What Kills Creativity and What Fosters It

I just finished the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön’s book The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness. I have been hearing about Chödrön for the last few years, and so when the book fell into my hands, I knew I was meant to read it. So glad I did. It’s based on talks she gave to participants at a 30-day meditation retreat in Nova Scotia at Gampo Abbey. In Chapter 6, “Joy,” she writes about a fellow nun who came to the abbey to teach a meditation retreat and how it was a revelation because the visiting Sister emphasized joy. Chödrön writes:

“I hadn’t realized how much emphasis I had put on suffering in my own practice. I had focused on coming to terms with the unpleasant, unacceptable, embarrassing, and painful things that I do. In the process, I had very subtly forgotten about joy.”

I could feel those words as they related so often to my own experience of life—and to writing.

Just seconds after a friend I was on the phone with used the phrase “radiating joy,” I looked down and saw this in the street

If you are a maker—of songs, soups, paintings, drawings, stories, jewelry, knitted items—presumably you find some joy in the act. I find that with writing, joy can be elusive. Perhaps it’s in part because, in order to write something, the stars need to align to gift me both time and confidence. Usually I’m short on one and lacking the other.

So I’ve been trying to get better at carving out the only thing in that duo I have any real control over: Time. I can make time. I can clear my schedule. I can give myself two hours. I can’t necessarily conjure confidence the way the magician conjures the bunny out of her hat. But if I make time and just start, I will find myself writing, confidence or no confidence. Writing begets more writing, and if I’m really lucky, it will just flow without my force. So I just keep showing up because it’s a miracle when that happens.

There is a lot of talk in the writing world about quieting the inner-critic during first drafts when you’re just trying to get the story down. As I’ve been working on my latest book whose working title is Let the Dog Sing, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Koch’s book Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction. In the chapter on memoir writing called “The Story of the Self,” he writes about taking the first steps toward your story: 

“Depending on your openness and your talent, you will be crowded with scrappy narrative possibilities. You may cringe at some of them, and if, like me, you have a strongly critical temperament, it will be easy to find a nasty label for almost anything that comes into your mind: This is cliched, this is sentimental, the other is embarrassing, stupid, overdone, boring, unoriginal. These are the killer words, and what they kill is creativity.”

These words will crowd your mind, pretending to be friends, guardians, “proof of your discernment,” he writes. In the early stages of anything, we’re so vulnerable. This is why we don’t enthusiastically dive into projects when inspiration hits. We’re afraid to let ourselves begin—or if we do begin, we may tell ourselves how lame and pedestrian the work is. We might talk ourselves out of a project even after we’ve spent years on it.

A big part of my writing journey has been to be brave enough to allow more heart in. For Let the Dog Sing, I already have hundreds of pages from notes, interviews, and research. But there are stories I need to include, stories from my childhood that are integral to the book and that I knew would be hard to write. I write in a journal every day when I do my morning stretching, and so I decided to approach these stories in the same way—freely and handwritten. My son Charlie had bought me a beautiful journal for Mother’s Day and to his dismay, I hadn’t started using it yet (it was because it seemed too beautiful and precious to me!) so I decided to use it to write the first draft of these childhood stories for Let the Dog Sing.

I sat down, grabbed a pen I like, opened the journal, and started writing. Was I worried that it wouldn’t be good? Of course. But I told myself: It will be a draft, a perfect ‘shitty first draft’ (a phrase coined by the brilliant writer Anne Lammot in her inspirational best-selling book on writing Bird by Bird). We have to allow ourselves that shitty first draft, which will give us something to work with. The author James Michener once said: “I’m not a very good writer but I’m an excellent rewriter.” We just need to get the words down.

I recently listened to an interview with Neil Gaiman on the Tim Ferris Show, my go-to podcast. Gaiman told Ferris that he usually writes his first drafts of a story in a journal by hand and with a fountain pen. Then, after the entire draft is written down, he begins typing it into a word document, editing as he goes. That’s his second draft. No one sees the first draft; no one has to. Gaiman trusts the process. Dare I say, he might even have fun with it. I mean, he’s written almost 50 books for adults and children.

Neil Gaiman’s notebook for The Graveyard Book

How are we going to blossom into our fullest creative selves if we don’t trust the process, if we don’t find some joy in it? Even and especially with our shitty first draft? Where could our imaginations take us if we allowed ourselves to be as cerebral or emotional or weird or dainty as we dared? What could we create?

Above my desk is a cut out from the New York Times book review of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.

Illustration by Rebecca Clark

In his book Novelist as a Vocation, he talks about his writing process:

“I wake up early, brew fresh coffee in the kitchen, pour some in a big mug, sit down at my desk….Then I muse about what to write that day. Such moments are pure bliss.”

But Murakami wasn’t always so confident with his own writing. His first attempt at writing a novel resulted in a boring book, he tells us. He had been trying too hard to sound writerly, to sound like a novelist, which is the death knell for a writer—to write not in your own voice but the way you think you’re supposed to sound. Nevertheless, that’s perhaps a necessary step for figuring out – and coming to trust – your own voice. Here’s how it went for Murakami—the advice that he finally gave himself:

“Why not forget all those prescriptive feelings about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your own feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?”

Yesterday in the afternoon after finishing work and my domestic duties, I went to a coffee shop, got a latte, sat in a chair, and opened my journal. Do I have to force myself to do this? I have to force myself to stop doing all the other things I could continue doing and carve out this time, even if I’m afraid nothing might come of it. I started writing. It was somewhat painstaking at first. I was a little tired, a little weary, which again, I attribute to a slight lack of confidence coupled with the question of whether I really deserve to be there in a café writing. Then over the course of the next hour, I “locked in,” as my son Charlie puts it. Pretty soon I was writing line after line after line. I would pause and stare at the ground or at the wall or at the back of a patron’s head without seeing any of it. I was all in, thinking, feeling, remembering, rendering. My energy picked up (the latte helped), and momentum coming from and pouring into the act of writing was, dare I say, joyful.  

Is any of it worth keeping? Will any of it make the final cut? I’m not worried about that for now. I’m attempting to foster creativity, not kill it. I’ll invite the critic later—and then my spouse Derek and his ruthless red pen. And the work will be all the better for it. But right now, I’m just going to keep trying to make time, a little every day whether I feel up to the task or not.

“You can do it,” Pema Chödrön tells us, echoing the masters Rinpoche and Thich Nhat Hanh. “You can connect with your joyfulness. You could start right now.”

Thanks for reading.