Finding New Worlds

There are new worlds right outside your door. You don’t need to journey into the deep rain forests of the Amazon to explore, or venture off into space to seek out new life, and new civilizations. Sometimes you just need to go outside. Find a new park, a new store. Go to a cultural festival, an art show, a farmer’s market. It’s all worth exploring, and for a lot of us, we can learn a lot from the effort. Get outside of your comfort zone.

Even better, grab a book while you’re out there, one from an author with a background different than your own, and bring another new world home to explore later.

Seasons of Creativity

November might be my favorite month since moving to Phoenix. The weather has cooled for good (usually), and it’s time to get back into the world now that the heat is gone. I have more energy with the cooler weather, feeling less beat down from the heat, and my creativity reflects it.

In the summer, as the temperatures sail past 100 degrees, I wear down quicker. Even inside, something about it chips away at me and I start to go a little stir crazy, like a kind of cabin fever, trapped not by the snow but by the sun. I’ve learned this about myself. I’ve had to accept there are seasons to creativity, and they’re often reflected by the seasons of the world outside my window.

Now, when the weather starts to heat up in May, I shift gears to less taxing projects, more reading, more movies, and less writing and art. It’s my off season in a way, a time of filling the well and getting inspired so when it’s time to commit to the keyboard in the fall, my subconscious is ready to run.

I’ve had some of my most productive times in Novembers past, and I’m looking forward to the same this year. Here’s to the coming winter.

Growing a Creative Family Tree

Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a 21-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ”Nobody’s.” He has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

Annie Dillard, Write Till You Drop

I read this quote from Annie Dillard the other day, and it reminded me of Austin Kleon’s concept of a creative family tree. When I was far younger, I thought I should strive to be completely original in my writing, which to my young mind meant not reading much in order to be influence-free. Of course, all of that writing sucked, and I put away the idea for years and years.

It wasn’t until I was around thirty that the idea crept back up, thanks to some nudging from my wife, that maybe I could be a writer after all. This time, I started with reading more, and after reading Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist, I started thinking about what my creative family tree would look like.

Now that I’ve taken the time to let it grow, to find my idols, my first branches, I’m binging through the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and having a blast. When I’m done exploring her branch, I’m excited to do the same with Bradbury, and so on.

For a guy that struggles with staying focused when the shiny new ideas come calling, having a structure like this is a game changer. I look forward to the climb.