making things
In Anne Lamott’s TED talk 12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing, one of the truths she shares is that creative success is something you have to recover from. I first encountered this talk several years ago and still I feel like this truth is something that keeps hitting me, again and over again, in different ways.
I think I was pretty successful, conventionally speaking, in my first few years of striking out as a freshly minted MA Creative Writing student. I won some competitions, was published in anthologies, read my work in public, spoke at festivals and conferences, and even had the opportunity to judge one of the competitions I won in a subsequent year. I received compliments on my writing from writers and editors who’d been doing this a long time. And I am grateful beyond words for all of that. I have been so lucky.
At the time, I thought what you had to recover from was the pressure of success, and to find ways to move forward as a writer without feeling like you constantly have to publish, let alone win awards. I still think this is important, but the bigger epiphany I am having now is that you also have to recover from tying yourself to the identity of writer.
When you are lauded for your writing, it’s easy to start boxing yourself in through that lens, and losing sight of what else you are. I love writing, but last year was the first year since 2018 I didn’t submit anything for publication. There were various perfectly good reasons for this, such as devoting most of my time to working on a novel project instead of short-form pieces, feeling burnt out of the endless submission/rejection cycle, feeling like I didn’t have actually have something compelling I wanted to say in a short story, and just… feeling tired.
Still, the break was unexpectedly difficult for me to reckon with. It wasn’t until towards the end of last year that I felt like by stepping away, I had taken steps to heal my relationship with writing in a way I didn’t even know I needed. By yoking myself so tightly to a specific writer identity, I’ve been devaluing all the creative things I do that are not writing. Like making websites, relearning how to code. Decorating my house. Cooking and baking. Taking photos of things I like. Playing the ukulele very badly. Trying my hand at translating Japanese show pamphlets. Even journalling, note-taking and blogging. Which is all obviously writing, but because it wasn’t fiction or poetry, I found myself feeling like I still hadn’t done enough creative work for the day if all I did was blog. As if writing a post like this isn’t creating something.
For the last couple of years after I left grad school and no longer had academic deadlines to meet, I felt guilty every day I didn’t work on my writing. This year, I want to let that go. I do think it is important to always be making. I think all of us feel, instinctively and innately, that we are less alive when we only take in things but don’t create. We’re not made only to read stuff/watch shows/play games without having ways to make something of our own.
But I think any making is good. Any making is creative. Writing is a medium, and for me it happens to be the one I have always felt the greatest affinity to, but making can take many forms. I no longer want to box myself into a fixed creative identity and feel guilty about not being that person.
I’m reminded of something Quincy Jones shared in his book 12 Notes on Life and Creativity (what is it about the number 12 and creative truths?):
You may have started reading this book with hopes that I’d reveal some grand secret about how to get nominated for eighty Grammy Awards, or how to achieve your highest creative self, but with age, I can assure you that simply being alive and present in your everyday life is the highest form of creativity.
This is the energy I want to channel in 2025, and in my forties and beyond, really. To be alive and present, whatever that looks like in the moment to me.