I Need to Get Over It
When creativity leads to frustration...
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Last Thursday, my friend Gina Hogan Edwards and I went on a scheduled “Creativity Day.”
The rule is simple: Productivity is not the goal!
We can work on our writing projects, but only from a sideways angle that isn’t about word count, editing, etcetera. For instance, Gina sometimes works on drawing out a map of her fictional North Carolina city, Kent Creek. Is it related to her book Dancing at the Royal Jade? Yes, but it’s not a task on her to-do list. It’s fun and interesting and inspirational.
Sometimes, I crack open the manuscript for The Empty Bowl, stare at the blank page for a while, and then close it again. It’s a process.
But the focus is always supposed to be creativity without restrictions. I often take drawing supplies and try to just sketch things out. I’m not a skilled artist, so I tend to get frustrated with my limitations, then have to remind myself that the point is not “self improvement” but “expression.”
Anyway, long intro to telling you about the fact that on that day I was mostly distracted and uninspired, or in other words: spaced out and checked out.
That’s sometimes how I goes. I try not to be judgmental, since, after all, productivity is not the goal. It is supposed to be about the process, and sometimes, the process is more like Settlers of Catan than flights of fancy.
One wall I come up against regularly is that my brain really loves accomplishment. Making a THING whether that’s a story or a drawing or whatever. Which, again, the process is supposed to be the point of Creativity Day. Exploration does not need a goal, or an endpoint, when it comes to creativity. We do the thing because we love doing the thing…theoretically.
But then I wonder, is it possible to love and enjoy doing something you are bad at?
For me, the answer is no.
I enjoy writing because I was trained to it so hard at so young an age that I kind of just grew out of my hatred of being bad at it. Now I can sit down and write a blog post like this or a fictional story and just enjoy the process of creating my vision. I mean, ffs, I wrote 1.2 million words of fanfiction as a hobby, because it was fun. Was it my best writing? Good grief no it wasn’t, and I definitely got better at writing the more I wrote, but overall I was pleased enough with the output that it did not ding my “THIS SUCKS!” reflex.
To get to a point where I am good enough at something to enjoy doing it I have to first power through the sheer, unbridled animosity I have toward my own subpar output… and quite frankly, I’m very bad at that. It’s almost physically painful so I just stop.
This is why I gave up on the violin, learning a new language, drawing, painting, dancing, the list goes on. They were not requirements for my job or life, so the pain of being bad at them was easy to avoid by just not doing them at all.
Then I get to Creativity Day and I’m just at a loss. What can I do that isn’t writing? Nothing much. I get in a tailspin, space out, and check out.
I genuinely love Creativity Day, because the days where I give myself a blank check on my time are few and far between. It’s just that sometimes when you open the door to creativity, it holds a mirror up to you, and then leaves you holding the bag.
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Adults do not like to be beginners at ANYTHING. We believe we're supposed to be good at "it" already, by now. We think this about things we've never even practiced. We do not want to practice, we want to be perfect ... so we can hold up the thing we've done or created and say, "Look how productive I've been. And isn't it good?" Cultivating the value system of productivity churn is one of the biggest and most detrimental lies in our culture. It's damn-near massacred my creativity. So as I try to recover and resuscitate it, I cherish our Creativity Days even when--or maybe especially because--they hold up that mirror.