Why Creativity Breaks Our Hearts
The real risks of creativity + why selfishness + the astonishing grace of Philip Larkin + a detailed writing exercise to get us out of our heads and onto the page in a surprisingly big boisterous way
Daughter in a Rocker (1917–1918) painting in high resolution by Henry Lyman Sayen
I arrived home last night after seven weeks away and am deeply happy to be home. As a former foster child, home means so much more to me than I was ever able to understand until well into adulthood. And as someone who moved almost every year as a kid, it has turned out that in adulthood, all travel, even good travel for good reasons, provokes some anxiety. Again, it took me decades to fully accept this about myself. I love being home. But, still, I miss the ocean. Don’t we all miss the ocean, as if we are pining for another kind of home, one known and yearned for always by our primal selves? Maybe especially those of us who are landlocked in the wintry Midwest? So, yes, both the happiness and the sadness envelop me today.
Ultimately, though, I am awash in gratitude for the time away and all that I accomplished. As mentioned last month, I have two longform essays coming out later this spring, one an urgently important personal essay on the persistent painful impact of familial silencing in Ilanot Review, and the other a craft essay on child narrators in Assay. Both were written in their entirety on the Gulf Coast, and neither were getting the slightest bit of traction while at home. I wrote about the reasons why in last month’s issue of Writing in the Dark, “Drenched in Thoughts of Place,” but the upshot is that my life is bursting at the seams, with caregiving being a significant activity now, and taking a few weeks away from those demands made a profound difference in a way that nothing else has (i.e., scads of other strategies from “habit hacks” to self-hypnosis apps to totally giving up wine in the evening to promising myself weekends away—which never came to pass, etc.).
As a result of this success, I plan to give myself another such residency next winter, as a failsafe. Yes, and of course I plan to maintain at least some of the momentum I established while on the beach over the spring, summer, and fall! I have to. But I also know that the demands of my life have not decreased, and therefore I will likely be just as thirsty for dedicated work time next winter as I was this winter. When you have as large a family as I do—six adult children, five grandchildren—life can be wildly demanding. To note, the time on the Gulf Coast was not free of all demands. I was working full time while there, and also teaching a freelance class. It was the relief from other responsibilities—mostly babysitting our grandchildren those 15 or 20 hours a week—that made the difference.
In other words, I did a selfish thing. But not that selfish. Three of our kids and two of our grandchildren (in two separate groups) visited our beach house while we were there, which was a total delight. As evidenced here in this photo of me with our oldest granddaughter, Esme.
And the thing is, seven weeks is a long time, it’s true, but … that still leaves 45 other weeks of the year! So, maybe it wasn’t selfish, per se, but rather, honoring of self.
And that honoring meant that in addition to the essays, I also got the big shapes of my novel manuscript wrestled into position and am now set up to write the missing scenes. Then, I begin the exciting work of making this big mess of a thing good (hopefully) or, at least, better (guaranteed). As I navigate the unpredictable waters of a literary life—especially as a late bloomer—I like to remind myself of the things I can control (making the work, revising it as best I can, offering it to the world) and the things I can’t control (whether the world, aka the agents and editors, love my work). So far, I am finding that if I work hard enough and keep offering, things do happen. Not always as I imagined, of course, but sometimes better. So, I continue to do the work, which is the one part I have agency over.
And isn’t doing the work hard enough? Because I teach as well as coach writers one on one, I know very well that the work is demanding. So much so that often, we resist it. I know I do. My students do. We love writing, but we resist it. This is the mystery that can often floor me hardest: I have so little time for my writing that one would think I’d leap to the page in ecstasy when time finally permits. But, of course, I don’t. Once upon a time, I’d berate myself for this creative resistance. I even sometimes thought, way back in the early years, that maybe this resistance meant that I wasn’t a “real” writer, that I wasn’t quite right for the writing life.
But these days, working closely with writers as I do, I know better. First, as we know, writing is hard, and that’s one reason we resist it, the same way we resist exercise even though we (theoretically) want to exercise. It’s like Dorothy Parker said:
I write with great difficulty, but have managed somehow to accomplish 40 short stories (all published in fugitive fashion) and five novels within the last three years, and a lot of special unsigned articles. Believe my forte is the novel. Don’t like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line, work only three hours a day, but work every day.
But there’s more to it, even, than the labor of writing. There’s something else, I think, about the vulnerability and the heartbreak we know is inherent in this work. A couple of years ago, Eric Kaplan wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times called “Five Theses of Creativity,” with the subhead, “It permeates life, and, like love, it can break your heart.” I loved the whole essay and have brought it into my creative writing classrooms from time to time, but one Kaplan’s five theses, the two that mean the most to me are four and five:
Thesis No. 4: Creativity can break your heart. It’s inherently risky. You might say, “Creativity seems so joyous and fun — why isn’t everybody creative all the time? Why do people steal and plagiarize instead? Why do they follow rules when they’re trying to be creative? Why do they always make the hero a handsome man, or always make song lyrics rhyme? Why do they copy what’s worked before?”
Because creativity can fail. If you knew ahead of time that the thing you were making would work, you wouldn’t be engaged in creativity. And when it doesn’t work, it breaks your heart. You look like a fool; what’s worse, you feel like a fool. It’s very embarrassing. But you can’t get the joy of creativity without risking pain and failure — which is also true of love.
Thesis No. 5: Creativity is a kind of love. That’s why it can break your heart, and why, at the same time, it can make the world come alive. When you’re creative, you make things fresh and new; when you love someone or something, you do the same.
I resonate so hard with this idea that creativity and love are much the same, and that both can break our hearts. This, I explain to my students, is why we sometimes avoid completing our essays, stories, or books (wouldn’t it be better just to start something new?). Because to complete something means to admit it the best essay/story/book we could make at a given point in time. What a tragedy, really. Completing a work is as much a sorrow as a celebration. I love when other creative people find ways of acknowledging this intractable truth, because it makes it less painful to know others feel it, too.
So, while I was on the ocean, I sent off the first pages of the novel to AWP’s writer-to-agent competition, which AWP offers to all registered conference goers. The idea is that agents from participating agencies read the submissions and, if they like what they see, they meet with you during the conference. I figured for the steep price of attending AWP I might as well send in my pages. (By the way, if you are going to AWP, I’d love to say hello!)
So far, two fantastic agents have scheduled meetings with me during the conference. Having already published one book without an agent, I know all too well that this does not mean anything much until the agent reads the full manuscript and decides to offer representation. Even then, an agent still has to be able to sell the book, for which there are no guarantees. But for now, I’ll take this encouragement that the novel’s opening pages, at least, kept them reading!
This—a ritual of celebrating small milestones even when I know the road ahead is long and uncertain—is one of my amulets against resistance. Because if part of resistance is fear of failure, then redefining success to include the many small steppingstones of pleasure along the path, whether or not those steppingstones lead to “the big thing at the end” (which all of us define differently, anyway), then the path suddenly becomes wider and more joyous than before. More beautiful, too.
My goal now is to have the manuscript revised and ready for querying more widely by May. I’ll keep you posted, because although the plot of the novel and its world are not ready for sharing—that’ll come if and when it sells!—the process through which we survive the arduous work of book-building is not a secret for me. I am grateful to the writers who’ve demystified the literary life for me, a literary outsider, by letting me into the messy chambers of their unfinished processes, and I am happy to do the same for others.
Later in this newsletter, in the Spark section, you will find a detailed and unconventional writing exercise to help you overcome resistance. I offer that exercise and the rest of this edition of the monthly Writing in the Dark newsletter with love and gratitude—and a quick reminder of format:
1. Lighting the Craft: What I am learning lately about craft, and my musings about it + any relevant resources.
2. Fuel: What I’m reading, which will include books, essays, poems, other.
3. Spark: A writing exercise for you to work on if you like.
4. Fire & Smoke: Short recap of my own writing life, including the ups, downs, joys, challenges, breakthroughs, and setbacks. And whatever else seems urgent and necessary in a given month.
With love,
Jeannine
Lighting The Craft: What I am Learning
Sometimes, when I’m writing a lot—writing thousands of words a week—the best teacher comes not in the form of craft books or essays, or classes or workshops, or webinars or intensives, but rather, quite simply, poetry. Poets understand the unending power of language, even tired language, to wake us up and make us see the world again—and love it. In addition to the work of Larry Levis (The Selected Levis and The Afterlife) I’ve been reading and re-reading the poem “Coming,” about the coming of spring, by Philip Larkin from his 1955 collection, The Less Deceived.
Oh, the stunning truth at the end—the unusual laughter of reconciliation and what it points at, the child’s ability to know without knowing. This is what I aim for in my own work.
Fuel: What I’m Reading
As mentioned, it’s a lot of poetry for me right now, though I did finish The Secret History by Donna Tartt last month. I’m about to start Cloud Cuckooland (I’ve said that before, but this time I mean it. What are all of you reading? Or, put a different—and better—way, what have you read recently that rocked your world? I want to hear about it! Whether it’s new or age-old, please share.
Spark: A Writing Detailed Exercise to Overcome Resistance & Combat Fear
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