Allowing for Joy

Releasing the constraints around your creativity

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On a dusty-hot day in May 2005, I knocked on the door of a stone house in the middle of a colourful street in Antigua, Guatemala, excited to meet a Maya astrologer who had drawn up my birth chart. As I sat in front of her, my blonde hair in two braids, pulled back from my face by a cotton headband, my young heart fizzed with anticipation. What might my future hold? I don’t remember everything the astrologer told me that day but a lot has stayed with me in those 17 years since. One thing I have never forgotten is her saying, Susannah, you are here to show other people how to have fun, how to find the joy in life. My free-spirited, optimistic Sagittarius self liked that idea a lot.

In the years since then, life, as it seems to do, has ebbed and flowed with easy, joyful, magic moments and much harder, challenging times, but the idea that we aren’t meant to take this thing called life all too seriously has never been too far away. I particularly believe it when it comes to creativity.  As I shared a while back in my newsletter When Did Writing Get So Serious?, I am all about bringing joy to this magical craft.

As Julia Cameron says “creativity is not and never has been sensible. Why should it be? Why should you be?”

This doesn’t mean that your writing can’t address serious themes but rather that you don’t let the seriousness take away from the joy of writing it. I believe that you can be writing about raw and real subjects and still really enjoy the process.

I also believe that the more we can let ourselves be beginners, experiment, get things wrong, try again in our writing, the better our writing will become and the more fun we will have in the process.

I’d love you to ponder what constraints you might be putting on your writing. Are you needing it to be perfect on the first draft? Are you stopping a character from doing something because it seems too churlish, too silly, too outlandish? Are you resisting taking a story in a certain direction because it strays too far from your plan? Are you desperate to write a poem, but think you aren’t a poet? Are you writing in the same tense you always have because it feels safe? Are you writing with an audience of very mean critics in mind and editing yourself to please them?

I want to give you permission to take your writing out of the constraints you have put it in, let it run wild in a field of wildflowers for an afternoon, frolic in the pastures, dive under spring waterfalls for a quick refreshing moment or two. What might appear on the page, if you weren’t writing what you normally write, what you are ‘supposed’ to write, if you weren’t taking it and yourself too seriously?

Maybe your writing wants to take a coastal road-trip in a turquoise Chevy?

I, personally, have been having SO much fun writing short stories lately. I love that when I come up with an idea, I can take it out of the constraints that a novel would have put on it (do I love it enough to delve into it for a year or longer? Does the idea have enough depth to sustain a novel? Will it work?). Instead, the short story form is letting me experiment, play with language, take the meat off the bone (as a dear writing friend described earlier today). It also fits really well with how I am feeling right now. I don’t feel the desire to delve in and be with characters for a long time, I want to pop in, delve deep and then pop out again (much like I did as a journalist covering all sorts of different subjects). There will come a time when I want to rest into a novel again, but it isn’t this week, probably not this month and in the meantime, I am becoming a better writer for those characters, for that future story.

In writing short stories rather than forcing myself into a new novel, I have found a joy for myself that 23-year-old me would approve of. I am so excited to write and eager to edit. I am carving out as much writing time as I can and the ideas are popping up all over the place like mushrooms after the first rains. It’s delightful!

That same astrologer I saw as a wide-eyed backpacker all those years ago, also told me that we have little animal spirits (mine was an armadillo I believe) that walk with us in life nudging us in different directions. “If you keep ignoring their nudges and going in the wrong direction,” she said, “eventually they will slam a door in your face to make you have to do an about-turn.”

I think that armadillo has been nudging me in the direction of short stories for a while and I definitely got very close to feeling the wood against my nose. Luckily, I made my little redirect just in time.

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Mentoring

I have the honour of working with so many courageous and talented writers, writing everything from creative non-fiction and journalistic articles to short stories and fairytales. I have a space for ONE new client in May. If you think you might like some support in moving your work forward, gaining confidence or identifying and removing some of those self-imposed constraints do get in touch.

Here is what one of my clients had to say:

“…Meeting Susannah as my mentor, she questioned me about my feelings and motivations, and helped me see what was really energizing me and what my personal connection to my work was. Then she suggested writing techniques to help me open up my thinking about my subject. I ran with those, and I began to feel the oxygen flow into my work and my aspirations for it. Sooner than I could have imagined my labor of love has gained its wings and been shared with others (in publication.)” J.P. Oregon, USA.