How To Tap Into Creativity On Your Own Time and Terms

SOMETIMES CREATIVE INSPIRATION tries to knock right on your head. You’ve had this happen: That feeling that you should be paying attention right this minute to that story idea that seemed to just fly into your brain. The whole-body response is like no other: Thrilling and yet private, enthralling but making you want to drop whatever is in your hands and rush to the desk and type. And, if like me, what is usually in your hands at that moment is your child, or the steering wheel — something so utterly important to your life’s joy or safety that if you were not holding onto it you would shake a fist at the gods as you wonder why such gorgeous inspiration is knocking on your head at that exact moment. How to tap into creativity when you want to do so? I think I have a clue.

Can You Bargain with Your Creative Self?

Is there a bargain you can make with your creative self? Can you ask it to wait, or at least hold the thought, or maybe take a fricking number while you finish bathing the baby or driving the kids home from school?

Yes, in fact, you can. Or at least that’s what I heard on Radiolab the other day, and the irony was that what I was hearing was utterly affirming and so thoroughly needed at that moment, and yet I had to get out of the car and turn it off and meet another obligation. Of course. And that act alone almost confirmed for me that I’d lost my mojo, that my time was up, that I’d never write another word because the proof was right there that I’d made myself utterly unable to even listen to a moment of creative inspiration, let alone write one. If that was the case, I wondered, sighing, when would I ever get back to writing?

What Tom Waits Does

You know the feeling. Every artist knows the feeling. The despair, the outright loss of self when it seems that you are never in the right place at the right time to write. Even the biggies in the art world have this happen. Or so I heard when I got home, found the show, and listened to it from the start, only to be rewarded by a marvelous story of the great Tom Waits alone in his studio actually yelling at errant songs that had not yet shaped up enough to be included in a current album.

Yup. Yelling at his songs, like bad children who were not ready for school. He was speaking to his creativity, treating it like it is a force outside himself. And everything about that worked for me, as did the first part of the segment featuring the remarkable Oliver Sacks admitting that he was “very obstructed,” while writing his first book, and telling you and me and everyone who writes how he spoke to the creative force that he needed to get in shape to help him.

Is Creativity an Innie or an Outie?

What if your creativity is, in fact, an “it,” that is outside yourself and can be managed, handled, spoken to and asked to wait until your are finished bathing the child? If that’s possible, what else could you do with that great big world of ideas that sometimes seem to whiz right by the kitchen window while your husband is telling you about his day?

See if this discussion doesn’t work for you in these half-lit days of winter. Listen in. It’s the second third of the show entitled HELP. And help me, it did.