Never not writing

Even when you’re not writing, you’re writing.

I said this recently to a writer-friend who had not been doing much writing lately. My remark was an attempt to help my friend feel better, but I’m not sure it landed as I had hoped. But I’ve thought a lot about that brief exchange, and it prompted me to elaborate on that idea.

The exchange also brought to mind this quip from author, humorist, and cartoonist James Thurber.

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.

From Conversations with James Thurber, edited by Thomas Fensch

It’s a quip you might expect from the man who gave us “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” the classic short story of a man caught in his elaborate daydreams to escape the mundaneness of the world.

But I think a lot of writers and other artists have a bit of Thurber in them.

I think a lot of us think about our craft even when we aren’t actively writing or composing or painting or otherwise creating.

We writers think about writing while at dinner parties (or while cooking breakfast, washing dishes, pulling weeds, driving across town, or any other mundane activity in our days). Musicians think about their music, sculptors about sculpting, painters about painting, chefs about their culinary masterpieces, dancers about dancing, woodworkers about woodworking, and so on.

Anyone committed to creating is frequently (if not constantly) thinking about, (if not obsessing over) creating, and that itself is part of the creative act.

I suspect this principle applies to people we may not think of as artists in the narrow sense, or “creatives” (a term I don’t like). Entrepreneurs think about plans for building their next business or expanding the current one. Scientists and scholars, too, ponder their work even when they aren’t in the labs or studies.

Everyone creates

In short, everyone creates.

In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin, producer extraordinaire and co-founder of Def Jam Records, writes that creativity is not the rare and exclusive domain of the artist. “Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human,” he writes.

To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam.

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Considering that perspective, the conversation with my writer-friend was a creative act. It was a conversation, albeit brief, about writing. And this post, about the idea that all we experience and all we do feeds into our creativity, even when we aren’t being creative in the textbook sense, is itself a creative act.

I am creating something, right here, right now. Yay me!

Another writer-friend, Nat Weaver, underscored this point in a comment on my post, “The tyranny of the blank page.”

Another thing about writing is that it isn’t all working with words (scribbling or typing). I spend a lot of time meditating, listening to music, or both, so I can sort out characters, plot points, etc. Plus research (mostly reading). I say that to remind that this counts as writing too.

Nat Weaver

Yes and amen to that.

‘It doesn’t leave you’

“When you are not writing, you are a writer too,” Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. “It doesn’t leave you.”

And you never leave it. Goldberg again:

If you are a writer when writing, you are also a writer when you are cooking, sleeping, walking. And if you are a mother, a painter, a horse, a giraffe, or a carpenter, you will bring that into your writing, too. It comes with you. You can’t divorce yourself from parts of yourself.

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Or as Rubin puts it:

Living life as an artist is a practice.

You are either engaging in the practice

or you’re not.

It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it.

It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.”

You are either living as a monk or you’re not.

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the

output.

The real work of the artist

is a way of being in the world.

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Open and receptive

When we’re in this state of not-writing, we can be our most open and receptive to new ideas or ways of getting unstuck. This is when those classic “shower moments” may occur. It could be while you’re driving to work, running, or gardening — not necessarily while you’re showering.

Sometimes when you are doing things that are not focused on writing — even when you’re actively avoiding writing — your mind is allowed to wander, and that’s when the creative ideas begin to bloom in your head.

To get science-y about it, “Our ability to generate novel ideas and creative thoughts probably arises from our brain’s ‘default mode network’ (DMN), a constellation of brain regions that are active when our thoughts are turned inward, such as when mind-wandering,” writes Richard Sima in the Washington Post. Sima cites a study on the relationship between creativity and this default mode network and suggests these tips for getting our brains in a creative mode:

• Give yourself breaks. Step away from writing and take a walk, do the dishes, take a shower, or do something else that might allow your mind to wander.
• Change your environment. Sometimes a change of place can provide new and different stimuli. If you regularly write at home, consider going to a coffee shop or library for a change.
• Keep at it. “Your creativity, like a muscle, will get better with repeated work.” So even if you don’t feel like writing or journaling, give it a try anyway. (And if you miss a day, don’t beat yourself up. There’s always tomorrow.)
• Figure out what gets you in a creative thinking mode and seek those experiences — whether it’s a shower, a workout, a walk in nature, playing with your cat or dog, whatever.

I would add this:

Pay attention. Be observant of the world around you. Let’s say you’re at the grocery store and you overhear a snippet of conversation that sounds interesting to you, or you observe something interesting on your drive to work. Make a note of what you hear or see (not while driving, please) and bring that information into your collection of inputs. (Natalie Goldberg talks about the idea of “composting” ideas, but I won’t get into that here, lest you think I’m an even bigger Goldberg fanboy than I am.)

And whatever you do, keep on writing, even when you’re not writing.

Photo of James Thurber by Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Public Domain.