THE WORK OF CREATIVITY

Judith Viorst

Let me start by reading to you the first poem I ever wrote—a heartrending, deeply rotten poem I produced at around the age of seven or eight. It was an ode to my dead parents and went as follows:

I wonder how the angels look

And what they do and say.

They took my mom and daddy

And carried them away.

They took them up the golden stairs

Far away from me.

I wonder if ever again

My parents I will see.

I need to point out to you that at the time I wrote this poem, my mother and father were quite alive and well and, when I proudly showed this (in my view) masterpiece to them, quite irritated. They urged me to put down my pencil and paper, go outside, get some sun, do something wholesome. They thought I was being morbid. I, or course, thought I was being creative.

From these dark beginnings, I continued to commit homicide in verse--ruthlessly bumping off mothers and fathers, brave soldiers and innocent children, and, in one intense poem, and entire family. I only recently figured out that the reason I kept piling on poetic corpses was that my mother’s favorite poem, one she recited to me CONSTANTLY during my childhood, was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” And if you remember Annabel, she wound up dying young and lying in a sepulcher down by the sea. Anyway, I realized, only recently, that as a young girl I’d somehow become convinced that a poem simply couldn’t be a real poem unless it had at least one dead body in it.

But with or without dead bodies I have always, or at least since age seven or eight, used writing to express and contain emotion, to let my fantasies roam, to think about life. I have always written, and for the past forty years or so, I have even succeeded in earning a living at it. I have also taught writing--both to teen-aged in-patients at a psychiatric hospital and to mille-aged psychoanalysts at a psychoanalytic institute. In addition to writing a lot, and teaching some, I am a voracious, constant consumer of all kinds of books--poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, the tried-and-true classics and the current best sellers, the noble and the purely entertaining. Along with my own private reading, I have just finished spending three glorious, challenging years as part of a four-couple study group reading aloud every word of James Joyce’s exhausting, exhilarating Ulysses. And in addition to all that, I belong to an eight-woman study group which, for some twenty-two years, has been examining poetry together, everything from Robert Fagles’ find translation of The Odyssey to our current poet laureate, Billy Collins. (Question: how many women does it take to understand a poem? Answer: It takes eight women, listening carefully and respectfully to each other.) My point is that the world of written language is the realm of creativity I’m most at home with, and my comments on creativity will be restricted to The Word, and to what I have directly learned as writer, as reader, as student, and as teacher.

And the main point I want to make in what follows is this: That in my view creativity is very, very importantly linked to discipline. Lots of discipline. The discipline I’m speaking of is of tow kinds: One is the discipline to set aside time on a regular basis to sit down and do your work, whether you’re quote in the mood quote to work or not. The other is the discipline to move beyond inspiration and--often with effort and anguish and sweat--to apply writing skills and controls to the raw material.

I’ll start with setting aside the time to write, and issue that I wrote about, thirty-odd years ago, in a poem called “The Writers”:

I write in the bedroom with unsorted laundry,

A crib, and a baby who hollers.

My husband the writer gets gold velvet chairs,

A couch that cost four hundred dollar,

A wall-to-wall carpet, bright red and all wool,

And a desk big enough to play pool on.

I write in quadruplicate, two sets for me,

And two for the baby to drool on,

In a setting conductive to grocery lists

And decisions like chopped steak or flounder.

Did Emily Dickinson have to write poems

With diaper-rash ointment around her?

Did Elizabeth Browning stop counting the ways

When Robert said “one hot pastrami”?

Excuse me, the big boys just came home from school

And they’re yelling their head off for mommy.

My husband the writer makes long-distance calls

To people too famous to mention.

The closest I get to the great outside world

Is listening on the extension,

Or reading old Digests while taking the kids

For their flu shots or antibiotics.

(Everyone knows that the mother who works

Will doubtlessly bring up psychotics

Unless she’s right there when the chicken-pox pop

Or they’re stricken with gnat bites or toe aches.)

Did Edna St. Vincent Millay rise at dawn

For a first-grade production called “Snowflakes”?

Did Marianne Moore put her symbols aside

To wipe Quaker Oats off the table?

Excuse me, my husband would like a cold beer.

I’ll be back just as soon as I’m able.

The baby is sleeping, the beds have been made,

And I’ve mopped where the kitchen was muddy.

My husband the writer has finished the Times

And is vanishing into his study,

Where no one would dare to disturb his deep thoughts

(Or the half-hour nap he requires.)

I’ve gone to the cleaners and picked up dessert

And I even put air in my tires

Before sitting down at my second-hand Royal.

(He just bought a new Olivetti.)

Did Miss Amy Lowell find “Patterns” besmirched

With dribbles of Junior Spaghetti?

Does Phyllis McGinley refrain from her rhymes

Whenever the garden needs spraying?

Excuse me, the dishwasher’s gone on the blink.

Maybe I’ll switch to crocheting.

I have to say that there’s much more literal truth than imagination in that poem.

For my first fifteen years or so as a professional writer coincided with bearing and raising three sons. I had to wrap a writing schedule around my children’s day-to-day requirements, and in order to both meet my children’s needs and get my writing done, I could not fool around. This meant that I had to figure out a realistic schedule, which included room for school plays and trips to the supermarket as well as ear infections and trips to the emergency room, and to make a major commitment to stick to that schedule. In other words, if I drove my kids to the nursery school at 8:45 a.m., got home at 9:15, and had to leave at 11:45 to pick them up, I could have two and a half hours of writing that morning if all I did in the course of that morning was write. Not chat on the phone. Not move furniture around. Not try on my black pants with the red sweater and the gray sweater. No distractions. No, “I’m not in the mood today.” No whining. To do this I also had to learn, and this is important, to take my writing seriously, not as something that could be easily interrupted by others or put aside by me. I had to learn to say that this is mine, this is what I do, and ask myself and others to respect it.

Now this taking yourself seriously can be a very hard attitude to achieve, and it isn’t hard only for women or the nonprofessional. When I was teaching a writing course to psychoanalysts, where the only requirement was bringing in writing each week, you can’t imagine the number of “my dog at my homework” excuses I heard. But what this failure to do the writing actually boiled down to, in case after case, was that while the analysts in my writing class wouldn’t dream of ever permitting interruptions while they treated patients in their office at home, they found it hard to view the writing they did in that same office with the same seriousness and expectation of respect. They allowed themselves a lot of interruptions, both by others and themselves, when they sat down to write. It is difficult to get writing accomplished that way. And it is certainly difficult to be creative.

Because, and this leads me to the second kind of discipline writing requires, creative doesn’t just mean a blast from the blue, just doesn’t mean an inspiration that seizes us. It seems to me that the creative part in writing, even in fairly mundane non-fiction writing, also has to do with how we organize and handle material, where we stand vis-à-vis the material, what kind of voice we use to talk about the material. It also has to do with openings, with endings, with transitions between the parts of what we are writing, with what we leave in and what we leave out. To mobilize this kind of creativity we need time, we need concentration, we need to work.

We need to work, in fact, no matter how inspired, how poetic, how passionate our initial impulse is. I am in complete agreement with the brilliant literary critic Leon Edel, who observes that discipline must be applied to the raw stuff of the unconscious before it can be called art. He deplores the notion of “id art” as true art, and says that “as we reassert the role of the ego and the self, we must recognize that crude emanations of the unconscious have value only as forms of experiment; they represent a kind of impulse-art and a failure to adapt the modalities, techniques, and discipline which man has learned in so painstaking and difficult a fashion during the centuries.”

Many psychoanalysts who write about the nature of art and creativity echo Edel’s viewpoint. Corbin observes that although the unconscious, and even psychopathology, may provide the raw materials of art, “there can be no creativity without the work of the ego,” that “creativity...has an important conscious component.” Rapaport distinguishes between “the ‘inventive’ phase of creative thinking, which abides by the rules of primary process” and the “‘elaborative’ phase of creative thinking [which]...is effortful and operates by the rules of the secondary process.” Kanzer writes that it “is necessary to distinguish carefully between the inspiration for and the manner of executing a work of art...Skills, learning, ambition, and even salesmanship play their part..; [art is] not merely the stuff of dream.” Kris points out that “In the work of art, as in the dream, unconscious contents are alive...but the ego maintains its control over them [and] elaborates them in its own right.” And Beres, describing the orderliness that the ego brings to the chaotic imaginings of the unconscious, says that this transformational process “...is what Coleridge meant when he spoke of poets as ‘Gods of Love who tame the chaos.’”

During the year and a half that I designed and taught writing to a shifting population of eight or nine in-patient adolescents at a private psychiatric hospital, I had ample opportunity to see chaos tamed. The goal of my course was not writing therapy but the development of skills that would help these young people produce creative work. To that end I did not treat them as patients, inquire what illness had brought them to the hospital, or invite them to dump their naked emotions on to a page. Their personal experiences and feelings might serve as the raw material of their writings, I told them, but that raw material needed to be shaped and controlled. My message was simple: Outside this room you may be patients, but in here you are creative writers--and SERIOUS creative writers, which meant: Completing assignments. Meeting deadlines. Not insisting on waiting for the right mood. Applying form and order to your material. And understanding that what you create must be, in Kris’s words, “a specific kind of communication from the one to the many.”

To underscore that important last point about communication, I had my students read their word aloud and, from time to time, gather it into a magazine called “Plain and Fancy Words” for distribution to staff, family, and friends. By impressing wider audiences with their creative work, these young men and women achieved (so to speak) what Freud once said the successful artist achieves, “gratitude and admiration..., honor, power, and the love of women.” (Or, of course, men, as the case may be.)

Thus my own experience as a writer seems supported by the psychoanalytic literature and by my experience as a writing teacher. Control, elaboration, order, form, communicability--all of them the product of disciplined work--are crucial parts of the process of creativity.

Having said all this about discipline, however, let me add that there are times, blessed times, in the life of writers when the unconscious offers us a gift. We’re driving in the car with the radio turned to NPR, or we’re staring at the blank screen of our computer, or we’re having a conversation with a friend about this year’s hemlines, when suddenly, amazingly, a story, a poem, an idea ablaze with promise dances or struts or woofs into our consciousness, at which point we tip our hat to the Muse, and say “thanks.” I say “woofs” into our consciousness because back when I wrote my first, thus far only, novel, a book called Murdering Mr. Monti, a large dog, a Great Dane name Hubert, appeared in Chapter 4 and would not leave. I mean, I do not have or want to have a dog, nor do I particularly like them, but there he was, insistent on being included, and actually he made for a lot of fun. But I hadn’t invited him, intended him; Hubert just showed up one day and stubbornly demanded to be included. And so I included him.

And then there was the time that I was on my way to the market and giving no thought whatsoever to writing poetry when I was suddenly and surprisingly struck with a line--an excellent line--for a poem. Eager to write it down when I stopped at a light I found that I had neither pencil nor paper (even though I usually carry both) so I grabbed my eyebrow pencil and scrawled the poetry line on the back of a blank check. I went shopping, left the market, and then found that I would have to return to the store because I had inadvertently paid for my cart of groceries with the check on which I had written that line of a poem.

Another example of uninvited creativity: Last September, the day before the year anniversary of 9/11, I was doing my Monday morning volunteer work when an entire poem came knocking at my door. I hadn’t had any intention of writing anything to mark this sad occasion--so much already had and would be written about it--but the poem in my head simply wouldn’t go away. And so at the end of the morning, I hurried home and telephone The Washington Post, which agreed, after seeing the poem, to run it on their op ed page the next day. It’s called WHAT DO WE TELL THE CHILDREN? And it goes like this:

If we can’t promise

That it will never happen again,

Or that it won’t, if it happens again,

Happen to them,

Or that if it does happen again,

And this time to them,

We will come save them,

Or that, if can’t save them,

It won’t hurt,

Or it won’t hurt that much

Or it won’t hurt that long,

Could we tell them

To please stop asking so many question?

If I wanted to parse the creative sources of this poem which was given to me ALMOST complete (the completion took three more hours of just plain hard work before I was ready to phone the newspaper), I could point to my desperate (both conscious and unconscious) yearnings as mother and grandma to keep my children and their children safe; and to the fact that my volunteer work is at a nine-unit in-patient hospice, where loss and dying and death happen every day; and perhaps to my unadmitted competitive wish to weigh in, along with the other writers, with some words, some meaningful words, about 9/11. But again, I wasn’t writing a poem, or thinking of writing a poem, as I answered the phone and tended the patients at hospice. The creation of this poem was the result not of something I DID, but, for the most part, of something that was GIVEN to me.

Here’s what some other writers say about the inspiration that launches them into the creative process.

From Robert Frost: “A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

From William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury “began with a mental picture...of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants go muddy, I realized...that it would have to be a book.”

From Joseph Heller: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line [the first line of Catch-22] came to me...I don’t understand the process of imagination--though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that these ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon. The ideas come to me; I don’t produce them at will. They come to me in the course of a sort of controlled daydream, a directed reverie.”

From John Hersey: “I think the first impulse comes from some deep emotion. It may be anger, it may be some sort of excitement. I recognize in the real world around me something that triggers such an emotion, and then the emotion seems to cast up pictures in my mind that lead me towards a story. To give you an example, the impulse to write The Wall came from seeing some camps (after World War II) in Eastern Europe...To see those bodies, to hear from the people who survived, created a sense of horror and anger in me that made me want to write.”

From Katherine Anne Porter: “I don’t believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you’ve been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you’ve known it always.”

From Tennessee Williams: “A play just seems to materialize, like an apparition it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar...I simply had a vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry...From that vision, Streetcar evolved.”

From John Irving: “I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed; I’m just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice. I think of writing fiction as doing justice to the people in the story, and doing justice to their story--it’s not my story. It’s entirely ghostly work; I’m just the medium.”

From Stephen Spender: “There are two theories of inspiration. One idea is that poetry can actually be dictated to you, like it was to William Black. You are in a hallucinated state, and you hear a voice...The other idea is Paul Valery’s, what he calls une linge donnee, that you are given one line and you try to follow up this clue, pulling the whole poem out of it. My own experience is that a rhythm or something comes into my head which I feel I must do, I must write it, create it.”

In a short story by Andre Dubus, his protagonist, a writer, says this: “...and suddenly the sentence was inside me; it had come from whatever place they come from. It is not a place I can enter at will; I simply receive its gifts.”

In addition to being given a gift--an image, or an emotion, or the first line of a book, or a line of a poem-- we may actively solicit one, we may CONSCIOUSLY ask our unconscious to help us out in our creative endeavors. I have literally, after hours of fruitless struggle to come up with a graceful transition or a satisfying ending to something I’m writing, fallen into bed with the thought, “Okay, unconscious, do your stuff,” and awakened the next morning with the problem solved.

I wouldn’t bank too heavily on this way of working out our writing problems, but I certainly wouldn’t dismiss it either. I agree with writer Hilma Wolitzer, who says that a “considerable part of the [creative] process is the dreaming phase, when ideas and language and characters are simmering in the unconscious, not ready yet to rise up and coalesce into actual written prose. Some things can’t be rushed; a certain amount of patience is required, as is the belief that waiting to write is in itself productive.” At the same time, however, I would argue that the creative inspiration I and other writers talk about is often a product of the hard hard work we have already don, priming the pump, loosening the soil, dragging the boat into the water. In fact, my favorite writer’s slogan--and I don’t know who said it, but I love it--is, “When there’s no wind, row.” And the corollary to that, I believe, is that if you row long enough and hard enough, you’ll eventually be blessed with a brisk breeze.

I have two more thoughts to express before I conclude.

One. In writing, in creating, in bringing to completion what has been given to us, we need not only say thanks for the generous gift of inspiration that we have received; we also should always be generous in return. What I mean is that we shouldn’t hoard these gifts, shouldn’t say, Well, if I stretch that idea or vision or image, I could manage to spread it over TWO stories, TWO poems, maybe even more. Instead, when we get the gift of inspiration, we should use it lavishly, use it as if it were inexhaustible, as if there will always be more where that came from. I honestly believe that if we use creative inspiration that way, there always will, in fact, be more where that came from.

And finally. I’ve found that people often say, when they meet me at a cocktail party or somewhere, “Oh, you’re so lucky to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to write.” Hearing this, I wonder (usually to myself) if they want to be writers (the glory, the gratification, a nice thing to say you are at cocktail parties) or if in fact they really want to write. Because all the goodies having to do with being a writer may, at the star, feel like a banquet, but after a while they’re just not enough to sustain you. Writing is not for people who want to be writers. Writing is for people who want to write, who need to write, who can’t NOT write. And it’s for people who can find genuine gratification in the lonely and difficult process itself. For while writing is eventually something that makes a connection between you and other people, it initially is just between you and you. And while a creative urge or thought or image may set this writing process in motion, it’s the nose to the grindstone, the hands to the oars, the tush to the chair, the revisions and revisions and revisions, that enable writers to do creative work.

References

Beres, D. (1960). The psychoanalytic psychology of imagination, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 8, 252-69, quoted material on p.267.

Corbin, E. (1974). The autonomous ego functions in creativity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 22, 568-87, quoted material on p.573, p.584.

Edel, L. (1968). Psychoanalysis and the “creative arts.” Modern Psychoanalysis. Marmor, J. (Ed.). New York: Basic Books, quoted material on pp. 631-32.

Freud, S. (1917 (1916-1917) ). The paths to the formation of symptoms. Standard Edition 16, 358-77. London: Hogarth Press, 1964, quoted material on pp.376-77.

Kanzer, M. (1957). Contemporary psychoanalytic views of aesthetics. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 5, 514-24, quoted material on p.519.

Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: IUP, quoted material on p.116, p.31.

Plimpton, G., ed. (1989). The Writer’s Chapbook, New York: Viking, quoted material on p.68 (Frost), p.72 (Faulkner), p.75 (Heller), p.77 (Hersey), p.86 (Porter), pp.88-89 (Williams), p.37 (Irving), pp.87-88 (Spender).

Rapaport, D. (1951). The Organization and Pathology of Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, quoted material on p.720.

Viorst, J. (1971). “The Writers.” People and Other Aggravations. New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, quoted material on pp.58-59.

-----Murdering Mr. Monti. (1994). New York:Simon & Schuster.

-----“What Do We Tell the Children?” (September 11, 2002). The Washington Post, quoted material on op-ed page.

Wolitzer, H. (2001). The Company of Writers. New York: Penguin Books, quoted material on p.82.