Dancing with the Romantics: How I do my best creative work

Mark, the Broadcasting Brain, has simple needs: he does his best work at the kitchen table with papers spread out around him.

I do too.

Bill finds there’s an astonishing lot of physical movement in the apparently sedentary act of writing, and a good hike with his dog can shake out the ideas.

Same here.

Susan’s muse is best courted by a morning ritual of just the right balance of distractions and peace, in just the right workspace.

Me too.

Kat says the key to doing great creative work is simply starting, though possibly with the aid of a kayak and a glass of wine.

Ditto!

So what’s the real bottom line here?  How do I do my best creative work?

Tough question. And the specifics depend on what kind of creating we’re talking about: building a website, writing a book, constructing a blog tutorial, plotting a film treatment, sketching for a painting, planning a lesson… And what do we mean by “best,” anyhow? Most satisfying, most lucrative, most original, or most critically acclaimed?

(A terrific way to avoid creative productivity, by the way, is to keep answering questions with more questions instead of forcing yourself to find an answer – even if the answer might change or be tossed aside, later, as you continue to explore and refine your work!)

I do my best creative work in a two-step process:

Bear with me here – there’s a chance this may not be quite as lunatic as it sounds.

Channel the Romantic Poets

The first step in any creative work  – in my process, at least – is to gather information and inspiration. Total immersion in the topic. Carbing up before the big game, if you will. Reading, reading, reading, filling the eyes and the brain with facts and ideas that jumble around together in the subconscious and form unexpected linkages while you’re off doing something else…

That’s where the Romantic poets come in.

Wordsworth, for example, one fine day in 1802. There he was, wandering around England’s Lake District with his sycophantic sister Dorothy, when he spotted a great huge whacking field of daffodils in bloom. Did he sit right down in the grass and write a timeless poem on the spot? No, and here’s why:

[Poetry] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on…

So he did a lot of noodling about those daffodils – For oft, when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude – before eventually (in 1804, two whole years later) turning his quill to crafting a poem that sulky high school students would be forced to memorize for centuries to come.

But write it, he did.

Do the Hokey Pokey

Being a writer is a much more seductive concept than actually writing.  (I blame the Romantics and their colourful scandalous lives.) You can do all the research and inspiration-seeking and lying about in pensive mood you want, but creativity doesn’t just happen all by itself. Too many people spend their whole lives preparing to Write My Novel, waiting for that magic day when the kids are grown and chores are done and all the stars are in correct alignment.

The thing is, creative work is work – and create is an action word.

At some point, it comes time to fire up the music and get down to the real Hokey Pokey.  Remember how that last verse goes?

You put your whole self in,
You put your whole self out,
You put your whole self in
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Pokey
And you turn yourself around,
That’s what it’s all about.

Keats wrote for just six years, thoughtlessly expiring at the age of 25, yet made himself immortal in English Lit by one part brilliance, one part persistence, and one part prodigious output.

Blake had visions, as well as artistic and literary talent, but none of these put his ideas (in mass-market paperback) in the pockets of beatniks and the songs of Jim Morrison, 150 years later; it was putting his visions down on paper that did the trick.

And, frankly, it’s always irked me that we’ll never know what heights the unfinished Christabel and Kubla Khan might have reached, had Coleridge not chased his muse in a laudanum bottle instead of an inkwell.

No shortcuts!

Even the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron had to buckle down to write Don Juan instead of merely living it.

Maybe you aren’t quite sure where you’re headed, or what the finished work is going to look like. That’s fine. After all, the Hokey Pokey starts with putting in one limb, then another, shaking one body part after the other as you try things out,  gradually getting into the music.

Think of your own best creative moments; you know how it goes:

You put your whole self in
And you shake it all about…

And somewhere in the middle of the dance, the Muses willing, comes a point where it’s possible to stop feeling like a idiot doing a nursery-school jig before the jeering multitudes.

Seductive ideas start calling louder and more sweetly than the sirens of safe inaction. The sheer pleasure of exploring your ideas begins to tamp down the fear of expressing them imperfectly. The first tentative feelings of excitement, of “oh, this actually might be something” start to tingle…

In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on…

…until the job’s done.

And that’s how I do my best creative work.

What about you?  Do you have any good ideas for establishing flow and writer’s block avoidance?

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