1 Creativity requires consumption
I watched Total Recall at the cinema the night before writing this. It occurred to me that I felt no guilt in that.
Creativity requires action. You need to write or draw or build or do whatever your chosen method is. You need to do it. Do the thing.
Those things need fuel. Creativity is a fire that burns. It burns hot and it can burn out. The fuel comes from the consumption of life. Doing other things. For some, it is being with friends. For others, it is being in nature. For some it is other media. For most, it is a mixture of those things. But we all stoke the fires of creativity by throwing new fuel on to it.
Creativity in a vacuum is important and some of the greatest works in history have come from it. But the furnace must be burning hot for it to work.
Consuming your favourite fuel is a just as important as taking time to create. I know that things that give energy sometimes feel like procrastination in disguise. This is Resistance applying itself in a nefarious way because it’s not The Work. By not working on the big project, you’re doing something you shouldn’t be.
I swell with dread and even disgust so much so that I cannot enjoy the thing I am dying to enjoy. What a horrible way to view my favourite things?
For the last year or two, I suffered from this. Small children need your time, attention, and energy. The small pockets I had for myself were so precious that I couldn’t ‘waste’ them consuming some other media. I had to write, dammit!
But I didn’t write.
Those pockets were so precious that even when I sat down to write, I didn’t write. I wanted the words to match the preciousness of the time. The Work I did in that time had to matter. They had to be good and therefore no words came.
Like I was some tortured artist that couldn’t stand to create something subpar.
What a chump.
I write because I like it and I want to.
The combination of no writing and not enjoying my favourite media made for a miserable Stuart. I was in a death spiral of busting with ideas, failing to create, and refusing to enjoy my spare time. Anyone who’s dealt with Resistance knows the detrimental effect it has on your life. It bleeds into every aspect of life, pushing you into damaging behaviours. I either needed to give up or change my approach to creative expression.
My fuel has always been creative play, reading, exploring, and watching films.
My creative expression has always been written. And acting when I was younger.
I read Writing Down the Bones in January. It puts forward an argument for regular writing practice, using a notebook for writing regular low-stakes entries as a method of Zen meditation. The practice becomes a tool to unlock creative flow. It removes the pressure to perform (hurhur) and the fear of the Blank Page. I’ve referred to the pieces that come from this practice as Rising from the Wreckage. That’s what this notebook looks like, a wreckage. A madman’s scrawling. But good things come from it when I give it time.
A result of the daily-ish practice is the creative furnace is burning! New ideas are always coming, may be larger projects are always on my mind. There are bits and piece that drop in here that I can move over to those projects.
With the fires burning, fuel is needed.
The second and more surprising result is a renewed passion for reading and watching films. I’ve been watching movies without an overwhelming sense of dread and despair: The Godfather, Interstellar, Fellowship of the Ring, Bloodsport, Conan the Destroyer, Reservoir Dogs and a huge number of snippets from other films. I’ve read books too: fiction, non-fiction, paper, digital, and even audio books. I’ve rediscovered my love of comics, too. Reading them in digital format, which, just quietly, is a dream.
What I’m saying is, the more I create, the more I consume.
And it’s glorious.
