These three habits make you more creative.
TRAINING INSPIRATION (part seven)
While in the previous posts we covered the four sources of inspiration that I’ve found—Compounding, Modeling, Refining, and Receiving—I think we can boil down the creative habits you need to just three:
1. Be open to your own novel, scary ideas. This means being open to bad ideas as well as good. I’ve spent many happy years pursuing bad ideas. (See: Word Hero, Psychomixology.com.) The thing about inspiration is that you can be inspired to do things that simply don’t work. But how do you know until you try them? If an idea excites you, and seems unlikely to cause anyone harm, then go for it. Your life will be richer (though your bank account probably won’t). Of course, you also leave yourself open to humiliation. I’ve become almost used to making an ass of myself, which I’ve decided to call courage
2. Discover and combine. Curiosity leads to inspiration, I believe. I still pull down books at random from bookstores and read them. If you don’t listen to podcasts, you might start. They’re a great way to pursue subjects that you had no idea were interesting. I find myself inspired by other people’s crazy ideas.
3. Write badly. When students ask me how to avoid writer’s block, that’s what I tell them: “Write badly.” Then use your superior skill as a reader to made it better, draft by draft.
Of these three, I’d put openness first. I find that when I open myself to my own strange ideas, I’m more inclined to be open to the strange ideas of others, and to the strangeness of others. In some weird way, this makes me see people who don’t look or think like me…more like me. Montaigne knew this: by understanding our bizarre selves, we assay the value of all humanity.
After all that time of living with Jonah, the protagonist of The Prophet Joan, I found that the words seemed to come straight from the character herself—a girl who, like me, spends as much time in the woods as she can. At the end of the novel, Jonah is a voice who has cried in the wilderness and has come to a kind of peace. I wondered what would a retired prophet see. So I let that voice speak. I turned from author to ghostwriter and simply typed Jonah’s words.
The ending to The Prophet Joan
I see the moose head up to their wintering ground to the east of my land, and the bracken curl up and turn brown, and the spruce wait for winter with their perfect little cones, and the silly oak leaves hang on like they think winter won’t really come this year, not this year. I see the last geese fly in their Vs with the strong ones taking turns pushing the wind and the weaker ones drafting in the back. I see the ravens ride the thermals at eye level on the bald Jumper summit, with no tidings to bring. I see the flakes fall, printing their perfect crystal pattern for the tiniest instant and then disappearing. Somehow, I see all these things ride outward, south and east and north and west, unfolding and brightening and darkening like Northern Lights, carrying secret messages like the wisest viruses, outward and outward beyond even the earth and this universe and whatever lies beyond, and I think of my father spreading outward, his atoms, his sayings, his jokes, his Jonah-ness, carrying the message with all the others. I could not see it before, but I do now, and I cannot tell exactly what it is because, except now and then, it is silent.
Again, you don’t have to like this; it may not even make sense to you if you haven’t read the novel. (Wise viruses?) But when I stopped typing and read Jonah’s words, tears came to my eyes. She had caused an incremental change of mind. Which was a form of prophecy, and of unconscious artistry, and therefore, in its own, modest, non-bestselling way, inspiration.
