Pick Your Size Well Refilling

Refilling the creative well is like drink sizes at one of those massive gas station / truck-stop arrangements. You can get the kiddie cup, something approaching medium, or the ridiculous, last-for-days and have-to-pee-every-hour grand gesture hydration solutions. Filling the creative well comes in all those sizes, too. If it doesn’t for you, I argue it should.

Kiddie cups: These little sips are daily practices. Work out, maybe. Meditation. Breathing exercises. Yoga nidra/NSDR. That twenty minutes after work and before the dinner rush wherein you sneak- read a few pages of a book. Journaling. Singing when you’re alone in the car. Spending ten minutes outside in the early morning sunshine admiring the trees and plants and flowers. The daily kiddie cups may be small, but they keep the well topped up and the workings clear of debris. There’s a saying among hikers: It’s the water in your body that keeps you alive, not the water in your canteen. Refilling the creative well feels very much the same. In the throes of stressful daily live, whether there’s a deadline or other pressures, most of us can’t afford anything more than a few short, stolen moments to pour a few ounces back into ourselves. A few ounces at a time won’t keep us topped up, but they will sure slow the draw down.

Medium-ish: These rehydration investments are bigger investments, whether in time, effort, or cash. A class. An entire day alone with no one else setting the agenda. A solo trip to an art gallery or a museum or a bookstore. A day of enjoyable outdoor activities. Sailing, hiking, biking, exploring, whatever. It can be short writing retreats or a local conference. The point of the medium-ish creative well refill project is to tip a lot more into the well to bring the levels markedly up. If you’ve watched any ancient Egyptian archeology shows in the past decade, picture the Nile measuring systems the Egyptians built to keep track of flooding. They knew that if the Nile floods didn’t hit a certain height, it meant famine and they could plan. We’re using our medium drinks to bring up the level of the Nile. We don’t want creative famine. So, we need a cadence of regular pours to inch that level back up above the uh oh mark.

Grand gesture: These are huge, major investments in well refilling. They’re great emergency measures akin to getting an IV in the ED. The grand gesture can be life and soul saving after major burn out. Everyone’s grand gestures will look different. It could be a major conference (San Diego Comicon, DragonCon, etc.) It could be a longer-term writing retreat or even an artist-in-residence situation. The grand gesture is meant to be a big adventure, preferably undertaken solo. You shouldn’t have to share your Big Gulp. Not when you need it. It’s supposed to shake you up. It’s supposed to be faintly scary. Refilling the well like this should feel a little wild and uncontrollable as if you might be swept out to sea by the force of the flood. I mean, okay. My analogies are breaking down and getting tangled up. In my case, it was a ten-day trip to Ireland. Ten days of beginner mind because everything was new and bright and shiny and well-filling. Your grand gesture may, like mine, be a once in a lifetime event. That’s fine. I just hold that everyone trying to refill a creative well should indulge in a grand gesture at least once in life, understanding that grand gestures may need to be scaled to accommodate budgets, schedules, and envious spouses.

 

Just for the Fun of It

 Creativity is rarely sticks to a single track. Writing may be my major means of processing the world and my experiences of it, but once you start getting paid for a creative endeavor, it's vital to have other creative outlets. It's especially vital to have have creative outlets that have zero pressure on them. We all need space to for Beginner's Mind. We all need space to experiment and try things without any expectations around the outcome. It's necessary to do things where you've given yourself permission to do them simply because you enjoy them - even and especially if you do them badly. I think it's super important to do things where enjoyment and outcome are divorced from one another. Most of us who write started writing simply because we enjoyed it. We enjoyed the process of telling a story, even if the story we told was riddled with errors or lacked conflict or a character arc. We just wrote because it was fun.

Then one day, someone sat up and said, hey, I'll pay you for that story! Also, I want to pay you to write it again! Exactly like this one, only different! But I need  you to do it three days! GO!

The pressure to Get It Right (TM) is real and it's heavy. So yes. Having other creative places to go for rest and fun matter. When it comes to creative activity other than writing, I'm a bit of a dilettante.

Most of the time, I cook or bake. This morning, it was a thrown-together, totally made up vegan buckwheat pancake batter. Hit out of the park, too. Usually, preference is given to recipes I haven't tried before, and I like the complicated ones with a reasonable chance of failure. Yeah, I don't know why. I like the experimental nature of it, I guess. I like going into the process knowing there's a chance it will be inedible at the end - or I'm going to end up with something tasty. Either way, it weirdly takes a lot of pressure off. I cop to having a tic about NEW. I crave new. Given a choice between something I've done or eaten before and something new, I will almost always go with the new thing just for the dopamine hit of new experience.

I'm not entirely sure this is a creative pursuit, but I garden. I like painting with flowers and getting my

hands in the dirt. I'm trying to build something aesthetically pleasing (to me) and that feeds to pollinators. Failure is definitely a thing here because Florida's planting and growing season is reversed from just about every place else in the US. Summer is when everything dies. Or rots because of the combination of heat and humidity. I'm still learning the vagaries. But at the moment, the front yard looks pretty good. 

I paint. Pictures. Rooms. Rescued furniture. Unicorn Spit is my friend. Yes, it's a paint brand. I'm also fond of Dixie Belle paints. Also let me note that while I'm pretty darned good at painting a room, all other painting is done poorly. There's a reason I only rehab rescued furniture. I need cheap canvases so I can try things and make mistakes and learn without destroying something that cost actual money. I've tried paint pours and while I love the results, it's expensive from a paint standpoint. It's a resource intensive method and I'm not to the point where I can justify that kind of outgo for experiments and learning curve.

On low spoon days, I might take pictures. They won't be anything special usually and if they are something special it's a complete accident. Yes, I look for perspectives and shots that intrigue me, but I utterly lack the gene that could make me care about F-stops and Apertures.

When I need something more active, I dance. Badly. But the point of dancing isn't to be good. Or beautiful. It's not ballet. Modern, maybe. Anything I feel like, definitely. It's good therapy. I find it particularly useful for handling anger. It's cleansing in a way other activities might not always be. I have to be in a spiteful mental space for dance though, because I have to not care at all what anyone else thinks or says. And I have to not care that my music might not be to everyone's taste. There are days that the Too bad, so sad energy is a nice, healthy reset. (I mean, obviously not when someone is ill or trying to sleep - this is why the gods created noise cancelling headphones.)

All of these creative pursuits feed my main creative drive to write. They keep me from going too crazy when writing isn't going the way I want. Occasionally, I'll be in the middle of one of them and unbidden, some story tidbit will poke its head up and volunteer a story snippet. But whether that happens or not, each of these activities are worth spending time on in their own right. Just don't ask me to sew. I really, really suck at that.

Preventing Burnout with Non-Monetized Creativity

 If you missed it, SHADOW WIZARD is now available for preorder! It releases September 29, 2022. This is Book One in my new trilogy, Renegades of Magic, and continues the story begun in the Bonds of Magic trilogy. Preorder links below!

     

 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven involves our non-writing hobbies.

 

In various discussions around burn-out and sustainably productive writing habits, I've discovered that many professional authors (as in, getting paid to do it) have another creative outlet that is non-monetized. Ted Kooser, a U.S. Poet Laureate (1004-1006), told me that he painted as a hobby. His paintings were apparently glorious and much-sought, but he'd made the decision to only give them away. It was important to him to have a creative outlet that wasn't connected to money. This was a startling thought to me at the time, and one I've come back to often. 

 

Other authors I've talked with in various scenarios have also discovered that approach: that having a non-monetized creative outlet not only refills the well, but prevents burnout (or allows a creator to recover from it).

 

What happens to many of us - and I'm speaking of authors, but I imagine it happens with all creatives - is that we begin with writing as the hobby. It's the passion, the special something that we do because we LOVE it. Eventually, with persistence, hard work, and luck, we make that hobby into the profession. Then it's no longer the alternative to the day job and other responsibilities. It's become work.

 

Which, let me be clear, is good and natural. I'm a big believer in treating writing like my job. That's how I support myself and my family.

 

Still, to manage the creative self, I've found I need other outlets to refill the well and take the place of that other, special, and relaxing Thing. Keeping it non-monetized is the challenge. Especially since the pandemic began, I think we've all become adept at casting about for side-gigs. In fact, the gig-culture was going strong before that. It's tempting to take that successful hobby - I imagine Ted Kooser's friends admiring a painting, offering money for it, and him turning it down with a slight smile and shake of his head - and begin to dream of taking that art viral and making an avalanche of comforting money from it. 

 

I sometimes think there's a certain magic in refusing that temptation, in enjoying creativity for its own sake. 

 

And magic is precious.

On My Mind: Treating the Writer Gently

 Yesterday, Jeffe shared a blog post from the SFWA blog with me.  Treading on Embers talks about the challenges of existing - much less writing and performing as a public-facing author - while managing chronic disability. In this case, it's invisible disability: chronic migraine disorder. It speaks to any chronic pain disability, though, and brings me to What's On My Mind this week.

How do you treat your writer gently?

Most of us in the writing trenches understand that 80 to 90 percent of the time, discipline is the answer to just about all of our writing woes. But there are days or weeks or months or (gods forbid) years where discipline is crumpled up like a used tissue and cast aside by Life Events (TM). It could be chronic illness that a writer has to contend with and which no amount of discipline will overcome. It could be a crushing and terrible diagnosis and subsequent treatment. It could be the deep pain of sitting in the hospital room with your slowly dying child. Or it could be a tornado of activity, instability, uncertainty, and circumstance changes crushing you into burnout.

Of course taking a break and allowing yourself to rest and heal is the first, obvious answer. But that's physical and mental recovery. There's also a subtler recovery required - more than emotional. I'm thinking about creative recovery.

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way lays out a 12 week path to creative recovery. The program is laid out as a 12-step program because it was the way Julia Cameron charted her course for creative recovery after managing alcoholism. It is useful and it can be powerful. The current issue with the program for me is that it demands going out in public once a week. For me, that's a dicey commitment both with a pandemic that hasn't resolved in our favor and a chronic pain issue. It isn't that I don't *want* to go on Artist's Dates - it's that working a day job means there are no spoons left at 5pm to do anything but take a pain pill and collapse. That doesn't negate the rest of the program, granted. 

I'm just interested in how other people recognize their need for creative recovery and then what they do (or don't) in order to treat that writerly part of themselves with compassion and care - tempering discipline with a bit of nurturing. 

If you've considered how to treat your writer gently, what are you favorite ways of doing that? How do you approach creative recovery if it's ever been necessary for you?