Creative Recovery (Conclusion, Debrief, Implications)

And another book is done.   The last three chapters of the book, “Early Recovery,” “Ongoing Recovery,” and “Creating in Recovery” are valid pieces of information, and the exercises at the end of each chapter continue to impress me in their diversity.

However, not much there to work with as far as just a study of the creative character.  Here, we really get into the mind of the (hopefully recovering) full blown addict.   Nevertheless, I think these seven steps are a nice guide (not the only guide, but a nice one) to maintaining a creative life.   I won’t even bother paraphrasing all the information below all of them; most are self explanatory, and I do think I can use all of them in my own creative life.

1.  Maintain a daily plan and a schedule for your creative efforts…

2.  Have a creative project to work on, one that you can name, commit to, and finish.

3.  Keep an abundance model in mind, so that you don’t overly attach to any one project and produce too much stress on yourself to get it right or too much pain if it turns out poorly.  Picture a lifetime of work, rather than just a few isolated works, and by picturing that large bounty, get in the habit of understanding that no single project defines you–or can hurt you…

4.  Change at a visceral level, not just at an intellectual level, your relationship to mistakes, messes, and not knowing, growing more comfortable with all three in a deep way.

5.  Love your creative work even as it presents you with problems.

6.  Remember to pay attention to three distinct but related aspects of your creative life:  your personality…the creative work itself… and the world in which you find yourself…

7.  Make sure you have convinced yourself that what you are doing as a creative person matters, at the very least to you.   (pp.228-230)

I myself am particularly fond of #s 3 & 7.  With #3, the problem is simply maintaining the discipline to get words on paper (hey, even though there were two lapses- one of them long- in this blog, I’ve still maintained it for over a year.   That’s an accomplishment for me.  #7 relates to the creativity rant I keep giving in person but refusing to put down on paper here.  I think that #7, though, is the most vital of all.   Creation is always about the creator, and necessary to the creator, and the whole fuckin world be damned.

GHP, then.  The Creative process class.  If I trot it out again, how do I do it differently?

1.  Reverse the trend from two  years ago.  Instead of 20% production, 80% theory, make it 80% production, 20% theory.  Have the kids come into the class with an idea or theme, work with it for a day or two, and then do a day of theory in the middle, and conclude the class with semi-metacognition about how the theory may or may not apply to their own process.

2.  Chuck John Irving out the window.  I do love The World According to Garp, and I thought I had made it reasonable by only reading the first third of the novel.  This way, the kids could actually see a writer at work.  But no, it’s too much.  I’ll have them focus almost entirely on their own processes, rather than look at those of an outsider. (See Maisel & Raeburn’s guideline #7, above!)

3.  One of my favorite things about this book was the creative exercises at the end of each chapter, designed for specific people who have strengths in specific areas- especially the science/math ones.  I feel that after the kids have expressed their idea in the first day or two- whether in writing, visually, etc., that we should have at least one day of experimenting in perhaps just not another medium, but a whole other modality of thinking.   Wouldn’t it be interesting to see some of these science kids paint?  Or some of these linguistic whizzes try to incorporate their ideas into movement/dance?  They take the same idea they’ve been working on for a week, and apply it in a new fashion.

Other stuff to work on here, no doubt.   I may or may not return to the class, but now it’s got a hold in my mind again, and stuff I read & research for the next few months will probably wind up being read through this lens.

Enjoyed the book more than I generally enjoy touchy-feely stuff like this, but there was quite a bit of good qualitative research, and definitely a more intellectual approach.

Next up for nonfiction:  Finishing Bipolar II (which, creative juices wiling, will only require a single post).