In Search of Creativity
Once I got stuck in traffic behind a hand-painted box truck decorated with silhouettes of rebel soldiers kissing Southern belles under trees dripping with Spanish moss. In addition to the Civil War scenes, there was one of those magnetic signs depicting Mary and Joseph bent in prayer over the baby Jesus that read, “Let’s Keep the Christ in Christmas.” I was so tickled by the disparate messages on the reenactor wagon that I wrote an entire novel featuring a reenactor who was a crazed murderer.
I’m not kidding.
At the time, my closest friend here in Charleston was a staid southern lady who abhors coarse language (she’s still my closest friend) and my hairdresser was a drunken slut (she’s no longer my hairdresser) who said things that were totally off the wall. I got to wondering what would happen if those two women were twin sisters who had to live in close proximity to one another.
So I used them as my protagonists.
And for some reason at that time I was intrigued by the still-unsolved murder of Jason Mizell AKA Jam Master Jay from RUN DMC. So, I set the novel in Jam Master Jay’s recording studio in Queens and threw in a snowstorm so none of my characters could escape one another. Unfortunately, I learned as I wrote the novel that the story was really about a member of the dead rapper’s entourage I created, a man I named Solly. I also had far too many characters and the imprisoning snowstorm became problematic because snowstorms in Queens don’t usually trap people inside recording studios.
This is only unfortunate because it means I must totally re-write the novel if it’s ever to see the light of day and I haven’t had time to get to it. But it did earn me an agent who wishes I would figure the whole thing out and start over.
I write all of this to say that I never know what will kick-start my creative process.
But when I’m writing nonfiction the natural world has been my inspiration for virtually every essay. Storms, birds, the beach—shells, rocks, sand, the water, phosphorescence, other birds–wind, flowers, more birds; these are the elements that send my thoughts (preferably down a path toward a beach) on a hunt for the meaning of life.
For example, the magazine Creative Nonfiction has had a call for entries for months for essays about Southern Sin. Every time I turn around somebody is sending me a reminder about the Southern Sin issue and until last week I would shrug and say, “I haven’t got anything to write on the subject.” Of course, I knew that was false because I live in the South and my life is riddled with sin so it was only a matter of time until God revealed the exact sin I was going to be writing about.
Sure enough, last week I was out walking in my neighborhood thinking about the rich gardenia season we were having this year and making mental parallels between the gardenias and the magnolias when blam! I knew the subject of my Southern Sin essay. I can’t say right now what the essay is about because it’s still in the works, but maybe Creative Nonfiction will buy the finished product.
And what keeps me writing on days when too many rejection slips have come in or my husband is mad at me or I’m just feeling lousy? Compulsion, I guess, but also my reading life. Case in point:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of my tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life would stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.
John Keats wrote that poem when he was dying of tuberculosis. He was living in poverty. He was in love with a woman he had no hope of marrying. And the critics had trashed his first published work, Endymion.
The reason I happen to know all of this is because I’m currently reading a biography of Keats titled Posthumous Keats, by Stanley Plumly.
So if you have a story to tell, but you think you’re just not creative enough, go for a walk.
Read a book.
Pay attention.