Forged With Fire:Creativity and the Creative Spirit, Part 3

On Growing Up Creative

Part 1 is on September 6, Part 2 is on September 10

No exploration of creativity would be complete without some discussion of the creative process as a whole. Yet what I discovered in my interviewing was that people are afraid sometimes to look at the process objectively. They are afraid to dissect what they do; they fear that in examining their creativity, they will somehow jinx the process or take away the magic. In truth, nobody can take away your magic, for it is not for the taking, only for the giving up.

I myself have had an obsession to learn as much as I can about the creative process. This infatuation with the mechanics of the process comes, I believe, from a need to constantly reassure myself that I am indeed creative. This may sound odd, considering that I not only give workshops and talks on writing and creativity, have a website and this blog that you are now reading, but also I have seven works of fiction and a workbook on fiction writing published - and I live a good deal of my time in my imagination. However, as so often happens with creators, their products, their offspring, their creations do not seem to be part of them.

I can look at my eight books and say I wrote them, and know I did, but once the writing, the flurry of creation and the long months or years of writing are over, I feel little connection to the books, the characters and their journeys. I know I wrote them because my name is on them, and I remember writing them, but remembering is not experiencing them. Once the book is complete, the organic process is over and can not be recaptured but must be found anew in another creation.

So, when I am not writing, I recall the experience illusively, as one might recall a dream, and I sometimes fear that I will never be creative again. The charge, the joy of creativity does not come from what was. Creativity must be experienced again and again, through art, through relationships, through innovations and inventions, through the challenging and the doing, through the risk-taking and the dark hours of the soul if it is to remain organic. Creativity may flourish in the light, but it is born in the dark, shadowy, moist, murky, juicy places of the unknown and the unknowing, of the unformed and the ill-formed, in the chaos where nothing is clear and everything is possible.

Picasso said that artists (and I will change that to creators) are "destroyers of nicely ordered systems." My interpretation is this: the first nicely ordered system a creator must destroy is her own: her profile, the face of survival that she shows to the world. For that face is an image that is reflected most often from the dictates of the mind, not the wishes, dreams and truths of the heart and soul.

Kathryn Hepburn said, "You cannot change the music of your soul." And those of us who can hear the music of our souls are lucky indeed. I believe that in a very real way finding the music of the soul is the prime mover of the creative journey, and to hear that music we must break down old barriers, the old ordered systems of our life 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 first be heard.

Most if not all of our nicely ordered systems, come from the expectations and the environments in which we grew up. If you are insecure about your creativity or 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 take the safe path, the one already staked out, the one that has turned too much of America into one big generic shopping mall. But what if you start exploring the out of the way hidden stores where the secret treasures can be found? As Alan Alda said, "Originality is unexplored territory. You get there carrying a canoe. You can't take a taxi."

Growing up, I stayed lived my parent's values. My goal was called "Smart 800", shorthand for getting A's in school and 800 on the College Boards. Success in my family was measured one way, academically. I walked the straight and narrow like a dutiful daughter for so many years, believing that life's greatest success was marked by graduating from an Ivy League college.

Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong in that. It simply wasn't my way. And the ultimate result was that I pigeon holed my passions and put little worth in my creativity. 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 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.

And so I grew up and married young -- but I did marry 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 valuing my going to Barnard College and 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 gets 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 or less important than the other stories that will unfold in this series - no more important than your own struggle to claim your writer and 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.

The next part of this series is An Overview of the Creative Process…

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© Emily Hanlon, 2005, May not be reprinted without permission.
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