Keep the Embers Burning
The Shadow Side of Creativity
One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. . . . If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.
—Marie-Louise Von Frantz (Jungian scholar and psychologist)
We celebrate creativity as a positive, life-enhancing force. But like most things, creativity has its shadow side, especially when it isn’t given an opportunity to manifest itself in the world beyond the self. Many of us find ourselves in situations where our creativity has to take a back seat to other pressing needs and obligations—financial and family obligations, work commitments, and the day to day demands of responsible adulthood. In these circumstances, we must hold our need to express ourselves creatively in one hand and our obligations as a partner, parent, family member, and professional in the other hand. Harder still, we must connect the two obligations to one another with the word "and." As in, “I am an artist and I am a responsible partner, parent, family member, professional” or whatever best describes the obligations you have to honor.
This isn’t an easy trick, but as Marie-Louise Von Frantz reminds us, we don’t have a choice. The poison she talks about is corrosive. It will corrode your family life, corrode your parenting, corrode your work life, and ultimately corrode your soul.
Each of us transmutes the poison differently. For some it manifests itself as a withdrawal from life—the color is drained from everything we see. For others it’s expressed as resentment, a kind of venom that we indiscriminately spray on everyone we come in contact with. And there are those who translate it into self-harm—substance abuse, neglect for their own health and well-being, and worse.
If you’re struggling to balance your creative life with other life obligations, make sure you watch for the warning signs that the poison of unused creative power is building up in your system. Learn your signals (such as irritability, lethargy, and perfectionism) and avoid self-judgement. You are not a failure, and your life is not a failure… The problem is that your creative energy isn’t being used—and there’s a way to fix that!
An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.
—Richard Hugo (poet and teacher)
Note: Before going on, I need to take a moment to acknowledge that the barriers to creativity some situations impose simply can’t be overcome—there’s not enough light for anything to grow. If this is your situation, know that your inability to focus on your creative work isn't a failing on your part. Your time and energy need to be focused elsewhere, for now...
Keep the Embers Burning
After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry... Hence, poems and stories.
Raymond Carver is widely regarded as the most important short story writer of the second half of the 20th century. He’s credited with creating the “minimalist” short story (though Carver rejected that label). Carver used his inclination toward brevity and intensity to craft short, incisive, heart-breaking stories about the unseen, desperate, and often violent lives of “ordinary people.” While the style and length of his work aligned perfectly with his creative vision, the driving force behind its development wasn't artistic, it was practical. Short on time, Carver needed to complete a story or poem in one sitting.
It’s when you’re feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities and obligations that you need art the most. Art challenges us to see things differently—to search for new connections and possibilities. In hard times, your ability to engage in creative work is usually gated by three issues: time, energy, and your ability to focus. Other issues, like finding a space to work, may also hold you back, but without time, energy, and focus it’s difficult to get anything done even if you have a place to work and the materials you need.
Time: What could you do with 15 minutes a day? It doesn’t seem like much time on its own, but 15 minutes a day is an hour and 45 minutes a week, about eight hours a month, and two and a half full days a year. Not enough time to create a large-scale work, but enough to keep your creative embers alive… The key is matching the size of your current ambition to the time you have to achieve it. That’s what Carver did—he adapted, and in the process redefined the short story form.
How much time can you commit to doing your creative work each day? It’s probably less than you’d like, so given that reality, how can you reimagine, resize, and realign your artistic goals so that you can make progress daily with the time you have available? How can you adjust the scope of your work (make it shorter, smaller, narrower in scope)? How can you simplify the work (limit your materials and palette, work within a defined form, use purpose-built tools that reduce the range of available options)? You have a limited amount of time available—use it expressing yourself.
Energy: When we haven’t been doing our creative work on a regular basis, our inner critics run amok. We undermine ourselves with never-ending stories about our failures: we failed to show up, we failed to get anything done when we did show up, the work we did is insignificant—not even worth doing. On and on… These stories sap our energy. Instead of creating new work, we waste our energy defending ourselves against personal attacks launched by critics who don’t really have our best interests at heart—their survival depends on our failure. Happily, there’s a simple way to change the narrative and refocus your energy: Externalize your goals and criteria for success, then show up every day and do the work.
As you return to your creative work, take time to reflect on your goals and how you will measure your progress. Be specific. Let’s say you’re trying to get back on track with your drawing, your goal might be “For the next 30 days I will spend 15 minutes a day working on a 5 x 7-inch charcoal drawing and I will complete one drawing every day.” Stating your goal this way clarifies what you’re going to do every time you sit down to work and how you will measure your progress.
Externalizing your goals and criteria for success takes your emotions out of your self-evaluation and self-judgement, making it harder for your inner critics to engage. Your energy is going into the work, not into arguing with your harshest critic—yourself.
Focus: One of the biggest challenges of re-establishing your creative habit is focus. It’s hard to let go of worrying about your responsibilities and reconnect with your creativity. The key is to make it easier to jump back into your work. Building a chain of linked successes is critical to rebuilding your confidence and re-establishing your creative habit.
Look for ways to link your daily work sessions together—for example, using our drawing example above, decide up front that the subject for all your charcoal drawings will be flowers. Or if you’re a writer, that all of writing for the period be cast as a first-person narrative. The point is to reduce the time and thought required to re-engage with your creative work on a day-to-day basis. The constraints you set for yourself up front make it easier to pick up the thread each day and get to work.
And Then...
You’ve probably heard the expression “less is more.” It’s true, and so is its first cousin: “less is enough.” When most of your time and energy is going into juggling pressing responsibilities and obligations, less is enough. When you’re not in a position to take meaningful steps toward realizing your full ambitions and potential, less is enough. When you feel the poison building up in your system, less is enough. Doing creative work daily in short sprints doesn’t compromise your artistic integrity—it strengthens it. You’re a working artist, every day of the week.
. . . Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives.
With luck, your circumstances will change in time: you’ll regain control over your schedule and be able to increase the amount of time you spend on your creative work. In the meantime, remember the power of the word "and." Make "I am an artist and I am __________” (fill in the blank) your daily mantra. Then do as much creative work as your schedule allows.
Keep the embers burning!
This poem by Raymond Carver on making use of your circumstances brings this article to a close:
Sunday Night
Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around the kitchen…
Put it all in,
Make use.
Recommended Books by Raymond Carver:
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (short stories)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (short stories)
Cathedral (short stories)
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (Library of America edition)