Creative pressure
I was talking to my friend Lawrence about creativity.
We both felt that our shared interest in the internet, and the fact that it is of crucial importance to our professional lives, had turned us into simple consumers of creativity.
We track the memes, read the blogs, monitor the feeds; we take it all in. We're both creative people - we both earn a living from it, we're paid to be creative - but our dependence on taking everything in has stopped us from being creative in our own time, on our own terms.
Lawrence revealed that he'd taken on part-time rental of an art studio space, away from home. The plan was to force himself to focus on the act of being creative, to ensure there was the opportunity, as well as the motivation, to create new works. He's an artist but has spent years focusing his energy on work and enjoying life; but the artistic urge remains. It's wrong to ignore it.
I'm very lucky to be in the position I'm in, to be paid money to write, in some cases, whatever I like. Writers earn money by allowing their brains to leak out on to a computer keyboard, and even if we are writing factual content, there's still a strong element of creation and originality that's essential to producing good work.
But in recent years I don't feel I've been terribly creative. Lawrence and I agreed that the web was partially to blame; like TV, it has been sucking away our time as we browsed, and read, and browsed, and clicked, and blogged, and browsed, and linked, and read. Of course I can't ignore the web because it is an essential part of my professional life; I need to know what's happening online in order to earn a living.
The line between professional monitoring and personal entertainment got blurred some time ago, and that was the cause of the problem. I'd browse things of personal interest during work time, and end up browsing work-related stuff during personal entertainment time. It all merges, one thing into the other, but the merging is something I bring about myself. I could be, I ought to be, more self-disciplined about it all.
So I wrote "BE CREATIVE" at the top of my todo.txt, a file I spend much of my time in, and challenged myself to stick to it.
Some years ago, I made a promise to myself that I would no longer allow TV to determine my actions; now I'm trying to apply the same rule to the net.
Labels: writing
