fierce need that finds satisfaction only in your creative efforts. The choice is yours. You create or you die. You either take that first step, or you are stuck. Your task in life is to express yourself—to make a mark, as boldly, honestly, and as often as you can. You have to stoke your creative fire, keep it alive long enough to make something that expresses you and then learn to pass it on to others who are reaching out for the torch. You either strike the flint and light the fire, or remain passive and go cold.
At the core of this book is my passionate conviction that, if you long to live a life of purpose and meaning, you must have a creative vision. Then you have to visualize the progress of your work if you intend to complete it. Like an actor who rehearses lines or an athlete who mentally pre-plays a game, the more you imagine the various stages of your journey, the greater the chances of completing your creative work. Your imagination gives you the courage to keep going if you're stuck, the strength to go deeper if your work isn't bold enough, and the confidence to overcome confusion about where you really and truly are. I believe that looking at your creative process as a journey with a beginning, middle, and end gives you a longer and more realistic view than you normally have.
This book offers a deceptively simple model to help guide you on your creative journey. Its unconventional form blends my own stories from four decades of freelance writing and film work, with my reflections from thirty years of teaching creativity in various forms, and with interviews, anecdotes, and exercises. Throughout the book, you'll be asked three questions: What kind of mark do you want to make? What kind of contribution do you want to make? Why do you do what you do and not something else? Ask yourself these questions throughout your creative journey. They remind you that you pay a hefty price for refusing the call to the creative life. Wasting your time may make you feel anxious, but wasting your talent is like letting your soul rust.
I happily offer this book as a creative road map filled with signposts and milestones to help guide you on your own creative adventure. You can start from the beginning and read it cover-to-cover, open it serendipitously, or focus on the stage of the journey you're most concerned about right now. It depends on where you're stuck and if you want to go deeper with your work. The good news is that the journey is thoroughly known; the tough news is you still have to find your own way. But I can only strike the flint; you must fan the flame. You've got to gather your own “firewood,” as David Lynch calls his movie research, and decide if it's worth the effort to move on with your creative work. If that work is vitally important to you—and I hope it is—think of this book as a kind of old-fashioned tinderbox filled with flints, paper, and matches to help you ignite your creative fires. Every image, story, poem, and exercise is included here for one reason—to spark your work. I promise you that everything here has actually fired my own imagination or proved helpful to someone whose work startles and inspires me. But you still have to learn how to stoke your own fire.
Innumerable parallels have been drawn over the centuries between nature's fire and the fire in our souls. Ralph Waldo Emerson's astonishing words come to mind: “Genius is the power for lighting your own fire.” If you believe, as I do, that creativity isn't a luxury, but a necessity—a means of survival—then you must ask yourself some fundamental questions before you go on. How important is it for you to express yourself? How badly do you need to leave a mark, to say what's really happened in your life? How critical is it for you to finish what you've started? If it isn't as important as breathing, maybe that's why you're stuck.
One of our wisest little philosophers, Charlie Brown, muses: “Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, ‘Why am I here?’” In the next panel, a spectral voice answers: “Why? Where do you want to be?'” And that's the key question for you as well. Where do you want to be creatively?
On one hand, to create is the most natural thing in the world. One of the characteristics that makes us human is that we are reflective creators rather than instinctive creatures. To create means to make something new, original, fresh, and vital. The very origins of the word go back to the Latin creare, “to grow, to make order out of the chaos,” revealing the depths of this irrepressible impulse. But being creative can also feel like the most unnatural endeavor in the world because of the often painful sacrifices of time, money, health, and sometimes sanity it requires.
The breakthrough comes when you realize that not to create is not to grow, not to emerge out of chaos, which, as psychologists remind us, is to court neurosis. When you make the bold effort to lead a creative life, you must seize the fire, as Prometheus did when he sparked the very origins of art and culture.
Ravenous (Prometheus) Creates a Human, etching. Copyright © 2005 by Dave Alber.
But what if your fire is not burning well or, worse, has gone out? Without inner fire, you have no light, no heat, no desire. You can't move forward without spiritual energy. You may be procrastinating or feeling lazy and unmotivated. You may be distracted by money or relationship problems. Or your creative block just may be a blip from your soul's Early Warning System that you're headed for disaster with your current plans or somehow self-sabotaging your vision.
Regardless, there's only one way out—and that's through the dark woods.
You must change your life.
STEPPING ONTO THE PATH
“Step by step, a path; stone by stone, a cathedral,” my greatgrandfather used to say. I think those are words to live by.
So here it is, in a nutshell. We create or we die. We make a mark or we leave a void. Our task in life is to find our deep soul work and throw ourselves headlong into it. “There's only one way to begin to work,” Eugene O'Neill wrote in Long Day's Journey into Night, “and that's to get to work.” If you burn with the blue desire to begin, there's no time to waste. There is no better time. “Start anywhere,” says Cormac McCarthy. There will never be a perfect moment when the stars are aligned, the money is in the bank, the kids are out of the house, and the muses are just a speed-dial away. What's important is to commit to your own creative process. The journey is about making time and space to make your art.
Think about where you want to be a year from now, five years, ten years from now. Consider what you have to do to reach that goal. Put skin and bones on that dream creature called your creative vision. If you believe, along with Doc, the soulful marine biologist in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, that “We have to make a mark, even if it's only a scribble,” then it's time to make yours and not worry about success, or fame, or riches.
Are you up to the challenge? Are you going to be a reproduction or an original? Will you strive to be innovative or imitative? Are you ready to take your turn on the page, turn up the heat, turn it on? “Wanna make something out of it?” as we used to taunt on the streets of Detroit. “Do you want to make something out of yourself?” as Roger Turner, my first newspaper editor, used to challenge me. Are you ready to create something that enlivens and enlarges your world and—if it's got the real fire—ours too?
Silhouettes. Sunprint by Jack Cousineau, 2005.
“A musician must make music,” wrote Abraham Maslow, “an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must.” In that spirit, the creative journey is the one you can't not take, the work you can't not do. But it takes courage to live boldly, a bold heart to become yourself. If you're stuck, you must move. To fuel
