How to Be in a Pure Creative Space
I'm figuring it out!
Hi, everyone! I hope you—and your writing—are in peak form!
I want to share an experiment I’ve been trying out to keep my mind in a pure creative space, uninfected by the “stuff’ we’re all contending with…constantly.
Instead of waking up and checking my emails, social media and texts first thing (why?!), I’m making coffee and doing “morning pages” (three pages of anything that occurs to me a la The Artist’s Way). Instead of watching Morning Joe as I get ready for the day, I’m listening to music (the soundtrack from Netflix’s Sex Education is my current go-to—it’s fantastic!). Instead of mindlessly binge-watching shows I’m not particularly enthused about, I’m reading Wuthering Heights for the first time (shamefully late to it, I know).
I re-joined a phenomenal creativity group I’d belonged to during the pandemic, offered by The Spark File, watched motivational talks by Anne Lamott and Julia Cameron, listened here and there to an Emily Dickinson marathon reading of all her poems. And guess what: I’m writing more and even taking the scary (to me) leap into fiction writing!
I happened to have the time the past two weeks to do all these things – that’s obviously not the way it will always go. But I know for sure I’ll want to safeguard precious aspects of this new regimen. In particular, I’ll continue following a great bit of advice the always-wise Lamott offers that you might find valuable, too: Could you sub out one thing each day for writing? For instance, instead of binge watching four episodes of Suits, could you watch three and write for 42 minutes? Instead of viewing Tik Tok videos about how to make anything out of popsicle sticks or fuming over Elon Musk’s offensive tweets, could you use that time to write instead? You get the point.
I haven’t pulled a Thoreau and gone off to live in a tiny house on Walden Pond (see below—although, did you know his mom made lunch for him?). I still check headlines and am painfully aware of world crises in Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, and so many other places where people are suffering. I’ll write letters and postcards when election time approaches and march for women’s rights and plan to get involved in educational reforms.
But I’m really enjoying this respite. And I want to keep the experiment going until it’s no longer an experiment but, instead, a way of life: a writer’s life.
What do you do to keep your mind in a pure creative space? Please let us know in the Comments, below. Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!
When I visited Walden, you could still swim in the pond, and so I did. My understanding is that when the property was transferred from Emerson’s estate to the town of Concord in the 1920s, one stipulation was that public access to the pond needed to remain. So unlike most national park historical properties, which often feel kind of phony, to dip into the actual water of the pond was a memorable way of experiencing the site.
As for the hut replica (pictured above), it was lousy with foreign tourists and their cameras. And sure, that’s great, he’s an international celeb, but I wondered how many had even read Walden, much less the book Thoreau was working on while living there (it wasn’t Walden).
If anyone has any interest in that early book, I wrote a little about it years ago. It’s probably one of my all-time least-popular articles:
https://10franks.com/2015/08/09/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers
I feel like this newsletter is speaking to my piece of a few days ago. I spent the better part of a week in the woods and found myself eager to hold onto the Thoreau-like disconnection from all the pings and beeps of our connected life.