Creativity is a slippery little devil. It cuddles up to me and whispers in my ear just as I’m falling asleep, all promises and blandishment. In the morning, however, it is all rumpled and its eyes are crusty and it squinches up its face and says Go away.
So, I go about my house, doing small chores and cleanings, keeping one eye on the grumplepuss and hoping that it will work out the kinks and come play. Finally, giving up, I sit at my computer, play some game, edit a story, look at images I’m considering for a book cover—and the little stinker just lays there and snores. Hmph. I’m staring deadlines in the face, and it can’t be bothered.
Grumbling under my breath, I wander into the kitchen thinking about dinner. I could come up with something tantalizing and tasty that would make my husband sit up and bark if I could only get some help from the lay-about in the other room, but noooo. Fine. I’ll just reheat the chicken and dumplings we had two nights ago and make some rice with…
I’m standing at the refrigerator, door open, with my eyes fastened on the pot in my hands, but my mind is juggling three different ideas for the book cover I’ve been contemplating. Coming to myself I hear the giggle behind me and smell the sweet breath of Creativity washing over me. Poor Ed. His dinner will have to wait. I have a will-o’-the-wisp to follow….
Making dinner tonight – Friday, by the way…not Thursday – I was slicing cauliflower very thinly and admiring the fine tracery its silhouette made against the dark background of my cutting board. Of course, my mind immediately jumped to how a fairy might use thinly sliced cauliflower as a backdrop for their nightly theater (wouldn’t your mind jump there, also?) They’d use broccoli for tree props, naturally, the “trunks” wrapped in brown grass to simulate bark, but to get that suggestion of distant birch trees under the moon, cross-sections of cauliflower would be just perfect.
I explained this to Ed over dinner. Bless the man…he just smiled, and nodded, and said, “Of course.” Then I told him a little story….
In 1988, my little family moved to Kentucky. We bought a great little property: an acre or so in the middle of town, with a sparkling creek that ran through the back at the foot of a steep hill. My husband and I built a darling little bridge with 2 felled trees and a bunch of boards, and we put in a garden on the other side of the creek.
The garden had several beds, with upright supports at one end for beans and peas. One morning, I walked down to the creek, over the bridge, and into the garden to do some tending and found a massive, beautiful spider web strung perfectly from one pole to another. It must have been three feet across, and it was jeweled with dew that sparkled in the early morning light. I stood, transfixed, for long minutes, taking in the lovely symmetry, the elaborate design, the perfect execution—then finally turned to do my chores.
Later, I stood before the web again, thinking of ways I could preserve such a magnificent specimen. I thought, perhaps, I could spray it with silver paint and carefully use black posterboard to “scoop” it onto; or maybe I could…
As I was considering options, a small, flying beetle blundered into the web, shaking it violently. In the time it took for me to gasp and for my mouth to form an “O,” the spider zipped over to the beetle and gave it a practiced bounce. I never saw how she did it, but in no time at all, that beetle was wrapped up and hanging from one of the cross-pieces of the web and the spider was back in her place as though nothing had happened at all. I was shaken, though the web was now still.
My experience with spiders had been limited to Daddy-Long-Legs that got into the house and strung scrappy webbings in the corners of the ceiling. Detroit didn’t have black widows or brown recluse spiders, or any other scary spiders that I knew about. Spiders were funny old-man-like things that wobbled comically across their artless stringings. I’d seen beautiful gossamers before, certainly, but had never understood their purposeful design or seen the spider’s deadly expertise.
Just after that incident, I read The Hobbit for the first time. When Bilbo and the dwarves got to the Forest and had their encounter with the spiders, I felt that encounter viscerally. The stickiness of the webbing, the quickness of the spiders, the bobbing figures on the lines overhead, even the smell of the loam underfoot as Bilbo jumped and scrambled and dodged about—all was so immediate and personal. I read the entire section with eyes so wide open that they stuck when I finally tried to blink!
The Hobbit lead right into the Lord of the Rings, of course, and my heart contracted with horror when the monstrous Shelob stalked the hobbits in her lair. I felt the sting of the venom with Frodo, and shouted out with Samwise as he battled the malicious beast. This was what it had felt like for the beetle!
What does this have to do with thinly-sliced cauliflower? Nothing, and everything. Imagination is a POWERFUL thing, and creativity relies entirely on the imagination. I cannot create something until I can see it in my mind, and neither can a reader. I look at cauliflower and see fairy props. Presented properly, I can make a reader see that too if he's ever seen cauliflower. That’s the difficulty with fiction—fantasy and sci-fi in particular—points of reference are essential, they give the reader a connection, an image, a reason to care. I CARED about Bilbo and Frodo because they were battling a spider—if they’d fought a wombat or a horned-gruntlebeast I’d have been “ho-hum…another monster.” But I FELT the sticky web, the burning sting, the sweaty fear of a known (if much smaller) danger.
[Raise my right hand] So, I solemnly pledge from this day forward to have faith in the imagination of my reader, and to supply adequate reference points of a familiar nature (and no wombats). Amen.
Things at rest tend to remain at rest. Things in motion tend to remain in motion. And it takes quite a bit of schnizzle (as my friend, Ian, would say) to change from one to the other.
I believe this is called the Law of Inertia. Or maybe it’s one of Newton’s Laws. Science is not my area of expertise, so I could be entirely mistaken about the titles or names, but I’m very sure of the truth of this notion.
I’ve noticed that when I sleep in, it takes a lot longer to actually wake up. And when I sit around playing video games (ok, Drue, I’ll admit that I’m addicted to that game – but I’ll get over it before you get your room truly clean)…as I was saying, when I sit around all day, it’s much harder to get started on dinner or a project than when I’ve been over-busy all day. Time off can be counter-productive.
Having been out of work since March, I’ve been suffering from IGAD syndrome (I’ve Got All Day). I didn’t make this up. I read it somewhere and I’d gladly give credit to the originator if my head could hold two thoughts together without them knocking each other out. Unfortunately, I’ve only just got this idea to wake up and it’s probably the other idea who remembers.
IGAD means that I don’t need to start on it (whatever “it” is) until later because, ah, you’re ahead of me…I’ve got all day. So I play my FrontierVille, or—well—play my FrontierVille until Ed comes home for lunch and catches me still in my nightie, with greasy hair, sitting at the computer. I often jump up and try to look like I’ve been doing something significant, but we both know.
So, using my vast scientific knowle…er…knowing vaguely that if I wanted to get myself out of my state of inertia, I’d need to do something drastic, I began making deals with myself. Okay, that may not seem drastic, but a body has to start somewhere. I told myself that I’d do five actions on FrontierVille, then go unpack a box. Then three actions and fold a load of laundry. Five more actions and start the potatoes for dinner. And it’s worked! Not only have I unpacked quite a number of boxes, done all the laundry (including ironing all of Ed’s shirts), and made lots of food, but tonight, I started two new watercolors.
I don’t know if my kind of personality can ever be regulated and dependable (unlikely), but I’m hoping that I can remain active and vibrant and creative. The inertia that keeps me dull and slothful can also keep me humming along…I just need to say IGAD, I’ve Gone And Dunnit!
“It's amazing how something so small and so new can become the center of your universe so immediately. Unconditional love takes on a whole new meaning...”
My oldest daughter gave birth in late June. This quote was something she wrote on her Facebook profile last week. Suddenly, old definitions have new meanings. She’s had a Galileo moment…. she’s realized that she’s not the center of the universe; she revolves around something else.
I think this is the real reason that we have children: to knock us out of the center of our own lives. People without children have to work much harder to gain that all-important perspective that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Parenthood is a clever construct that gets parents to grow up while they think they’re raising children.
I remember when this mental shift happened to me. I was holding this very daughter. I’d had a long, difficult labor and gone gratefully to sleep while my mother and sister took the baby to hold and gloat over all night. The next morning, alone for the first time, I gazed at her serene face, breathed in her sweet smell, and felt the earth move under me, inexorably shunting me off to one side. She provided me with something more important to consider, which is the first step in “putting away childish things.”
It is a profound joy to watch one's children repeat that process, follow that same path, experience those same poignant moments. It’s what we usually mean when we say life has come “full circle.” I just never realized, when I was younger, that when people talked about life coming "full circle," the emphasis was on the FULL rather than the circle.
I’m having an affair. I’m completely infatuated, enamored, bewitched. And I’ve been this way for a very long time.
Hey, whoa! Don’t fret yourself. Ed and I are still as happy as the proverbial clams. In fact, Ed’s in the same besotted state and I’m not upset about it at all. Indeed, sharing our obsession brings us a great deal of pleasure. We’re both simply smitten with words.
There are just so many of them, and they do such a great many wonderful things! Nice, normal, everyday things like flush and wash; solemn, important things like communicate and pontificate; fun and mischievous things like squirt and tickle; or naughty things like bait and switch. Of course, that last was actually a phrase, but words were definitely involved.
The thing to remember about words, though, is that they have to be used. A word left too long unused dries out and turns to a nasty, powdery bit of bleh when a person finally tries to put it back into circulation. Think of “whom.” It is almost impossible to say “to whom” without pursing up the lips and giving the head a little snooty jiggle as though the spirit of a withered old British governess had taken over for that moment. It’s a shame. Grammar doesn’t have to be sanctimonious and prudish just to be proper.
Words are breathtakingly expressive—it is, of course, their main function: to express. Think of bloviate. Even someone who has never heard that word knows instinctively what it means when it’s used to describe a Senator. And words are succinct. Contemplate euphoria. Describe it in less than five words. Difficult, huh? Yet that one word delivers whole paragraphs of experience in four syllables.
I’m opening my blog with this little confession about my ongoing frolic with words to give my readers fair warning. I’m not embarrassed to use flamboyant or old-fashioned or uncommon words. I’m not likely to swear, but I may bring swear words to mind. At any rate, that has been my experience with my children.
I hope to irritate my writing muse enough with my Thursday scribblings to get her to come out and play with the characters in my stories. If I irritate you at the same time and make you think of more words, even if they’re just to throw at me, then I will feel as though my time has not been wasted. Please feel free to use the comments section to deploy them in the direction of my quivering psyche. Joyous day.
