Filling the creative well

When I am doing a lot of creative work, as I am lately, it's easy to get depleted, to run out of ideas or solutions. Julia Cameron recognized this early in her work and Artist's Dates are an essential part of all her programs. On an artist date, you take yourself off exploring something new or perhaps forgotten that can stimulate your creativity, fill the well as it were.

When I did the Artist's Way program years ago, I visited a fabric store (I don't sew but I bought some fabulous ribbons), a bead store (I don't make jewelry though I tried my hand at it), a foreign film I would probably never have seen otherwise, the zoo, a gallery in our Pearl District that I hadn't been to before, the Japanese Garden, an Ethiopian restaurant, a rhododendron garden, a sex accessories store, the art museum, the town's science museum, and a chamber music concert.

Recently, I've decided to do this again. I'd spent six months heavily immersed in my freelance editing business and working on my novel. I wasn't stuck or bored, but I was weary in a way that was different. I recognized that not only did I need to come up for air, but I needed to fill the well with fresh sights, sounds, smells, touches, shapes, and colors.

So in the last month I've been to the theater a couple of times, went to a great musical review of the blues, got a friend to join me in a long-overdue visit to the art museum, sat down with a couple of great art books that have been on my shelf for years without me cracking them open, got some strange films from Netflix, visited a big plant store. And ideas are really flowing again.

So if you're feeling less inclined to make something new or push the envelope on your writing or your other creative pursuits, try a few Artist's Dates and see what happens.

16 ways to kill Callie's husband

In one of the big sections of the novel I'm working on, I need to kill the character's husband. I wrote an ending where she comes home to discover the kitchen awash in blood but no body and she hires a clean-up crew so she can disappear. And while it was a great chapter with a lot of writing I liked, it was too murder mystery for the context of the novel, too dramatic, too gory.

So last Friday I set about writing a list of 16 solutions to his death. And I thought I'd share them with you.

1. Hit by a bus (accident)
2. Hit by a car (not an accident)
3. Just disappears without a trace
4. Disappears but leaves a note of farewell but with no clues as to whereabouts
5. He decides to leave the country and she won't go with him.
6. She decides to leave him (divorce).
7. He commits suicide in some way.
8. He has a heart attack and dies at the office.
9. She agrees to kill him under threat from the wise guys who control them.
10. She shoots him accidentally (they fight over a gun and it goes off).
11. He gets arrested and killed in jail.
12. He's murdered and there's blood but no body (the original idea).
13. She poisons him (drug overdose).
14. He falls, hits his head on the tub, and drowns. (accident)
15. He disappears and she gets a phone call about it from the wise guys.
16. His body is found in the woods.

After I did this, I could see that I had criteria (or rather the story did) for what would work: The solution needed to be complete: the relationship over. Callie could not be implicated (I didn't want her talking to the police or visiting him in prison). I need her to move on. It had to be believable in the context and not too dramatic. And it needed to have an emotional component for her.

I'm working now with a combination of 7 and 14--an overdose that looks like suicide but with a whiff of wise-guy involvement so I can use the clean-up crew. I think it's going to work out fine.

Creative practice as an integrity issue

Many of us set intentions around our creative practice: to write in a journal every morning, to work on a novel that's long been in the creative hopper, to learn to draw better, to design and make a sweater for a gift. And for a few days, we do step into those intentions. And we feel good about that and are sure we have the practice nailed down. But then it's too hard to get up one morning or we're too tired one evening after dinner or we discover we aren't very satisfied with what we're creating and the practice either comes to a screeching halt or dwindles away rather quickly.

In my coaching work, I encounter clients who have had this experience too frequently to be very optimistic about anything else occurring for them. So we have a conversation about integrity, and about aligning their intention for a creative practice with their integrity. By integrity here, I mean keeping your word. Many of us are good at keeping our word with others but not so great at keeping our word with ourselves. It's this latter issue that I'm addressing here.

There is an added bonus of satisfaction, I've found, when we say we are going to do something and we do it. There is the satisfaction of creating, which for many of us is important: writing, painting, knitting, sculpting, however that creative impulse manifests itself. But that enjoyment is greatly enhanced when we also live into the value of keeping our word.

16 solutions when you're stuck

For a while, I've been a proponent of a brainstorming technique called 16 Solutions. I first heard about it from a member of my Women and Money group, how if you brainstorm 16 solutions to any problem, you can get beyond the first few obvious ideas into possibilities that are wackier and more creative. I've been feeling very stuck around my novel and how to weave the parts of the story together. I've been waiting for inspiration, for the muse to pop that perfect idea into my head, and she or he has not been forthcoming.

So this morning at Writing Friday, I went outside to the terrace table (one of our first warm-enough-to-sit-outside days) and sat with my notebook and just kept thinking up ideas. What if I dropped the kid from the beginning? Or what if there wasn't a mystery around the kid? What if Frankie's birth father came back into the picture? What if her mother was dead? What if her sister was on the lam from the mob and hiding out in her mother's trailer? What if her mother left a series of revealing diaries? What if the beginning of the story as it now stands was the ending? If that was the case, which of the three stories would make a good beginning? How would the story work with each of them as the beginning and what would have to change?

This spun me out into a whole sequence of questions that I had shelved to the back of my mind. What purpose does the boy serve in the story? What other purposes could he serve? Do I need a mystery to solve at all? Can the story handle two mysteries? And suddenly the book felt alive with possibility again rather than bound by where I had been. So if you've been stuck in your creative work, give the 16 solutions a try.

Entering into the great puzzlement

Yesterday I finished Callie's back story. That's the last of the three. For the past four months, I've known what to work on next in the novel I'm writing. First there was Lola's story to tell, then Frankie's, then Callie's. I had certain parameters and I knew how the stories ended (the characters coming together for the first time in decades) but I had free rein to develop these women as I felt best and to give them all sorts of adventures (or allow them to tell me what adventures they wanted to have).

Now I have to not only figure out where to take the main story next, but I also have to figure out where these back stories fit into the novel, if they even do. I had no idea when I started working on them, that they would become major sections of the novel, but 80,000 words later, I think they must. But how? An architectural challenge for sure.

Today was my first morning of insecurity. Off and on yesterday I wondered what I might do when I sat down but it wasn't until I turned on the computer at 6:45 that I realized I had to just start at the beginning, read and rewrite until I hit the current moment again. I wrote much of this first 20,000 words last fall so while I have some good memories of it, I don't remember the details. And even just the first three chapters, which I worked on this morning, were instructive.

I still have no clue as to the architecture, but I'm hoping that will reveal itself to me just as the story does.

Ambivalence about winding up the story

For the last four or five months, I've been drafting new material for the novel I'm working on. It has been great fun because it has been loosely structured for me. Instead of drafting blind, I've been writing the elaborate back stories of the three main characters. I had to get each one from a starting point to the present moment of the main story. I knew a little about them from the main story and their interactions with each other and I had the wonderful task of sorting out the experiences that had gotten them there. Each time I finished one of these long back stories, I knew right where to go next--the next back story.

Well, now I'm coming to the end of the third story. I began the last chapter this morning in my early morning writing. I've a few things to sort out, a few scenes to write, but then this big task is finished and I need to both proceed with the main story and figure out how I weave in all the information I've come up with (I've written a lot--the three back stories are nearly 90,000 words, a novel's worth) and whether to use it all or sort it out in a different way.

So today I find myself ambivalent about winding up Callie's last chapter. I know that once I get back into the main story, I'll be fine, but right now, I'm reluctant to head into the unknown.

Getting started on a memoir

Last week a new coaching client came to see me. She is writing a memoir and had stalled after about 100 pages. She was looking for a jump start. I had asked her to make a list of the pivotal moments in the story she wants to tell and the ones she had already written, but what she presented me with was a kind of dhronological outline of notes of details she thought important to include and where she was in that outline. And no doubt they were important. But it wasn't what I had asked for.

And so we had a good discussion about contemporary memoir that is successful. The influence of TV and the movies on both fiction and memoir and the central importance of scene. And we set out to create a list of those scenes that are pivotal to her story, because they lie at the heart of the memoir, not only for plot but also for theme. And we discussed the fact that she didn't have to write them in order.

Like many writers, Carla was stuck because she wasn't quite sure where the project was going. She didn't have a clear idea of the parts, let alone the whole. And I reassured her that that was quite all right, that many of us don't know until several drafts in exactly where something is going and we keep writing parts anyway. Hence the need for a list of important parts to play with, draft, become a better writer with. That's the practice part of all writing projects.