More to snack on

Three thoughts on creativity

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Hi, friends! It’s time to serve up another bite-sized issue of Name Three Things. Okay, it’s more like a small meal, but you’ll still be able to swim afterwards.

Three Thoughts on Creativity Inspired By Other Creative People

1. A creative approach to time management. Many years ago, my father-in-law gave me his collection of paperback novels by John D. MacDonald, a series written from the 1960s through the mid-80s. The main character was a guy named Travis McGee, a self-described “salvage consultant” who lived on a houseboat he won in a poker game.
   
   I remember loving these books — not just their musty smell, which I inhaled compulsively (IYKYK) — but their ability to pull me into their world in the old-school way books used to do before smartphones destroyed my attention span. I remember none of the plotlines, but two things remain. My regret over eventually giving that collection away (what was I thinking?) and the philosophy Travis McGee lived by. He “took his retirement in installments.”
   
   Like McGee, I make my living as a freelancer. Unlike McGee, I possess none of his relaxed attitude when it comes to lining up my next gig. Unless I have a full pipeline of projects, I’m shaking the trees for work. There are other notable differences between us. For one thing, my work isn’t dangerous, so I rarely need downtime to recover between gigs. For another, I work on multiple jobs at one time. No “one project/one humongous payday” situation happening here.
   
   I’m nowhere near retiring. But I started thinking that maybe “retirement in installments” could offer some balance, Like deciding on a beautiful spring afternoon that I’m done working for the day, and not beating myself up for bumping a to-do to tomorrow. Or allowing myself to keep Fridays meeting-free, in case I want to step away from my office for some me-time. Perhaps these small concessions could be framed as a form of micro-retirement — a way of embracing my inner Travis McGee. (And, for the record, I’m officially claiming ownership of the term micro-retirement.)
   

2. A creative on-ramp. I’m reading “The Book of Alchemy,” the beautiful new book by

   Suleika Jaouad
   that she describes as “a creative practice for an inspired life.” Instead of devouring it quickly, I’m savoring it one chapter per day and journaling to every prompt that’s provided at the end of each chapter’s guest essay.
   
   In her introduction, Suleika writes about getting past her own writer’s block by journaling, tricking her brain into bypassing her inner critic. Still, she often struggled to journal and finally broke through by using the words of other writers as an entry point:
   
   “In search of a way in, I sought out the voices of other writers who had famously kept journals … before cracking open my own journal each morning. To prompt myself — to push myself beyond myself — I would read a page or even just a paragraph, often selected at random. The experience was kaleidoscopic. A sentence, an idea, an anecdote could turn the barrel, refracting and reframing my perspective.”
   
   It struck me, reading her inspiring words, that I’d intuitively done the same thing on the art side ever since I was a graphic design major in art college, back in the days before the internet. I called it “feeding my head.” Anytime I had a new assignment for school, I’d grab one of my dad’s art books — like an art directors’ club awards annual or a directory of illustrators, each page a portfolio of a different artist’s work — and I’d slowly leaf through it, soaking it all in. I kept a sketch book, marker, and pad of post-its by my side and noted anything that sparked inspiration, from a color palette to a font to a visual concept. I collected those random bits of ideas and images as compost for my own new ones.
   
   As a writer, I should be doing the same thing, collecting bits of dialogue and creative formats into a Commonplace Book. Why am I not doing this? As a designer, there was more of an immediate link between “I have to come up with a logo for this specific business” and my subsequent search for inspiration. I had a target and my brain did the work of pulling the right images to the foreground.
   
   With writing, I’m so aware of not wanting to be influenced by someone else’s words, lest I unconsciously borrow them, that I haven’t intentionally “fed my head” before sitting down to write.
   
   My mind jumps to the wonderful movie, Finding Forrester, about a high school boy who befriends a reclusive, famous novelist (played by Sean Connery) who invites him to borrow his words as a way in to his own writing. This becomes a pivotal plot point in the film.
   
   I know being a lifelong reader has made me a better writer. Maybe my takeaway from Suleika’s approach is to warm up my brain by reading and borrowing one thought from the other writer to use as a writing prompt. A creative on-ramp, if you will.
   

3. A creative catch-up. I just finished the audiobook of Curtis Sittenfeld’s newest short-story collection, “Show Don’t Tell” (which I highly recommend). In the story, “A for Alone,” an artist describes how she created her own artist’s residency at home, where she watches documentaries, pores through art books, and experiments with her own art.
   
   I wasn’t a writing major in college (see above) and I’ve never taken graduate courses or pursued a writing degree. But over the last five years, I’ve taken Zoom courses and webinars in journalism, humor writing, and memoir and I’ve read craft books and subscribed to literary journals. That passing mention of a home artist’s residency inspires me to take a more intentional approach to filling in my educational gaps.
   
   Pre-pandemic, I used to do creative excursions with my best friend, a talented, self-taught motion graphics artist and animator. We’d go to art festivals or museums or wander a campus with great architecture just to feed our heads. It’s time to bring that back. I also want to compose a reading list of books every writer should read. Craft books, novels, memoirs, poetry.
   
   Do me a favor? Drop a few titles into the comments. And let me know how you nurture your own creativity.