Forged With Fire: Creativity and the Creative Spirit
by Emily Hanlon
Copyright 2011 by Emily Hanlon
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Also by Emily Hanlon
E-books
The Art of Fiction Writing or How To Fall Down the Rabbit Hole Without Really Trying
Print Books
Petersburg, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Love Is No Excuse, Bradbury Press
The Wing and the Flame, Bradbury Press
Circle Home, Bradbury Press
The Swing, Bradbury Press
It’s Too Late for Sorry, Bradbury Press
How a Horse Grew Hoarse on the Site Where He Sighted a Bare Bear, Delacorte Press
What If A Lion Eats Me and I Fall into a Hippopotamus’ Mud Hole?, Delacorte Press
The Art of Fiction Writing or How To Fall Down the Rabbit Hole Without Really Trying, Labyrinth Press
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The Creative Process: A Call to Adventure
Creativity is forged in the fire of the unconscious and the unfathomable depths of the unknown where nothing is predetermined and everything is possible. Its presence is often heralded by the seductive "spark" of an idea or image that brings with it feelings of flight and the godlike brilliance. And yet, for the tens, hundreds, thousands of ideas that burst up out of our unconscious, very few if any get carried to fruition. No sooner does the spark rev us up with the feeling that we can do anything, than we find 101 reasons to cast away the idea, worse yet, stomp it into the dust bin of possibilities that might have been our lives. Clearly, not all our sparks are worth the time and effort it would take to carry them out; not all are even viable -- but the problem for many of us is that we indiscriminately throw out the baby with the bath water. For our creations are truly our babies, born of us, male and female, as surely as our flesh and blood children.
There are some who do not discard these newborns of the unconscious. There are some who have a reverence for these sparks and embrace the risk and the passion it takes to see them through to fruition. These are the creators and innovators – the brave warriors of creativity as I like to call them –and they are everywhere in society, some known, far more unknown. They can be found among people who work under the roof of a shelter for the homeless as well as under the lights of the Broadway stage. They are writers, artists, scientists, inventors, gardeners, businesspeople, and just folks who go through their days and carry on their pursuits and relationships with an energy that comes from living one's life the way one wants. Their appearance may be nondescript or they may, at the age of sixty or seventy wear long, graying pony tail or braids; they may wear wild, bright colors and loads of make-up or they may never get out of jeans and sneakers. Although diversity is the calling card of creators, there are more similarities than can ever meet the eye. The similarities are not, for the most part, tangible, yet they are powerfully shared.
After more than twenty-five years of coaching people on the creative journey as well as interviewing creative people in all walks of life, from writers, painters and dancers to teachers, doctors, physicists, mathematicians and innovators, I have distilled the characteristics in successful creators to these five.
Successful creators are:
1. Passionate about their work
2. Risk takers
3. Technical experts at their craft
4. Comfortable with failure, do not see failure as failure and know how to get the job done
5. Appreciate their uniqueness
Of these five characteristics, passion is the prime mover. In fact, it is safe to say that passion=creativity and creativity=passion. As you might expect then, creativity cannot be taught. Creativity is experiential. It must be unleashed. That’s where the risk comes in.
As a creativity coach, I see myself as blood sister to the white rabbit; my task is to guide those I counsel “down the rabbit hole” and to their own personal Wonderland, which is a metaphor for the cosmic landscape of the creative unconscious. But unlike the white rabbit, I can't tumble down with nary a backwards glance because most of my clients won't follow. Falling down the long dark rabbit hole into the unknown is scary. Which is another way of saying the creative journey is scary. Creativity demands time in the dark, psychic mud of the unconscious. Creativity requires risk and passion and a belief in the power of the unknown. Chaos is integral to the process. For in the chaos, the new, unexpected order lies, waiting to be revealed in all its magnificence. This is a difficult terrain to travel alone.
I didn’t. I had several guides along the way, and I understand their importance in my success. Which is why I see myself as a more than a writing coach. I perceive myself as a guide, leading other into their home in the creative unconscious. I believe in this passionately, for I believe exploring, owning and delighting in this realm are the birthright of everyone on the creative journey. But if this is true, then why is it so difficult? Why do so many of us hold on to the edge of the rabbit hole for dear life? Even when we begin to slide, we hold on (metaphorically!) until our knees and fingertips are raw and bleeding – and the amazing part is that when we finally fall, when the doorways to our creative unconscious open, we wonder why we feared the journey.
Exploring the Risk of the Creative Journey
Picasso said that artists (and I will change that to creators) are "destroyers of nicely ordered systems." What could he mean by destroying “nicely ordered systems?”
I believe he meant that the first nicely ordered system we must destroy is our own: the persona or the face that we show to the world. For our persona is not a reflection of our deep, inner or true self. Our persona is built by the dictates of the mind, not the dreams and truths of the heart and soul.
Kathryn Hepburn said, "You cannot change the music of your soul."
Those of us who can hear the music of our souls are lucky indeed. For to hear that music we must break down old barriers, the old ordered systems of our lives that keep everything neat, tidy and acceptable. There is nothing neat and tidy about creativity. You have to be willing to not only get your hands dirty, but also to slug through the mud, to bushwhack through unexplored back country, to dive into the chaos, and walk, run, fly, or crawl through all those unknown, unseen magical places where the music of the soul can be heard.
Growing Up Creative
Most if not all of our nicely ordered systems, arise out of the expectations and environments in which we grew up. If, as an example, you are insecure about your creativity and creative potential, there's a good chance that creativity in general, and in particular the music of your own soul, were not valued highly in your home. Perhaps risk itself was not a high priority, and you were taught to walk the known, the safe path. In my house success was measured one way, academically. Dutiful daughter that I was, I walked the straight and narrow all during my growing up, believing that life's greatest achievement was marked by graduating from an Ivy League college.
Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong in that. And not that I don’t value my excellent education – but oh, the personal and psychic pain I suffered because I pigeon-holed my passions and put little worth in my creativity, which was labeled “flighty”, even dangerous. Instead of hanging out with the "artsy" kids, I hung out with the "brains", always feeling less than, always competing, always yearning for something, but I didn't know what.
There was no one who encouraged me to believe that my strength lay in my creativity, the intuitive, sensitive, imaginative part of my being that alternatively left my feelings raw and got me in trouble, the part that made me feel like a square peg in a round hole. I was so intent on being smart and fitting into my parents' image of me, I didn't have a clue as to what I was really feeling or wanting. I didn't have a clue that I was slowly dying inside. What I did know was that I was lonely, scared and angry. There I was, sweet, dutiful Emmy Hanlon, and I had a raging beast inside that wanted to tear out people's eyes out and claw out their heart and eat it for breakfast. I wanted someone to notice me! Me! I didn't have a clue that I wasn't noticing myself.
So, how did all that get me in trouble? Not in very big ways in terms of the world. I was too good to be a problem kid. But I wasn't taken seriously in the family because despite my best efforts, I was "flighty." When I was little, I couldn't sit for hours and listen to story books as my sister could. I was always forgetting what I was asked to do. "Send Emily to the store for a head of lettuce and she'll come home with a head of cabbage." Or, "Oh, Emily, you know, we found her in a garbage can on 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue." Family stories that everyone laughed at, and I laughed too, not knowing why. I laughed because if I questioned them, if I cried out, "Stop it! Don't make me an outcast because I'm different!" I was terrified that I wouldn't have any place to belong.
I grew up and married young, falling in love with, thank God, a rebel and someone my parents wildly disapproved of. He was brilliant. I had to marry someone brilliant. But most importantly, he loved my writing. We shared literature and writing, and he had an assurance about himself. Nobody could shake his self-esteem. Which wasn't, of course, true, but it seemed that way to me when I was nineteen and twenty and scared of my own shadow. I wanted some of his boldness. I was desperate to taste the life of the rebel. And I loved that in addition to thinking I was smart, he also loved my flightiness and above all, that he loved my writing.
I see now that what he loved and still loves best is the creative part of me. He needed that for himself just as I needed his boldness. And so we got married as opposites often do, and didn't quite live happily ever after, but always, even through the bad times, we have that unspoken sharing of the soul. And sometimes I think still, in the quiet dark of night, as we cling to each other in sleep, even after the worst of arguments, I think that that sharing through the soul joins us and get us through the hard times. It's a very secret sharing that is inexplicable, even to us.
I remember the day, sometime in the early seventies, we had two little children and were living in Brooklyn and didn't have a lot of money and Ned, my husband, came home with a Smith Corona electric typewriter for me. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. No more following the little portable Olivetti as it skidded across the kitchen table while I typed. And we sent the kids to nursery school – my son wasn't even talking in sentences yet, he was, like his mother, a slow talker – so I could have three mornings a week to write. Terrified, I wrote nothing that first year with my three mornings alone every week and my shining new Smith Corona electric typewriter.
I suspect, in reality, I did write during that first year when my children were in nursery school. I suspect I did because I was always writing even when I was struggling to get all A's. I don't remember writing because I still hadn't come to the point where I valued the writer in me. But she was there. Just as my father wrote after he taught school all day and tutored and then had a third job in a liquor store, I always wrote, because I had no choice. I wrote when I was little, I wrote when I was growing up, I wrote during those years when life swirled insanely about me and I felt as if I were caught helplessly in the currents. Always, writing was my lifeline. I literally envisioned it as one of those white lifesaver tubes they have on ferries and ocean liners. And the tube is thrown out to the cry of "Man overboard!" I was man overboard. I was drowning. I would have drowned, I do believe that, if the writer, the creator in me hadn't quietly and repeatedly lifted me up to the surface so I could get a big gulp of air.
This is only part of my story; there's more, there's always more, and it's no more important than your own struggle to claim your creative soul within. I tell it because it is nice to tell one's story and because I have learned through my years of studying creativity, how to objectify my story. It has been helpful for me to look back and see the many paths I took to get where I am. For embracing one's creativity isn't like turning on a light switch. Bingo, one moment you're in the dark and the next you're in the light. Creativity is a lifelong journey that ceaselessly traverses kingdoms of light and kingdoms of dark. And destroying our nicely ordered systems doesn't just happen once. It happens again and again. For new systems replace old systems, and new challenges first threaten, then beckon.
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An Overview of the Creative Process
Creativity is risky business. Living a creative life demands faith in your inner world and the only way I know to take the plunge is to trust that order will emerge. It must. Order is as integral as chaos to the creative process, but the order will be new and often unexpected. Gertrude Stein put it this way, “You cannot go into the womb to form the child... What will be best in it (your creation) is what your really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”
The process of gestation and birth is a perfect symbol for the creative process, whether it is the birth of a child, an animal, the emergence of a butterfly from the chrysalis or the flower from the seed buried under winter’s frozen earth. Birth is a continual marvel; it warms the heart, brings out the fierce instinct to protect and fills the mind with wonder. We need to hold our own creative ideas in similar awe. We need to give them the warm, safe place in which to germinate. We need to protect them in their newborn vulnerability, which is the same as protecting our deepest self.
The Cycles of Creativity: A Short Review
The Spark of Inspiration
The initial spark of inspiration is creativity’s calling card. It can be an idea for a poem, sculpture, dance or concerto, a new garden, business or invention, a Halloween costume, a party or a gift; it can be a vision of you in a new relationship to others and to Self. Inspiration is non-verbal; it is the life-enhancing wow moment when the vision of what can be –of who you can be – carries you into unchartered territory and the land of possibility.
The land of possibility is the womb of creativity; it is here that you swim on the sea of the unconscious; your spark of inspiration is thrust about by the surging waves of the chaos. This land is not unknown to you. In fact, you visit it every night in your dreams. What sometimes makes it a nightmare is that your mind cannot make sense of this non-verbal world. Which is why mind – with its language, thought and need to analyze – should not be allowed entry into the early stages of the creative process. The mind is also home of the ego, that busy-body who will surely bully his way in and put your spark of creativity under the microscope of judgment! Now, you feel confused. The image that made glorious sense a minute ago feels muddy, vague and stupid – just another one of your dumb ideas. Out it goes!
Gestation
That is why inspiration needs time to gestate unfettered in the unconscious, in the place of mystery, where there is only possibility, not definition. Stillness, patience, passion and risk are all part of the journey through this inner landscape. Here chaos finds form in its own time and at its own pace. If an idea doesn’t work, it floats away of its own accord; the unconscious sends up another idea, possibly close to the first, possibly its polar opposite. We see this happen all the time in nature; and you don’t hear nature giving up in despair. Imagine a plant saying, “Woe is me, my new shoots died. I should have known the sun was going to be too hot today. Why can’t I ever do anything right?” Nature in her wisdom simply lets go, sows more seeds, puts out new roots and the cycle begins again.
After an experiment failed for the ninety-ninth time, Thomas Edison said, “Now I know at least ninety-nine ways it wouldn’t work.”
Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times, but he hit 714 home runs.
You fell, a lot, when you first tried to walk, bike, skate, ski.
There is no such thing as failure in creativity. Not all possibilities pan out, but at every turn, something new is uncovered; every path followed leads to the next. Learning to welcome “failure” as a gift is a sign that you are swimming in the womb of creativity! If allowed to gestate, your creative efforts will give birth; and the outcome will rarely be the one you expected!
The Birth
The period following gestation is the appropriate time for the mind to get to work. Now you think, you organize, you focus on getting the project finished and looking good! It is a busy time, filled with its own energy. And it feels good. You are so productive. The good old mind is clicking away. At the end of the day, you think, “Ah, what a productive day I had! My creative juices were really flowing!”
The rational mind likes to take credit for being the creative genius; but as incredible and invaluable a machine as the mind is, its gears are driven by the work done during the periods of inspiration and gestation. You know you can’t start your car without its battery. Then you need to progress from first gear, to second, to third, to fourth and, if you have a sports car, into overdrive! Zoom, you’re off, the micro mesh working seamlessly as each gear follows the other. So easy to understand for a car, but so hard to understand for the creative process.
The mind’s predominance comes at the end of the process. And because most people don’t realize that they’re laying the foundation during their time floating around in the unconscious, and during their time spent ever so slowly gathering together the exact parts needed to bring the new creation to birth, they value the third stage far more than the first two.
Ten Tips on Writing and Creativity
1. Don’t think. Creating a story or book, when we first begin, has little to do with language or the intellect. Out best ideas will emerge as a spark or image, not as words. Like dreams, they will make little sense. But followed, they hold the key to the creative unconscious.
2. Nothing kills creativity faster than criticism. Don’t share your work-in-progress with people who are critical or whose opinions leave you vulnerable, no matter how much you love them. Good critiquing should leave you inspired, not deflated.
3. Spend time listening to your Inner Critic. He or she is not comfortable with the risks demanded by a creative endeavor. By becoming aware of the foul jabber of your Inner Critic, you can see how your mind puts up roadblocks to your creativity.
4. Being a creator is risky business. Don’t underestimate the tremendous emotional and psychic risks the journey demands. Learn to push ahead even when you are afraid. Learn to love the risk.
5. Nurture your creativity. It is as fragile as a budding flower. Open to the dance. Listen to music that makes you feel like flying. Go for a walk. Laugh with a friend, child or lover. Become a child or lover. Creativity is about feeling.
6. Don’t be afraid to fail. Every successful creator has failed hundreds of times. Failure is an integral part of creativity. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong or stupid. It only means you’ve uncovered a path or technique that does not work.
7. Don’t be afraid to write garbage. Every successful writer writes mounds of garbage. Give your work time to percolate. Play the What If game. In the world of the imagination, anything can happen.
8. Be passionate. Creativity is passionate. Passion is always creative.
9. Creativity is cyclical. You cannot and will not be creative all the time. What is full must empty and what is empty will fill. Creativity has its own internal rhythms. Learn to listen to yours.
10. Learn your craft and write, write, write! The more you write, the better you will get. Discipline yourself. Successful writers are disciplined writers.
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About Emily
I
am the author of seven books of fiction including Petersburg,
published by Putnam’s in 1988. Petersburg
was translated into several languages and became a
best seller in England. Some of my books for children include The
Swing, Circle Home and The
Wing and the Flame.
I have been a writing coach for thirty years. I offer writing and creativity workshops, teleworkshops and teleseminars. I edit manuscripts and work with writers privately the New York City Tri-State area. I live in Yorktown Heights, NY, in northern Westchester County. I also work with students all over the world by telephone. In addition, I hold a yearly retreat for women, Writing, Creativity and Ritual in the US, England and Italy.
Connect with Me Online!
The Fiction Writers Journey Website
Join The Fiction Writer’s Journey Mailing list
Blog: Fiction Writing, The Passionate Journey/
Blog of the Divine Imagination/
