The creative process

Some people think creativity requires inspiration, provided mysteriously as manna during dreams to be harvested at morning. Others imagine ideas to be coaxed from the ether by capricious talent. Sometimes, inspirations and ideas can be found by those who look carefully for them within tangled briars of thought. These are sweet as wild berries. For most people engaged in creative pursuits, however, ideas and the words to form them are elusive. Not only are they shy, but it often seems as if they know they're hunted, and actually loathe us.

I've been making a deliberate and sustained effort at writing for about five months. That sounds like a much shorter period of time than it feels. In that period, I have written almost 30,000 words towards what I think might be a high-concept novel, but then again, it may all be garbage if I can't distill a pitch line to it or figure out what the protagonist is actually doing. I've bled 1500 words' worth of beautiful images into a short story, which is still unpublished. I'm currently three months into an entirely different project with a collaborator, and what I think is one-third of the way to completion, with a first (and only, we hope) proposal nearly ready for submission to a pretty big publishing house.

Every single step has been a struggle. The only easy aspects of this have been my partnership with the collaborator and the helpful good sense of my spouse / editor. Everything else- the hunt for ideas, the crooked paths to effective expression of these, and the necessity of sitting down and doing the work when spring so expertly distracts- is difficult. It has been said that creativity is like a muscle, and it gets stronger and better with use. I've also been told that just getting words down on paper is a victory, because writing helps to organize thoughts, and an organized mind helps accomplish almost anything more easily, or thoroughly.

Today I am deep in the tangle, and most of the blood on me is my own. Only a tiny bit belongs to the prey. But I have a sharper stick than I did a few months ago, and I am starting to recognize sign from litter when I peer more attentively at the forest floor.