Day 252: Deer

Here's something about creativity that I should know, and yet am continuously learning: it cannot be forced. Creativity is a deer in the woods, picking gingerly through the thicket, and yelling at it will only scare it away. Telling it when to turn up is an exercise in futility. Anger and frustration only drive it deeper into the bush.

The best you can do is create a large and tranquil space within yourself, put out food, ensure there is running water, and then wait. Maybe the deer will be along. Maybe it won't.

If the deer does arrive then you can only be relaxed, let it do its thing, and accept that it is going to leave whenever it wants. Maybe you need it to stay for a full day, but it wanders off after half an hour, and does not return.

This is the nature of the deer.

You're not hunting it. You're not capturing it. You simply want it to come and sit with you. The energy and beauty that the deer bestows upon you only works when the deer is free. Creativity cannot be made to happen.

But of course this doesn't mean you have to wait to be productive. Oh no. The deer might well come and go as it pleases, an animal spirit beholden to no mortal laws, but you, if you are serious about creativity, have to make commitments.

Whether you're painting, writing, sewing baby jumpers, or baking meringues, you have to be able to work whether or not the deer of creativity, of inspiration, deigns to grace you with its presence.

How do you go about this?

There are many tricks. Bum on seat, that's always vital. Get to where you need to work, and put yourself in position. You have to be in that woodland glade, ready, or there's zero chance of meeting the deer.

Schedule your time. Turn off your phone, disable Wi-Fi on your laptop, create a block of time that is for this activity only. Don't leave until the time is over. If two hours feels impossible, do twenty minutes. Do ten minutes. Do sixty seconds. Building a routine of sixty-second blocks, a number of times a day, for a number of months - and sticking to it - you might be shocked by what happens. And you may well find after forcing yourself down to the glade that you've become lost in the sunlight and birdsong, you've met a few deer, and your alarm has long since sounded and fallen silent. Ingraining the habit of getting going is a powerful thing indeed.

Picture where you want to be in the future, say, winning the local meringue baking contest, and try to spend every day moving closer rather than further away from that goal. Go to bed closer than you were when you woke up. Even if only by an inch.

Go for a walk every day. Eat a satsuma. Get enough sleep. Try the Morning Pages. Three sides of free-writing every day, no excuses. They work.

There are many tricks. For me, though, the hardest one to learn has been this:

Get over yourself.

Just get the hell over yourself. Because the truth is that most of what you create, when you sit at your desk, stand at your easel, lean over your stove, will be rubbish. It will be not good. Most of the time the deer will not turn up, there will be drizzle falling, and you'll come home cold and damp.

This is the nature of the deer. This is the nature of the work. This is the nature of life.

Fight it all you want, but it won't change. So best get the hell over yourself, and get on with making things anyway.

You simply cannot put energy into getting that damned deer to do a damned thing. So forget about it, and put your energy into all the rest. There is much to do.

......

Music: Sister Cities, by Hop Along.