TODDLE TO WADDLE
Wednesday July 12, 2017
Stimulation comes through open windows, over airwaves, pulsing faster than I can grab.
Must be correlation between writer hitting keys, composer striking piano keys or strumming guitar – that first, ‘try something’ step, searching for riff or theme …
How many times did I fall before I could walk?
How many DRAFTS till one takes breath away? Or filled someone’s sail?
Stimulation comes, never goes.
Always on, never leaves – breathing, awake or snoozing.
Creativity is not about inventing imagination. Rather, it’s harnessing galloping minds, putting reigns on – but gently so – capturing on a page before magic moments escape. Or painting it. Or carving it.
Here a moment ago, now gone. Flits butterfly-like, or raging storm-like. Shutting down elusive creative juices (sometimes ‘in this moment’, not for publication yet, or ever or R-rated) kills them. Where did it go, when will it return – if it ever does to please, tease and torment me again?
We try stuff. Most days, spilling like a hydrant, somedays not so much – whatever comes first is usually rough or raw or wrong. What it does is this: puts me in flow, in-the-flow is probably more accurate. Like child moving, toddle to waddle.
Getting right down to it – unfiltered stream of consciousness spilling over proverbial dam when we think fast, nobody could catch it because we say it too fast, can’t capture or dam it, if it was flowing down a stream, nobody could film it’s invisible gigantic elusiveness.
On the other hand …
At two or five it just flowed from us ‘childlike’. Like any game we invented, fleeting thoughts spread like soap bubbles on summer afternoon breezes.
Isn’t of course – just seems that way when I give my mind permission to ‘not be creative’. What then?
Not everyone can be an award winning writer or best seller factory – most of us never will be, but everyone can be a descriptive creative writer, even if only for an audience of one – yourself.
Do it for personal purposes, do it for publication – whatever floats into you head, put it down. Write it down. Don’t let it escape, don’t let the moment be wasted like so many in life that just pass away with or without memory of time passing – without memory of the moment, those moments. Put all those moments together and you have the high-points of a life. Don’t miss them, don’t miss the memory of them.
Write them.
Now.
I mean right now …
Reader feedback:
TOO CONNECTED TO DISCONNECT
Spot on, Mark. As a working freelance musician, I very often finf myself in setting where people, young and old are seated at tables, each seating 10 r so, and totalling as many as 500 hundred. I am shocked to see them texting to other, in many case to the person siting beside or across from them. sad but true..the gain involves some loss, AV, Yarker, ON
I agree with you completely. Where did the “need” to be aware of everything happening in the world, or even in our own group of friends, at any moment come from? I believe the users of the devices are being taught to need this, LH, Lethbridge, AB
AWAKENING
Great article! I love the pre-dawn hours. The darkness & quietness unfolding into the magic of day.. Almost as good as the smell as bacon and coffee in the mountain air, CS, Hammond, IN
