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It all starts with just a few notes on my digital piano, half a dozen or so. Beneath them I lay in some jazz chords, add in a bit of rhythm. I listen for the feeling those notes convey. The fledgling little riff gets me curious. I play it over and over. And then another handful of notes crop up. The new notes complement those first ones, share their harmony and rhythm. I go back and forth between the two riffs, listening as an outsider to their conversation together. The creative process has begun. This process is not instantaneous, nor particularly easy. Non sequiturs and blind alleys loom in the midst of the creative work. Variations on the initial riffs push in that don’t seem to work. I get frustrated and yet I’m compelled by its possibilities. I keep going back, working to build on it. Gradually other variations that do fit make their way in. They add texture, create nuance. The more I work the emerging song, the more it whispers something to me about me. Gradually a coherence develops, a structure emerges. What had started out as a few minutes of doodling becomes days. Those days become weeks as the emerging song stretches and settles me. After a month or so, I’m ready to take it out for a Saturday afternoon spin at the coffee shop. A year or more later in performing the song I’ll still search it for it’s beauty, probing it again for that initial depth of feeling it promised when it first emerged. It always starts with a single sentence. That sentence sits starkly on the computer screen, the cursor blinking beside the period which completes it. There’s a premise beneath those first words, one that had been playing on my mind over the previous few days. That’s always where it starts: a premise and then a first sentence. Then that first sentence begets another. Those sentences become a paragraph which begets other paragraphs. Conversations take place, things happen, stuff gets noticed and described. The creative process has begun. I realize that the questions I was supposed to have sorted out before I even began are being answered on the screen in front of me. I notice who’s telling the story, whether it’s one of the characters or a narrator detached enough to watch. I become aware of the when of the happenings, whether it is now or in the past. Part way through the sentences and senses of the piece take over, create an inevitability to the story line. It feels a bit like tumbling. No, like being on the carousel as it speeds up, having to hold on. No, like a kite on its windy string trying to defy gravity, to drive itself upward, forward. It wakes me up in the middle of the night because there is something going on with my characters. It’s there to take advantage of the first sips of caffeine when I’m fresh the next morning. At this point I’m writing as a reader, following the story to find out what will happen. I keep going forward, content in the headspace of not yet knowing. And then I do. The ending begins to draw me. An idea is emerging of what will become of the characters, what will resolve the perplexities of plot. Days have passed. At times I’ve been blocked or tired and I just had left the story unfinished, coming back to it when I was fresh. And as much as I realize that its writing has drained me, I’d never thought of it as work. It's been all about being with, and noticing, and sensing, and feeling. The work of it begins once it’s written. There are rounds of editing to polish and prune the story. There are word tangles to straighten out, punctuation choices to make so the story can have its own rhythm. Then comes the vulnerability of showing the story to beta-readers for feedback. The wondering whether it will make sense to somebody else. While it’s out there, I tap my metaphorical fingers anxiously, hoping the story will twig a feeling, bring a memory to mind, make a reader stop and reflect a moment or two. And, probably within a few months, after I’ve incorporated feedback from beta-readers, after I have let it rest and gone back to smooth it even more, then I might take the story out for a spin at the coffee shop. I’ll watch people’s eyes as they listen. This is not the first dance I’ve had with creativity. As a psychotherapist, I spent forty-two years co-creating healing conversations with my clients. Being creative. Doing creativity together. It went like this. After the greeting and small talk, the therapeutic conversation would begin, perhaps with a simple statement, maybe a curious and caring sort of question. My client’s participation in that conversation would allow us to set the stage together for the emergence of healing, of resilience, of hope. Together we would create a conversation that was a fit for that client’s needs and meet the requirements of my profession as defined by ethics, knowledgable good judgment, and skill. There’d be an emotional valance underneath those conversations, much like the harmonic structures beneath a jazz riff. There’d be celebration what it means to be human for that client, much like what occurs in a worthy piece of fiction. It didn’t always go easily. There were blind alleys, and periods of doldrums, and depths of suffering to simply witness and companion through together. But it was the ultimate creativity: creativity in the quest for wellness within and interconnectedness between. So what is the take away? I’ve been involved in three highly creative ventures and I realize that I’ve never been able to engineer the process or predict the outcome. I could set the stage, I could watch, I could participate on a skilled level, but I couldn’t force the possibilities within. Whatever was going to come of the creativity simply emerged. It all makes one wonder, eh? Clickable links to previous blogsMarch 2024 - Your bridge to cross
February 2024 - A little Deeper into the human condition January 2024 - On Darkness December 2023 - Note Perfect ... or not! November 2023 - Just notes October 2023 - About endings September 2023 - Sacred ground August 2023 - Are we there yet? July 2023 - How smart is SMART? June 2023 - Only half there May 2023 - Who gets to write the story? April 2023 - Intersubjectivity. Hunh? March 2023 - A disturbing trend February 2023 - About being in the middle January 2023 - Can we have a little heart here please? December 2022 - A story about story November 2022 - Facing One's Fears October 2022 - Transitional folk September 2022 - Transitions August 2022 —At the other end of life's journey July 2022—The problem with what emerges. June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway? May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ... April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi. March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone. February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes. January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book. December 2021 — About time and being human. November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery October 2021 — Flow versus focus. September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth. 0 Comments
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