jaeleslie

In response to one of my earlier posts, lamentables wrote I suffer from that very common thing of prioritising practical stuff and thinking that creative things belong in the gaps in between, and expresses interest in some of those goal-setting type questions from Silber's book that I've been thinking through. I'm not going to copy all forty of them here, but give it a start at least. You know, like a quiz, only no clicky things, more like a short-answer test, we overeducated types know how much fun those are! These from the particular section on creativity. My answers below, click.

32. Name one way you could improve your life by using your creativity. Your job?
33. How much time do you spend watching TV? On creative pursuits?
34. What creative project have you started but never followed through on?
35. What projects do you want to do but never seem to find the time for?
36. What do you consider your real creative strength?

Paradoxically I have always had more time to exercise my creativity than organization mustered to make use of the time. In younger days I actually guarded my time outside of the day job by not volunteering for activities, and must admit I actively sought underemployment, specifically because I was hoping for the muse to strike and didn't want to be caught busy with something else like a real professional career. This is not quite how the muses work. That approach resulted only in a few short but fairly evocative poems about the malaise of barrooms, you know, downstairs from the hotel rooms where our tired youth etc etc. Now I have no day job, but still the same problem of working out how to use the time productively, and with trained recalcitrant muses. I think the most creative approach I might happen on is to use the business organization and bookkeeping skills I learned out of sheer boredom to organize a more interesting creative life. Thus the calendar planner.

I spend far too much time watching television. When it is not even interesting enough to provoke comment and criticism, it must be time to turn the thing off, but this sounds deceptively like a simple task. The summer re-runs have weaned me off of the nightly nonsense. I have promised myself that if I just do something else the rest of the week I can still watch a bit Tuesday and Thursday nights. This question also suggests that even in the darkest months of the year I might spend at least as much time painting or writing as I do watching teevee. Balancing my checkbooks during the advertisements does not count, although addressing cards or letters might.

Creative projects I started but never followed through on are countless. Chief at the moment is First Novel. The more I work on it the more I realize that I kept writing tiny bits of it that are now scattered over how many years among how many different notebooks... but following through to collect them all together and see what I've got is easier, in some sense, than starting something else entirely again. When I just can't make new sentences, I find some I already made and see how they hook together.

The result of spending all this time on writing is that I am not spending nearly enough time on painting and none at all on lettering. Those are the broad divisions of craft I am engaged in. There are others. Once upon a time I used to do quite a bit of sewing, patchwork, and later crochet. The piano keyboard is left dusty and recorders entirely unused for some years. Next week my ceramics course starts up again.

I think my creative strength, other than being an idea factory, is long-term persistence.