What We Need to Live More Creatively

Want to live more creatively? Consider simplifying your life.

From time to time I go through bouts of paring down, de-cluttering, getting rid of things I don’t really need—which because of their existence, require me to see and consider them, think what to do with them—and that works to complicate my life. And lessen the time I have for what really matters.

We all want full lives, lives rich with meaning, but not necessarily full of things. Instead, we want around us that which energizes and enlivens and helps us to think in new and exciting ways.

Which brings us to creativity. Elizabeth Gilbert said that “a creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.” And with it, as Martha Graham believes, we experience “a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening.” Which is a pretty good reason to get up in the morning.

What We Need:

So…how can we go about living more creatively? What do we really need? Let’s talk about physical needs first–the supplies or equipment requiring a certain outlay of money. The answer to that depends upon what form our creativity may take. I’m a writer, so my basic needs are for pen and paper, and access to a computer. From time to time, I need to replenish my supply of ink cartridges and printer paper, and if I am putting together a manuscript, I like to have a three ring binder. Pretty simple needs, fairly easy to lay my hands on.

Musicians need mandolins, harps or clarinets, guitar picks and music stands. Visual artists require canvases and paint, brushes and brush cleaning chemicals. We’re talking basic needs here, what essential items we absolutely must possess in order to pursue our writing or painting or music.

But besides these physical needs for equipment and supplies, the things we can see and put our hands around, we have intangible needs which are even more essential—which will encourage and delight us and keep us going. And which we must cultivate.

These include:

A link with the Source from which all creativity comes—for we do not work alone.
Connection with nature and the physical world—in it, we find continuous enchantment and inspiration.
People in our lives—to love and to cheer us on.
Books, music, and art—for they tug at our hearts and lead our thoughts in new directions.
A sense of fun—because it makes everything easier.
Steadfastness of spirit—to stick to the project at hand.
Flexibility—to let go and allow what wants to be created to arrive in its own time.
Time and Energy—to accomplish all the potential that exists within.
Inspiration—it’s all around us, when we have the time to notice, and when we allow it in.

What else would you include on this list? A writing partner? A retreat? Confidence to exhibit your photography?

Parents provide their children with the essentials–food for their bodies, shelter, and safety. But they also provide love and encouragement, comfort and the direction children need to lead complete and fulfilling lives. Let’s do the same for the creative child that lives within.

Exercise for Living More Creatively:

Make a list of three things you can eliminate from your life which do not add value and meaning. And which might work to complicate your days. Maybe it’s that stuffed closet you need to clean out. Perhaps those committee meetings which drain you..
Now, think about what you’d like to concentrate on to be able to live more creatively. Perhaps you’d like to spend time meditating or taking walks outdoors. Maybe you need to clear an hour each day to play with your paints. Make another list of three things.
Now pick an item from each of your lists. Eliminate one barrier to your creativity, and add one which will enhance and meaning to your life.

Wishing you a beautiful and creative week.—Lucy Adkins

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase Writing in Community or our latest book, The Fire Inside.

Because Stories Matter

“Reading is an exercise in empathy,” Malorie Blackman said, “an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” I believe this, and I believe that stories, the reading and writing of them are important. They can make a big difference in our lives. They can help us grow.

Recently I read a book that touched me in a way I did not expect. The book is Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, and I admit that I was attracted first of all because the name of the title character is the same as mine. In addition I admire Strout’s previous Pulitzer Prize winning novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge. So I knew I was in for some good writing. But I did not expect to be so moved, so affected as I was.

The novel takes place in the year 2020, in the first days of the Pandemic—remember those days? When we did not really know what was happening, but we were alarmed. And as time went on, we became even moreso. In the beginning of the book, writer Lucy Barton, is convinced by her ex-husband that “to save her life” she must leave her New York apartment and take up residence with him in a house in a small town in Maine.

So the story is about the fears of the pandemic, but also its freedoms that can be found living in solitude. Living a simpler life. In addition, it is about the relationship between Lucy and her ex-husband, Arthur. As well as the domestic difficulties of their two grown daughters. All of which makes for interesting plot dynamics.

But the part of the novel that most intrigues me has to do with a woman Lucy meets while volunteering. (Fully masked and socially distanced, of course) at a Food Pantry. The woman is Charlene Bibber, fifty-something years of age who works as a cleaner in a retirement center.

Charlene is somewhat of a character, and though the two are of vastly different backgrounds and occupations, Charlene is funny and honest and the two find many things in common. As women of a certain age, they worry about thinning hair, about losing things. About whether the quarantine is causing them to “lose their minds.” And as time goes on, a true friendship forms. In our times of sticking to our homogenous social circles, Lucy recognizes how extraordinary this is, and how valuable.

Then the woman remarks that she is glad they don’t talk politics. And when Lucy sees the bumper sticker on Charlene’s car lauding a certain president she detests, she has a moment of awakening.

This is just a small moment in the book, but it is an important one, one that gave me a great deal to think about. It has been said that fiction is a lie that over and over reveals the truth. In reading stories, we find this. And in writing stories, developing well-rounded characters, we inhabit the mind of “the other” for a while, and our lives become more expansive, fuller. We become rich in ways we couldn’t have imagined. –Lucy Adkins

Writing and Creativity Exercise

Think about books you’ve read that have widened your understanding of someone different from you. Books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X or I Am Malala. Consider sharing the titles of these books in the Comments.

For the next poem or story you write, think about writing about someone of an entirely different background from you. You might write offering a different perspective of someone you considered a bully as a child, or someone in your elementary school class who couldn’t seem to learn to read. Take the point of view of an individual from a different socioeconomic class. Write and see what enlightenment may happen.

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase Writing in Community or our latest book, The Fire Inside.

Wild Passions

Always I have loved gardens and gardening, but about 15 years ago after moving into a new house (new to me, anyway) and acquiring a yardful of plants and flowers, I suddenly became obsessed with all things relating to flowers–perennials, in particular. It became for me my wild passion. I checked out books from the library—Perennial All Stars and Perennial Combinations (two I remember), and pored through the pages. I loved everything about those books. I liked the pictures, of course, the descriptions of the various plants, and I especially liked their names.

There was the elegant Lady’s Mantle, the exotic Siberian Iris and Golden Hakone Grass. There was Purple Toadflax—what was that? Silver Wormwood and Bear’s Breech? It was almost as if there were years and years of ancient lore underlying each plant, and I wanted to learn about them all. I indulged myself in those books, and then in as many plants as would thrive in the twenty by forty patch of soil under my care.

It’s wonderful when these “wild passions” make their appearances, making each day a little more exciting, each new encounter adding wonder and meaning and fulfillment to our lives. Of course there are romantic passions. And relationships with family and friends. But if we are lucky, we will experience all sorts of grand passions. Like a passion for learning, for music, perhaps, or for gardening. The more we have, the better. I think that’s how we were meant to live: like children finding delight in each new thing, like lovers wild for what we love.

From time to time, I’ve had flings with crewel embroidery, ceramics, and macramé—remember macramé? Those passions came and went. Others have been more enduring. I love the work of poet, Mary Oliver, and have bought every book of hers I could lay my hands on. The same with Linda Pastan, Kim Addonizio, and Dorrianne Laux. Also Joyce Sutphen. A new discovery for me is poet George Bilgere, and I highly recommend his book, The Good Kiss. And I greatly admire the novelists Alice Hoffman and Chris Bohjalian. There are many more, of course, and more out there I haven’t discovered yet. The thought of that send chills down my spine!

And now we come to that other great love affair you might be experiencing—that with creativity, in whatever form it takes. “Passion is energy,” Oprah Winfrey said. “Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” Let that passion burn. Embrace it, take that passion to a beautiful place, and make it yours forever. It’s a wonderful way to be alive.

What about you? What are some of your great passions?
–Lucy Adkins (Note: This appeared in a slightly different version in The Fire Inside by Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed)

Writing Exercise:

Read the Poem “Night Fishing” by Peter Sears.
Make a list of some of the human emotions/conditions…like loneliness, happiness, a feeling of self-satisfaction. You can think of more.
Make a list of some of the activities you do…like fishing, mowing the lawn, making a pie, and so on.
Choose one of the human emotions/conditions, and pair it with an activity.
Write, beginning with a first line that makes a comparison between the human emotion or condition and the activity.

You might be surprised at what happens!

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase Writing in Community or our latest book, The Fire Inside.

Living Among the Glories

We are what we eat, the old saying goes, and this is true, in that what we feed our bodies affects who we become as physical beings. Similarly, who we become spiritually and emotionally is influenced by what we feed our souls. As does nature.

As a people, we evolved living in nature. We wandered the plains, tended plants and animals that shared the world with us, woke to majestic sunrises and watched in awe as the heavenly bodies crossed the skies. How did this all come to pass, we wondered. We flourished, breathing deep of the rhythms of the earth.

Your Wild and Precious Life

“Tell me,” Mary Oliver wrote, “what is it you intend to do with your wild and precious life?” What a wonderful question! And one we answer every day with every decision we make. Every action we take. And now that it is spring, the time of new beginnings, it’s a good question to ask again.

As children, we make discovery after discovery; every day brings something new; and we learn, we delight, we find joy in one wonderful new experience after another. As we grow older, the pace of discovery slows down, but we still have many opportunities to make new and exciting finds, and open up our lives.

Perhaps some spring, we decide to plant a few flowers, and suddenly find ourselves intrigued with the world of gardening, plotting grand new schemes of beauty for the back yard.

Writing From the White-Hot Center

This last year I discovered a new writer that I love, the novelist, Lily King. In an essay in the back of one her novels, she tells about doing a reading at an Ivy League college in which, during the Q and A afterwards, she was asked “what factors determine your authorial distance from the narrator?” She responded that “I don’t think when I write. I am like a blind worm on the ground.” I love that! “A blind worm on the ground.”

She goes on to relate how she loves English literature classes and has been an English teacher herself. How she’s discussed and taken great interest in English-teachery things such as themes and yes, authorial distance. But that when she writes, she doesn’t use her “English teacher brain.” Not in the first draft of writing, “What you need,” she writes, “all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain.”

Gerald Stern and The One Thing in Life

A month ago, I learned about the death at age 97 of poet Gerald Stern. I knew only a handful of his poems: “The Dancing,” “Waving Goodbye,” and “Stepping Out of Poetry,” but I loved those poems. They got me in the stomach, punched me with their emotion. And hearing of his passing, I knew that I needed to read more of his work. These last few weeks that is what I have been doing.

I read again “Stepping Out of Poetry” in which he reminisces about getting on “the old yellow streetcar” and going to the public library, the joy he found there: “What would you give,” he asks, “for your dream/ to be as clean and simple as it was then/ in the dark afternoons, at the old scarred tables?”

I found and read “Waving Goodbye,” about sending his daughter off to the next stage of her life, experiencing her loss “as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her/ walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek…”

Then there is “The One Thing in Life,” a poem he considered as one which best described him and his life in poetry. Here are the last five lines:

There is a sweetness buried in my mind;
there is water with a small cave behind it;
there’s a mouth speaking Greek.
It is what I keep to myself; what I return to;
the one thing that no one else wanted.

How lucky he was to recognize that buried sweetness, to explore that small cave. How lucky for us to be able to read his poetry. And wonder about the wonderful one thing in life which exists for each of us. –Lucy Adkins

Writing Exercise:

Read “Waving Goodbye” and “Stepping Out of Poetry”
Think about some people or ways of life you have said goodbye to. Jot down a few.
Think about some fond remembrances of the past and list some of these.
Write, beginning with the phrase “What would I give……..” Go on from there and see what happens.

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.Or follow this link to purchase our latest book, The Fire Inside.

Want to Consider Collaboration?

Ever think about collaborating with another writer or artist on a creative project? Wonder how it works? Bryan Collins, host of the “Become a Writer Today” Podcast recently interviewed Becky and me about our collaboration on our two books, Writing in Community and The Fire Inside. We had an intriguing conversation which provided an opportunity for us to think more about collaboration, how it worked successfully for us, and how a collaborative partner can help you to accomplish more–and better!

You may want to know:
How does the collaborative process work?
What are the advantages?
How do you find a collaborative partner?

You can listen to the interview (or view the transcript of it) here.

For more inspiration, check out our website www.thewritingandcreativelife.com.

Or follow this link to purchase our latest book, The Fire Inside.

Blue Horses: Saying the Unsayable

Blue Horses

One Christmas I received as a gift the Mary Oliver book, Blue Horses, and was absolutely blown away by it. First of all because of Mary Oliver’s writing which I’ve admired for ages, and secondly, because of the book cover. This features a painting of four horses, their forms rounded and graceful, all looking to the left as if something interesting is there. A fox or a dog returning their gaze, perhaps, or a person. The horses are beautiful and blue, the background in shades of yellow, spangled with stars, as are the horses themselves, their heads and bodies starry. So whether the horses are of the earth or the heavens, we are not sure.

Franz Marc
The painting is by Franz Marc, an expressionist painter and part of the “Blue Riders” group of artists in Germany in the early 1900’s. Marc was talented and influential, but his career was cut short after serving in the army in World War I. In 1916, flying shrapnel struck him in the temple and he was killed instantly. He was just 36 years old.

The Writing Life: Keeping the Faith

Are you a writer? A visual artist or musician? As my writing partner, Becky Breed, and I write in The Fire Inside, we are all creative, an inner fire aflame in us, urging us on. But it is not always easy—sticking to our writing or our art–we need to keep the faith.

I believe that the longer we live the creative life, creating poems or paintings, making music, loving our work, sometimes struggling in our work, the more we realize that our art is a calling, our birthright to create. And we are in it for the long haul.

We may come to the realization gradually, or it may be that after two or three years of writing, it suddenly dawns on us that this obsession of ours is not going away. This is not the fad of the moment we pick up for a while, and then drop as interest wanes. It’s more like embarking on a marriage, building a relationship that will last a lifetime.

There will be hard times: days when it’s difficult to get to your easel, when the words for your poem won’t come, or if they do, limp onto the page and fall flat. Nothing worthwhile comes easy, the old saying goes, and that is certainly true of our passions, our art. Still, it is our passion, our deep love, and we want to keep at it, knowing that our lives would not be as rich or as full without it. So you find a way to keep the faith, to keep on going. How do we do that? Here are some tips:

Keeping the Faith

Look for the joy in the “every-day” of work. Relish those moments when the words flow from the tips of your fingers, when the brushstrokes come free and fluid.
Read books like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. These and other writers provide gentle encouragement and help keep you going.
Set goals for yourself—such as writing a certain number of pages per month, or sending out a certain number of submissions—and ask a friend to hold you accountable.
Celebrate your accomplishments—even the small ones. When you find the right color for your painting, the right word for your poem. Give yourself a pat on the back when you send out a story to a potential publisher.
Develop a work schedule and stick to it as much as you can. Include in your schedule some down time, time to go “off-line” and free your mind.
Don’t beat yourself up when you stray from your writing schedule or fall short of your goals. Give yourself a break. Be kind. Then get back on track.
Become a part of your local artist community. A good writing group or artists’ group can provide a lifetime of support and encouragement, and is probably the very best thing you can do to nurture and sustain your creative life.

Elbert Hubbard said that “Art is not a thing, it is a way.” It is not the finished painting that matters, the completed novel (though these accomplishments are wonderful!) It is the everyday of work—the violinist practicing, the writer writing, the many happinesses found in doing what we love. This is why we wrote The Fire Inside—the joy in creating. We hope you pick up a copy and explore its pages. We hope you get in touch with your inner fire—and keep it blazing.

For more ideas to help you along the creative path, see our book, The Fire Inside. We think you’ll be inspired!

What We Need to Live More Creatively

What We Need:

These include:

Because Stories Matter

Writing and Creativity Exercise

Wild Passions

Living Among the Glories

Your Wild and Precious Life

Writing From the White-Hot Center

Gerald Stern and The One Thing in Life

Want to Consider Collaboration?

Blue Horses: Saying the Unsayable

The Writing Life: Keeping the Faith

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