elections, as well as some new landscapes regarding my teaching work—that pulls me back into the orbit of thinking about the creative process.
This afternoon I took part in a panel as part of the Northfield Authors and Artists Festival. The focus of the panel was to discuss the process of blogging—particularly with regard to spirituality and naturalism. It ended up being a delightful conversation, and I will post a link to the recording when it is available.
As part of the discussion, we all talked about “why we do this.” The best answer I came up with is that I need to keep working, on a number of fronts, on a number of subjects, in a number of different formats, in the hopes that out of all this amassed material, some small pieces will actually be of value.
I guess this is a weird version of the then-thousand hour’s rule that Malcolm Gladwell talks about, which basically says that all expertise comes not so much from talent, but rather from doggedly showing up and working away at something for enough hours that you get good at it. That has certainly been borne out in my own experiences; I have seen a lot of talents (including writing) come online in my soul because I kept showing up.
I mentioned my friend Katy Scrogin. We’ve known each other for around twenty years, and in that time we have come to call this “being too dumb to quit.” Because literally everything screams at you to stop doing things that are uncomfortable, and not being good at something is perhaps the most uncomfortable thing that you might actually still choose to do (as opposed to those situations where you are forced to do something).
So the production—all the continued levels of output I do in the world—is done in the hopes of the possibility that some corners of it, here and there, will be worth more than mere content and filler. That somehow, some of the pieces of it, will actually touch somebody else’s soul.
Not often, but just enough.
That will make all the showing up and rattling into the dark worth it.
Sorry I was gone for so long. I won’t do that again if I can help it.
Thank you again for sticking with me, and thank you for reading.
Thanks, David! I love that, being too dumb to quit. Ha. Wonderful thoughts on creativity and work. A college asked about my weekend one time, I said I was working on a story. He then asked about my work as an educator and asked, what do you do here? And how do you differentiate what is work? I think that is part of what you're talking about.