EAT, PRAY, LOVE, CREATE

Before the Beginning

I guess we all have some inkling as to where our strengths lie. But for assessing strengths and weaknesses, we always need to make reference to scale: where do I lie on the patient/impatient continuum, for instance; am I more logical or more intuitive; maybe even, do my strengths lie toward leadership or “followship?” Am I creative, or its opposite?

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love did a TED talk recently on the foundations of creativity. That her novel would vault her into what are dizzying heights in literary achievement was as much a surprise to her as to everyone else, she said. She went on to talk about the act of writing fiction (in her case), the frustrations (many) and the triumphs (not so many), but what interested me was her delving into possible sources of that strength or inclination we call “creativity:” where it comes from, how it does or doesn’t ignite the fervour, fuel the energy that leads to great paintings, great sculptures, great poetry, great fiction.

She talked about the loneliness of the creative endeavour, how we place all the credits and debits of a work of art on the artist-person. There was a time in Greece and Rome when creativity was seen as an endowment from an outside source, like a muse or genii inspiring a selected person for a given purpose in, for instance, the sculpting of David or the writing of Virgil’s Aeneid. 

I immediately thought about the prevailing theology surrounding the origins of our Bible, i.e. God as the inspiration energizing certain people for the writing of specific volumes. Given this paradigm, the human with the pen or the chisel or the wheel is a partner in a creative process, a conduit for inspiration originating elsewhere.

Inspiration. Literally “a breathing in.” The choice of that word to connect art with its practitioners seems fitting. If you’re a Christian doing Christian work with fervour and conviction, it’s probable that your conviction and fervour came from “breathing in” the New Testament and the spiritual “air” that permeates your church. The idea fits: wander off to breathe in alien air and that “inspiration” is bound to lead you down a different pathway. I would contend that most artists “breathed in” art well before they picked up their tools of choice. The genii or muse, in that case, being very human; creative inspiration handed down generation to generation, built upon and adapted by each.

The work that creativity requires was probably touched upon less than I’d hoped in Gilbert’s talk. An exercise I’d do with students who were asked to write but hadn’t a clue how to get started was to have them jot down one word selected at random, “grass,” for instance. Next we’d add an adjective, like “green,” or “spikey.” Next, we’d add a verb, “waving,” possibly, and as we built on our start, an image would begin to take on a life of its own. “In Grandpa’s pasture on a summer day, the green, spikey grass would wave to me in the heat of the afternoon, and I would go out to greet it.” It begins with work, even if it’s just the writing of a single word, and then a bit more work, and a bit more and suddenly, even a little work begins to “inspire,” we breathe in the joy of having begun, and with each new inspiration, the air becomes richer, the breathing easier, the energy rises. 

Maybe that’s what makes even the most skeptical of us capable of creative greatness. Maybe that’s all that creativity really is. What do you think? Maybe un-creativity is simply a hesitancy or refusal to write down that first word, pick up that lump of clay, dip that brush into the red ochre and make a tentative but bold mark on the canvas.

Or maybe we’re hooped unless a genii creeps out from under the wallpaper and . . . does what?

P.S. We can hardly talk about work without mention of technique. No good starting a sculpture until you’ve practiced chisel behaviour; better to know a bit about sentence structure and tenses before committing a great story to print. Next post on Readwit will be about that.