Discovery, Habits, and our Creative Process | Meg Weston
My writing practice is rarely about writing at the same time and place, seven days a week. My practice includes all the experiences that end up in my writing as well as my thoughts, my dreams, the way first light divides the sky between day and night, the way the crows have been assembling in the trees around the back garden in the morning, even the relentless news—it eventually finds a way onto the page.
This winter I became frustrated with my writing output so to give myself a jumpstart I signed up for a 6-week class with the poet Wayne Lee of Santa Fe. The class is about the poetry and creative practice of William Stafford who was a prolific poet producing about 20,000 poems and publishing 57 books in his lifetime. Stafford said, “a writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” He rose early every morning to write and believed that starting first thing was important before the ordinary push and pull of the day.
My father also advised us to write first thing upon waking. In the threshold between night and day, sleeping and waking, there is a time when I can be most open to the muse—the inspiration that comes from elsewhere—before my analytical mind focuses on the more quotidian tasks I have to do. I’ve been trying that lately—and for now, it’s providing new inspiration.
I know habits help me to do the thing that I want to do, but might be avoiding. For things like exercise or meditation, I set aside a time and make an intention to do it on a schedule and it happens. When I let the habit slip, it slips away from me.
But I’m a rebel at heart. If I do the same thing every day, I find myself doing it without really paying attention—dulling the blade of my creativity. I get bored. I need to stir my coffee in the opposite direction, use my left hand instead of my right, take a different road home, go to an art exhibition, or get on a plane and travel—in order to shake up my thinking, notice what I’m seeing, and find inspiration.
There are times my own creative process is more like a volcano building up pressure underground. The magma is always moving, collecting minerals and gases, and on the surface, it doesn’t look like anything is happening. It might feel like a “dry spell” in my creative output but one day it erupts into a very creative flow. Since I have been obsessed with volcanoes since I was very young, I learn from observing and learning about the processes of the earth. This eases my Inner Critic who is saying—“You aren’t writing every day! You’re not being creative!” I can say, “the magma is moving underground right now, you just can’t see it.”
Whatever your expression, whatever your process, notice it and embrace it. I often find encouragement when reading and listening to other people’s poems. The poem below, “Discovery,” by William Stafford encourages me to “...turn to the open sea and let go.”
Discovery
Tomorrow will have an island. Before night
I always find it. Then on to the next island.
These places hidden in the day separate
and come forward if you beckon.
But you have to know they are there before they exist.
Some time there will be a tomorrow without any island.
So far, I haven’t let that happen, but after
I’m gone others may become faithless and careless.
Before them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,
and without any hope they will stare at the horizon.
So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:
to be a discoverer you hold close whatever
you find, and after a while you decide
what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,
you turn to the open sea and let go.
Reprinted by permission of the Estate of William Stafford.
Meg Weston is the founder and host of The Poets Corner, and co-founder/co-director of the Camden Festival of Poetry. Her books include Magma Intrusions, Letters from the White Queen, and a collaborative collection with Margaret Haberman: To The Point and Back: Swimming Poems. Her writing and photography can be seen on her website Volcanoes.
