Creativity is on tap. There are burs in your hair, bark to be stripped, and so forth—but the miracle of the present moment? The sight of a flower out my window? It’s always there. Creativity is a human muscle, a responsibility, a gift, a stellar configuration that nothing will unshift, and like the constellations we experience creativity unavoidably, though the stars themselves are further distant from one another than we are from them.
Our miraculous musings, our stories, and our instinct to innovate, to build, to combine, to bridge the gap between one side and the other—these are human traits. We’ll never lose them. Our windows may shutter and the sill may mold over, our nostrils can un-flare, but the flame cannot go out. We need creativity to talk. To think. To breath. To eat, or at least to know a purpose in eating. Creativity’s death comes only with our own.
So I’m not worried about creativity. There’s no need to fret or muse darkly, or to see myself in a hallway without exit, shins crying out in perceived trauma-by-way-of-end-table. I do not need to fear that.
But mastery is something else.
The expression of creativity is the challenge. The form, the flattened teardrop of the airfoil, the shape of the vowels in my mouth and how they will build a landscape—this is harder, slipperier, less reliable, and thereby all the more wondrous (and ponderous) once achieved.
When I’ve written a good sentence, it’s like spotting a unicorn on a foggy morning while walking through wet grass. I must travel many such fields—again and again—until I can tread silently, hear not even the broken spine of last year’s last leaf—walk on and on, until…? Until I can look into the marsh water and see that the unicorn is myself. The flanks are mine, the horn mine, the certainty of strength mine.
What I mean to say: creativity is natural. Writing well is not.
We are creative every time we breathe—but to write well takes a lifetime of practice and improvement and self-reflection, not to mention the ability to scrape off the glistening scales and pull back the dorsal fin and somehow remove the pulsing, bloody entrails, a beautiful achievement, intact, that it may be tasted whole—the muscles discarded. We need to learn how to clean the fish and keep the nasty bits, removing everything that is clear and pristine, so that we can instead taste the viscera—bitter iron, half-digested muck, gelatinous swim bladder, and perhaps the broken snag of a hook that draws blood upon our tongue.
That’s mastery…that’s the practice of writing. That’s the joy and the dream of craft. The hard part.
Whenever I take a half-step towards self-expression that matches or at least echoes my aspiration, I feel it like a shock: electric and painful, and right up there with the laudable cannon of the best feelings that one can feel: to be safe, to be loved, to love another…and to create well.