Process notes: 4 thoughts on creativity this week

Creativity as participation (after Nick Cave) | learning poetry by heart | making preparations | writing within the hour

This is a newsletter for my paid supporters with a preview for all my subscribers. If you enjoy my writing please consider upgrading your subscription for £4/month or £40/year. These mean a lot to me as I try and maintain an independent writing life. You can cancel at any time though I always appreciate your commitment over time, as I offer mine to you. My most recent book is Weathering on geology and therapy. My first book Grounded is an illustrated guide to nature connectedness. I also have a new multi-disciplinary art chapbook called CONDUIT available now in hardcopy and digital version. Thank you for your continued support.

This week I want to share some observations, from my desk to yours, on the creative process. As some of you may already know, alongside my work itself I keep an ongoing, multi-year, journal of what it’s like to try and make things, what gets in the way, what works and doesn’t work, and how I feel about it all.

Largely, I write it for myself because getting the process down into words is itself clarifying and generative. I also have some diffuse and unspecified sense that it might come in useful someday professionally speaking. I also find it a useful reference for mentees, or on workshops, when I want to remember how it is for me, if asked. Mostly though, I keep it because I’m not sure I’ve ever learnt as much from delivering a finished product as I have from the undertaking. I create far more than I deliver - and in a way I keep notes because I want to understand why this is, recognising that creating has never been about product for me, but about some essential human response to the world.

Anyway. Here are a few things I have noted this week, thoughts I’m having, a couple of things I’m up to: