Delight and Danger of Creative Chaos
I like order. I like to create. The two don’t easily comingle. At least for me.
My writing and art life are messy when I’m producing good work. I’m into it. I forget everything else. I let parts of my regular life fall off the cliff—at least temporarily. I neglect family and friends, the garden becomes unnavigable due to abundant weeds, I don’t sleep enough hours in a night, I even forget to get dressed.
You, of course, never have this kind of lapse. Am I right?
Days like that, I’m grateful my family and friends know enough to text or call before coming over. I’m not a pretty sight in my pj’s, head bent to the laptop, startled by any intrusion. Lucky for me, I have a forgiving (also creative) spouse and two dogs who are easy with my routines. We coexist with an understanding about creative chaos. My kid is grown, on his own. The house gets a blitz clean when I surface. Laundry piles up but who cares. Everyone gets their own dinner, except for the pups (they’d prefer getting their own but are too short to reach the fridge).
What happens after a few days or at most a week of this? I lose track of myself. My chaos is beautiful but it reeks of the red shoes parable made famous by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. There’s no balance to it, no sustainability. I’m dancing my heart out but my entire being is wiped when the music ends.
So my journey for years has been searching for a way to keep the freedom and joy of the dance, its wildness, while keeping my life going as well. I love that I love writing so much (and art too—I’m a painter when I can’t write). I love that I get so immersed that I forget anything else. Most times, I’m crazy about the act of writing—making art in general. But the act of losing myself feels only temporarily delicious. After a while, it feels more risky, even dangerous.
When I was diagnosed in my thirties with thyroid cancer, the first of two cancers I experienced, I had to have surgery and radiation treatment. Many strange symptoms arise when the thyroid, that delicate butterfly-shaped gland, goes missing. One is the inability to wake up easily from sleep. At first it was delicious, like immersing myself in unlimited art. I love to sleep, and I loved how easy it was to drift off and stay gone. But the struggle that ensued trying to wake up each time grew truly frightening. I began to not want to sleep, during this time of treatment, before I could use meds to regulate the TSH production. I hated the sensation of being so out of control of my body. It actually took time to relearn how to sleep and properly wake up, to regain a sense of safety from the process.
I had a provocative conversation a few years ago with a handful of writers who were taking one of my weeklong writing retreats. We were staying at a beautiful island resort and the workroom where we had tables, our storyboards, our writing books and supplies spread out temptingly was open 24/7. Writers could work anytime, day or night. “I could never do this at home,” one woman shared. “I can’t lose track of myself in my regular life, because I have kids, a husband, a job, a routine. But do I love it here!”
So many of us, especially women, crave the total release of immersion in our art. My personal quest has been to find a way to get it without losing the rest of my life.
I mentioned Clarissa Pinkola Estes, above, and her take in Women Who Run with the Wolves on the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, “The Red Shoes.” According to artist Sieglinde Battley, Pinkola Estes was referring to how “a woman’s meaningful life can be dried, threatened, robbed or seduced away from her, unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth.” We unconsciously take in “traps and poisons” when we are caught “in a famine of wild soul.” This concept of the wildness we need as creatives has stayed with me all these years, and it fueled many an immersion in my younger years. To keep the wildness feels crucial. Chaos = delight.
But creative chaos can also refrain back to the less savory idea of creatives who become addicts, relationship destroyers, losing all the beauty that hopefully surrounds an artistic life.
My recent experience proves the point, at least to me.
These past two months, my second novel, to be released in October, danced into the vast hall of pre-publication tasks. I’ve published many books, and many were supported well by the publisher back in the day. My last few, not. I’ve gotten used to doing the necessary tasks myself. They include a thousand details, a thousand emails and texts, and all of it (well, most of it) is thrilling. The day I got the first images for cover design. The day the print proof came in the mail. I’ll be sharing more behind-the-scenes of those emotional moments and what they mean in the writing life in future newsletters. But the distractions caused by each event—whew. Hard to concentrate on anything else.
I deserve this glory time, I know that. My novel took ten years to finish, find an agent, publish. I’m a turtle when it comes to writing: I write slow and edit slower. My agent is also slow (and careful, bless her) and my editor as well. The publishing machine cranks even slower. Years isn’t unusual.
With this book, I tried to put my sustainability act into practice. I had a good sit-down talk with my family in April. We tried to get real about what it would mean in our lives if I gave this part of the journey my all. I calculated six months, April to October, as the first gasp of the marathon, then probably another three months after. My spouse is a singer/songwriter and we had the possibility of a gig together (I’m the lowly backup singer but I enjoy it a lot). I said I might not be able to take on the rehearsals and planning and more rehearsals if I did this project the way I wanted to.
It wasn’t an easy conversation. But we got to the real stuff, we mapped out the problems as well as we could foresee—what else I’d need to bow out of, what I could not forsake. We’re good planners so it was helpful future forecasting, but nothing prepares you for the reality of the creative current rushing in.
Whether it’s birthing a book or a chapter or a poem or a painting, exhilaration—the wild delight—can sweep you away. Like a tornado, it leaves debris in its path.
As the weeks went on, I wondered why my last book didn’t demand this much. I realized I was raising a kid, getting remarried, starting a business, and moving to a new state—I didn’t have time or energy to do this much for that novel. I was also eleven years younger: I handled creative chaos better, I was a master multi-tasker.
Now, not so much. No choice but negotiate the potential—what if I let a lot fall? What adjustments would we all make?
It took practice to immerse then surface, over and over. I needed to immerse to find the flow of the work and the joy. I needed to surface to find my way back. The first weeks, my routines evaporated so suddenly, and I would get so wrapped in a task, our smaller pup would have to put her paws on my laptop to remind me about getting her dinner.
That kind of stuff hurts my heart.
But overall, I felt proud of us as we moved into this chaotic time. It helped to be long-time partners, to believe in each other’s creative needs, to acknowledge the red shoes in each of our lives. To know that, above all, we wanted to honor the family and the love we had.
We each have a certain tolerance for the chaos of immersion. It’s very much like jumping into uncharted water, not knowing how deep you’ll have to swim to access the good stuff. Or how you’ll find the surface again when you’re done.
A student once complained in class about the surface level of everything she wrote. She longed to sink in deeper, she had her life set up to do just that. She’d claimed a lovely private writing space in her home, she had time on her hands now that both kids were in college, she had a fervent desire to create.
“But all these years of being a mom have changed me,” she said, “and I don’t trust myself enough to dive deep then come back able to pick up my life again.”
Maybe this is not the unique territory of women, but it seems to be, from all the conversations I’ve had with students. Women are wired to show up for the lives of others: for childcare, meals, house care, friends, and family. Men may carry equal weight, but they are also able to detach fully, to immerse.
I realize I’m generalizing mightily here, so forgive that, but there’s a truth in this: women I know have a harder time being true creatives, letting in the chaos and attendant forgetfulness, because we can’t legitimately abandon the other lives in our hearts and hands. Always something pulling at us.
Those weeklong retreats attracted mostly women, which seemed curious to me until I heard about the glory of a week to oneself, no obligations to others, nobody to feed or care for.
I envy writers and artists who don’t need to get away. Who can say, “Who cares? It’s my life. I’ll stay up all night and write, if I want to.”
Aside from (1) awareness of the nature of chaos and the human artist’s need for immersion; (2) being willing to straightforwardly talk about the effect of such chaos, to take responsibility, and to negotiate with those I care about; and (3) giving myself total permission to immerse and resurface and practice doing so, I’ve discovered a few other key elements to successfully navigating.
I’ve produced thirteen books over two decades, some for hire and some for publishers and some published under my own imprint. This past week, I looked back at how I did each project, what my life was like then, how I managed the immersion process.
There were at least five activities I deliberately engaged in, to balance myself and practice the immersion-surfacing rhythm without losing the gold of my work. I want to share them here in case they are helpful. They are my learnings. They may not resonate with you. But I’ll share them because we do that in such a writing community as this.
Each made a difference in sustainability of my creative practice. Especially during the red shoes times.
As a writer, I live on my laptop. I’ve researched and invested in EMR protection devices, like this lap pad, or this blue-light screen shield, but even so . . . too much time onscreen actually decreases both my ability to surface from chaos gracefully and increases my internal scatter, so it’s harder to write well. (Blame it on a changing brain, the effect of the flickers. Our world now.)
I was curious about earlier projects, if I used any other methods to keep myself sane. I did notice that I tried to balance offscreen tasks. Such as . . .
Listening to poetry read aloud (try David Whyte’s “Midlife and the Great Unknown,” for a real thrill—good even if you’re not even close to midlife).
Gathering a project box or corner display/altar; Twila Tharp’s The Creative Habit is a great resource for how to do this.
Collaging my characters or the themes of my story (see my recent newsletter on risk and follow Chris’s story of her image board).
Making a location map of my story—big sheet of paper on my wall, handful of colored markers—either by birds-eye view of the entire place or by a central room or space where a lot happens.
Reading passages out loud from books by my favorite authors (opening chapters, especially, rearrange my stuck brain).
Without losing the laptop as the center of my world, these became my balance breaks. I set my phone alarm for ninety minutes. When it rang, usually startling me, I make myself get up, stretch, get a glass of water, then do fifteen minutes on one of these hands-on tasks.
Brain refreshed, I’d come back to my writing.
I noticed others doing this too. When a writer friend landed in the hospital for a week of tests, she, of course, took her laptop, but she also took a box of colored pencils and a Zentangle coloring book. When she put aside her laptop and took a play break, she’d come back to the writing with refreshment. It also, she said, helped her be more tolerant of the chaos of her environment.
Makers in every medium talk about this balance of handmade versus screen-made. That art becomes easier, better, less chaos-producing if the maker takes time to walk, doodle, knit, handwrite letters, whatever. I like to keep my offscreen tasks related to my writing, hence the list above. But it does work. The brain gets nourished from these other activities.
They will probably feel unproductive at first. But if you try one, welcome the diversity and know your creative self is just taking a nice moment in the fresh air.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
For your weekly writing exercise, try one of the ideas above or create your own. See how it affects your ability to swim in creative chaos AND be present in your life.