If you are any type of artist or happen to be creative in any way, you have a process. It might not be well-defined or obvious, and you may not even realize it, but it’s there.
Here’s the thing – nearly everyone is creative in some way. I so envy those who can clean and organize a house in one day. I’ll start something in one room, go into another, get distracted, etc., etc. until the day is gone and nothing is done. I’m a Southern woman and I must admit that I could not grow a tomato or make a homemade biscuit if my life depended on it. Not for lack of trying, either. What about people who work with numbers? I cannot even wrap my brain around that concept. The art of small talk. Can’t do it, hate it. All of those things I just listed – art to me.
I’m a writer. I have also been dabbling in some found-object, mixed media visual art and painting. Nevermind that I cannot draw a stick person. That’s not stopping me from trying. After reading something I wrote last week, my husband suggested I try writing a song. Why not? What could it hurt?
My writing process is painful and arduous and usually very time-consuming. Writing a poem, for instance, is like chiseling a sculpture out of a block of marble. The work starts out basically as a short story, a narrative of some sort, or in some cases, a novella. A big chunk of words. At this time, I start the chiseling process – dividing into sections the parts of the story and arranging them into a coherent order. Then, I find more concise ways to express the ideas. Weed out the ones that are redundant or unneeded, or takes the work where it doesn’t need to go. Distil those thoughts down to their essence. Sometimes I end up with a creature entirely different from my initial intention. I love when that happens.
We have all heard those stories about songwriters waking up and jotting down a complete song in 10 minutes. Or Stephenie Meyer’s story about writing the Twilight novels – they just came to her and poured out on the page. I’m going to have to take her word for that one. It is one of my life’s goals to never read a Twilight book or see any of the movies – nor will I ever go to Disney World. It’s personal. Just don’t, please.
Yeah, I’ve written some epic Facebook rants that just “poured out of me” and I’ve done some pretty swift typing to meet deadlines, but I am not so fortunate to have things simply fall out of my brain and onto the page. You should be grateful to me for that. Most of the time, what goes on in there is not for the faint of heart.
Here’s an example of an epic creative process. I have been volleying around a screenplay idea since I was in film school in the mid-1990s. Going on twenty years. The timing is perfect, in today’s society, for what would be my controversial independent thriller. Why have I not completed it? I dunno. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will flow.
Lately, I seem to be finding more inspiration from nature. I was finally doing some work in my backyard today. I got a great idea for a visual piece from decaying hosta leaves I found while raking out my flower beds. Laziness has its perks! If you still have remains of last year’s plants lying around your yard, take a look at their states of decomposition. Today, I found more aesthetic and inspiration among the decay than in the fully grown plants.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the saying goes.
Be your own beholder.
The Middle-Aged Ingenue 
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