I began reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert months ago with the best intentions. I have spoken ad nauseam about the impact her TedTalk “Your Elusive Creative Genius” has had on me and in what ways it has shaped and continues to shape me creatively. What better inspiration could be taken by a girl fearful she’ll never create her best work than to receive indirect words of encouragement from a woman who was verbally frightened by the thought that her best work was behind her?
I treated Big Magic similarly to how I treated reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I took notes, and wrote down page numbers, and if I read a line I tried to read past but could not flip the page, I had to write the entire line down before I could proceed. Though I haven’t made it far in the book, I have several fragments of this creative manifesto scribbled on a piece of paper, just waiting for my fingers to pick up the notebook again. Although I often find the novelty of writing on paper much more stimulating to the brain, I find it more cathartic and productive to type out my thoughts as they come to me. Almost as if catching these pieces of genius while they’re mid-transit, by typing them as quickly as they pass. That seemed to happen with a line on page 72 that made me stumble. Written in my notes app sits a lonely line that reads “in the end creativity is a gift to the Creator, not just a gift to the audience.” Coincidentally finding this note at the same time that I am catching flying fragments of artistry feels as though I am being set up to produce.
As a teenager, I wrote and created and looked for inspiration constantly. The revolving door of my process was second nature. If I wasn’t writing, I was listening to the echo of something in my head. If I wasn’t drawing, I was studying what I could render. Seldom was I not looking for inspiration, but it seems as though when I wasn’t looking, music still encouraged the part of me subconsciously in need of support. I continue to do the latter, and even moreso now than when I was 16, 19, and 22, amidst the days I’m unable to write or create. I find myself attempting to appoint a spot for inspiration to perch upon my shoulder and whisper idyllic promises into my ear like the ghost of creations past.
I recently got back into Hunter Hayes. His unique voice and natural pop-country bid play a role in several of my memories from the 2010s and those memories are not unlike the memories of other girls in America at that time. You couldn’t have expected Nicholas Sparks reading, hormonal, hopeless romantic, new age country digesting teenage girls to hear a song like Wanted being sung by a cute boy around their age and it not have some sort of impact on their memories. For the past 10 years, I’ve had moments with his music like I typically do with other artists where I say “let me see what they’re up to” and fall back down the rabbit hole. By the time the next hyper-fixation comes around, I have already begun to treat the previous re-discovery as a figment of the distant past. This is simply the consequence of living in a world dictated by short attention spans and losing the taste of the media before it has been brought to our mouths by the proverbial spoon. This time I began to move with the music, not just ingest it. The feeling was different; more adult, jazzy, and more sexy, and felt full of more substance. The walls of what “a genre” is have yet to be built in the 30-something years Hunter Hayes has been creating music. He has always come across as someone making music for himself, for the love of the craft, though in several conversations online, he has made it clear that it was not always the case.
After watching Hunter’s conversation with Zach Sang, I walked away feeling very validated in my creative fears. Coincidentally there are pieces of this conversation I can’t shake, but I did not write them down in their entirety. What I can tell you is that it was made clear to me just how I’ve been approaching my ability to write and connect with people in this medium. Which at this very moment, I find myself devoid of the ability to do either, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with my “constructing vs trusting” approach. I have always written or created for an end product. I have always seen or felt or heard the final product in my head and it doesn’t matter to me how I get there, but that I do. And preferably: fast. Instead of trusting the process and letting my innate ability to create lead the charge, I’m forcing a product out of me for people to digest, and more often than not it becomes the sole purpose of what I create. To me, this is where writing starts to become fraudulent. This is where I begin to doubt in what way I’m using my words and what for. Am I truly aiming to share a part of myself, or is this another piece of someone’s soul that’s going to go out and live in the world for anyone and everyone to tear apart, just for a semblance of validation? In genuinely asking myself that question, I can’t confidently say the answer is only one or only the other.
A piece of this conversation I did write down is “the separation between art and commerce.” There are very rarely things so obvious as this that pull from me in the night, but I haven’t been able to resist this particular pull. Identifying the pattern of my art and what it’s for is very clearly identified in the juxtaposition of art vs commerce. At the time I found Hunter Hayes, I was being graded on every pencil stroke I made. Every word I wrote had a numerical accomplishment attached to it. I could identify when I stopped enjoying the process of creating. As I entered my early 20s, I leaned on the internet heavily, as a way to share my endeavors but seldom created for anything off the internet. And as much as I hate to admit it, that habit has continued.
In “Why I Write,” an article published for the New York Times in the 70’s, Joan Didion says “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” This was the first piece of Joan Didion I had ever heard and to say I connected with it immediately is a minimization of that experience. She wrote those words 21 years before I was able to speak and 40 years before I could say that’s exactly how I felt about writing. I have seldom experienced a situation, good or bad, that I have been able to fully dissect without writing about it first. When “art vs. commerce” becomes godlit, it becomes strikingly apparent that I have continued to produce content just to share it. Not to become acquainted with it, not to sit with the feeling, not to understand the whys or hows, but to receive validation on feeling a certain way. Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s sub-magic in justifying creation as a gift to the creator brought me to the metaphorical water stream and allowed me to drink. So far, Big Magic has validated so many of my creative insecurities.
For a while, I found myself saying yes to opportunities just so I could write about them; and use them as a scapegoat to escape my ever-present writer’s block. This is a very Pavolvian way of approaching my senses to socialize and expose myself to new experiences, and when I would follow through and still fall creatively short, it would often reaffirm the voice in my head telling me I’m not cut out to create. This wasn’t consciously apparent to me before watching the aforementioned conversation where, mid-video, I paused, took a deep breath to process whatever it was I had just heard, and wrote “taking experiences and give them purpose, not doing experiences hoping for purpose.” This has always been the name of the game. This has always been my approach to the things that happen to me, hence the relation to Why I Write. The assumption was that the only way I’d be able to fully process a circumstance is by writing about it but muddying the colors to keep it from being blunt, make it something easily digestible for someone else to read, which in the end defeats the entire purpose of writing as a craft. There are very few things I have ever written and kept to myself. These pieces always find themselves on my blog (hi!), in an email to someone, or left as a completely abandoned idea, never thought about again because it felt “too much” or "too heavy" to write about. This is very obviously not a gift to the creator. I can say now that amidst this realization, I’m making peace with the fact that I am doing myself no favors by not explicitly writing what I think and feel, whether it is being shared or not. Even in this case, I am writing to share this realization. I am writing explicitly to post on my blog, although this is an ah-ha moment that I know I’ll carry with me, or even be able to come back to later. As I’m attempting to wrap this up, I’m looking for the perfect bow for this metaphorical gift, and I can’t seem to come up with what will leave you, dear reader, saying “ooooh, that was good” or “damn, what an ending” instead of how I feel comfortable closing it. I’m already thinking about the next time I will post here and what it will be and who it will talk about, instead of enjoying this craft I’ve found solace in. What I’m looking for is resolve to an issue that is only an issue to me, a person who finds resolve by discussing her problems with other people. And the cycle continues: shiny and ready to be given.
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