As I sit down to write this, I have just returned from a beach walk. The first thing I encountered on the beach was a dead jellyfish. The second thing was a log which was perfect for sitting on. But the third thing – actually, no, that was another dead jellyfish. But the fourth thing I found was a Home Truth.
Let me set the scene. For fun, not because it’s relevant. I had this thought on West Sands, unquestionably the best beach in St Andrews, which is itself unquestionably the best town in Scotland. Day was transitioning into twilight, and the sky was reforming itself before my eyes, from the patchwork of thin clouds into the soft gradient of blues and pinks. As the sun fell behind the dunes, the ground was bathed in a wonderful pink hue. By about half past ten, we were officially in twilight (the sun had set, but there was still plenty of light reflecting back from the atmosphere), and I was altogether alone, save for a few wayward youths.
But of course, I didn’t have this thought at half past ten: I had it about an hour earlier. Remember, it was the fourth thing I encountered on my walk, and it was a fairly long walk. An hour earlier, the beach had been mostly empty, but there were a few other people wandering about – couples, mostly, with a few dog walkers and families dotted about. It was this circumstance that prompted a thought.
In a crowded place, you know exactly where to go, because there aren’t any options. You gravitate towards the path of least resistance, and there’s no real thinking involved. But on a nearly empty beach, you could go almost anywhere, and so you end up overthinking it. You don’t want to seem creepy by walking right up beside a couple, even if that couple is exactly where you want to be. Nor do you want to seem overly antisocial by avoiding them too deliberately (though perhaps this doesn’t apply in the time of coronavirus). And you don’t want to seem like you’re mad by walking diagonally and curving around and stopping to (for example) admire/analyse dead jellyfish. It’s very hard to pathfind in a nearly empty beach. The same is true for ideas.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I know I’m not the first to think about it – I’ve heard other people express the same idea in pretty similar terms, ironically. But it’s really very difficult to create anything when there’s too much freedom. A blank canvas is almost oppressive, because it looks full. It’s very easy to become paralysed by indecision: you could do anything, so what do you do? The possibilities all blur together, and when you do manage to pin a possibility down, you end up focusing on its obstacles and imperfections – and you can’t bring yourself to settle for an imperfect idea because there are so many alternatives, even though they’re nameless and shapeless.
In my mind, I’ve characterised this as a sort of lack of creativity. Some people seem to have good ideas all the time, and that sort of creativity seems unattainable. I fairly recently had half an epiphany, which was that rather than actually coming up with ideas, they’re simply noticing things. I describe this as half an epiphany, because it’s easier said than done. “Great, in order to be creative I need to notice things. How do I do that?”
The other half of the epiphany is this: start small. Universal truths are difficult, whether that’s a truth about a country, a theory, socialising, or anything else. Ideation within such broad parameters is impossible, at least for me. But by starting small, the bigger picture can begin to make sense. Going back to the idea of a canvas, it’s hard to paint a forest without painting a tree. (The beach analogy falls apart here, so I’m forced to mix my metaphors.)
But I think there’s more to it than that. I don’t think it’s just that we (I) struggle to be creative. I do a lot of what a friend of mine has termed “curative creation”, which is a polite way of saying “making things out of other people’s things instead of actually being original”. I play a lot of piano – but I don’t write my own songs. I make a lot of playlists, I do drawings but only from photographs, I write reviews of albums (but I swear this isn’t a music blog – it’s actually a fashion blog in disguise).
I’m not entirely sure why that is. After all, I used to be creative – I won a secondary school creative writing competition in Year 7 (and I’ve obviously moved on from that, right?) and I used to love making YouTube videos. I think it comes down to vulnerability. At a certain point, probably around age 14, I learned shame, pride, fear, insecurity, anxiety, and all those other wonderful gifts which teenagers receive in an abundance as a prize for surviving until puberty. I stopped wanting to put my work into the world. The world doesn’t really mind, because it can cope quite well without some lacklustre art and the fantasy short stories written by an easily distracted Tolkien wannabe. But I mind. I think that’s why I started this blog, in a way – some sort of an attempt to recapture my past creativity.
Not that it was an easy or quick process. I had the blog for almost three full years before I actually posted anything on it. Partly that’s because I was kidding myself (and, indeed, I still am kidding myself) that I’m a fashion blogger really – as you can tell, from the huge volume of fashion posts I’ve published – but partly it’s because it’s actually quite a big barrier to cross, sharing Things You’ve Made. The only way I was able to do it in the first place was by telling myself I wouldn’t even share the link with anyone outside my immediate circle. It’s still very comforting to me that not many people actually read this thing, but I’m getting more comfortable with it, and with sharing the posts on my Instagram stories – still not quite at the full post stage yet, but maybe one day…
The weird thing about this whole escapade is that for some reason, writing posts that are personal and non-fictitious is somehow easier than it would be to share more creative, fictional writing. I think there are two reasons for it. One is that bad creative writing opens itself much more to allegations of cringe, which I dread. But perhaps more important is my belief that, perhaps a bit paradoxically, creative writing is actually much more personal than non-creative writing.
In writing directly about my personal life, my thoughts, I can choose how to frame them. Not in a particularly conscious, subtle, or artful manner – I’m not writing this thinking “How do I want people to perceive me?” – but I do have some control over the subtext. But fictional writing, in its attempts to be about something else, would probably end up being far more revelatory. All the characters would have bits of my own personality, and all the themes would be the things about which I obsess. For better or for worse, and whether I wanted to be or not, I would be hidden in those pages.
So, I shy away from creative writing. I publish vast tracts about pop stars and spaghetti, interspersed with occasional brief musings about ducks. Maybe one day I’ll even write something that’s actually about fashion (don’t hold your breath). But I think it’ll be a while before I take my own advice, and make something truly new.