Creative Practice
amywink March 16th, 2007
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
~Aristotle
As I sit down to write this essay on creating a creative practice, I have just concluded a personal practice that helps me focus, centers my thinking, and channels my energies into creative production. I have shopped for groceries. Such a mundane thing! How can this chore be a creative practice? Creativity surely requires something more exotic, more glamorous? How does choosing vegetables invoke the Creative Muse? Shouldn’t there be some incantation
at least?
As I walk slowly, mindfully, through the grocery store, I am concentrating on a simple task that has a definitive beginning and end, after which I have a sense of accomplishment. I have completed a task and for a writer, completion is never so conclusive! During the process, I go steadily through my list, tracing my path carefully, and focusing on each necessary item. I ponder what I’d like to cook (create) during the week ahead. I wonder about trying new things. I open to new ideas. For me, grocery shopping provides the perfect balance of ritual, creation, and simplicity to serve as an excellent creative practice. I am also thinking, as I shop, that when I return home, I will sit down to write. I am preparing myself for more creative work. Once I’ve put the groceries away, I’m going to write. That’s simply the next logical step.
In her book, The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp writes of her own “ritual of preparation”: “I wake up at 5:30, put on my work out clothes . . . I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to [the gym] where I work out for 2 hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training . . . the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual.” How ordinary! How simple! Indeed. The habit must be simple, doable, attainable, because as Steven Pressfield points out in The War of Art “it’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s sitting down to write.” A creative practice readies you for creativity. Once you’ve established the precursory practice, you set yourself up to work. If X occurs, then Y happens.
The one requirement of establishing a successful creative practice is that the practice must work for you, and your practice need meet no other requirements than that. If for example, you despise grocery shopping, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make that a creative practice unless getting the hated task out of the way allows you to reward yourself with the pleasure of your work: “once I complete this hideous task, I get to paint!” But you must never forget to reward yourself, or stack too many hated tasks ahead of the creative one. Conversely, if the creative practice is far more engaging than the work, then perhaps it’s time to rethink the role of the practice!
I also caution against worrying too much about how someone else may practice the same task you wish to use. I fell into this trap myself after beginning a new practice I’d read about in Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. She suggests writing a haiku a day as an writing practice and offers simple clear instructions for creating haiku, particularly that capturing the essence of the haiku moment is more important than focusing on syllabic restrictions. Indeed, I found it worked wonderfully. While my haiku were not particularly brilliant, the practice brought clarity to my work, helping me concentrate on clear, concrete images in a very small space. After each practice haiku, I wrote more efficiently and my poems became more precise. I was also pleased that through practice, my haiku improved. For every four or five I wrote, at least one would be markedly better, and if I created nothing else that day, I could still be happy that I had created one haiku.
I lauded the practice to my writing partner, who immediately decided to try haiku as well and to begin she had, she told me, reviewed the rules of haiku for several hours. While I worried that I might be doing the practice incorrectly by not following the rules, I had to remember that the practice was working for me. My writing partner found herself so caught up in the rules of haiku that she could not use the writing practice that worked so well for me. She now uses other rituals, but not haiku.
The rule for successful creative practice is only this: the activity opens your mind and readies you for creative work, whether it’s yoga, or doing the dishes, or sharpening ten new pencils before you begin. If the practice you try does the opposite, it’s simply not the practice for you!