The Work of Creativity

Pamela Mueggenberg LIMHP, MA Art Therapy Counseling​​ 
"You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club." – Jack London
 
You may be surprised to find that I, your friendly neighborhood art therapist - the lady in ponderous frocks who refuses to throw out any drawing and will greet bunnies in the backyard - loves Stephen King. I particularly enjoy his more recent works. He’s mellowed with age but doesn’t let his newfound hope for the goodness of humanity deter him from creating some memorable villains doing gleefully awful things. 
 
Last year I read his autobiography/writing guide, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. The book is historically notable as the one he was working on when, taking his daily walk through the woods near his home, he was run over by a truck and almost died. Five weeks after a life flight, a collapsed lung he suffered in midair, emergency surgery, and several reconstructive surgeries with all sorts of pins and shims holding his bones together, King decided it was about time he start writing again. Five weeks!
 
Tabitha, King’s wife, set up a modified writing space for him in the kitchen and set him to work. King writes:
 
“When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying—it was as if I’d never written anything before in my life. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones.
 
There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after a while, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I’d got going; there was that much. After that, things could only get better.”
 
The practice of creativity is, at its core, a battle against entropy. With our pain we will create, with our exhaustion we will find patterns, with our confusion we will put things and ideas and images together and then, when we’re done, there will be something new that has never before existed in the world. (Then we need to find a place to put it, but that’s a completely different article.). We need to go deep into ourselves and the world to access such beauty.
 
Compare that, for just a moment, with the story of the Greek Muses. Inspiration is flown in from above to a deserving few. Gilded ladies would whisper in their ear and, delicate and subtle, the art would flow through them and land fully formed on the page. 
 
How do you relate to your own creativity? Do you believe it to be a finite resource that must be budgeted? Like a gift from above that must be worshipped. Or, like King, is it a practice that helps remind you who you are? In my experience, the more we create the more creative we become. It is work, one we must commit to and practice, and we will see just how we can make the world more beautiful.

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