you need other art forms
when you can't engage with your art, engage in other art forms
I am a writer. I have always been a writer. Not an accomplished writer. Neither a novelist nor a columnist. Just a girl who writes things - snippets and scenes and book chapters - without ever writing the book in which they belong.
Words have always come naturally to me. So when I quit my job in early 2023 to make more creative space for myself (among other things), I fully intended to write more. And here we sit entering the final quarter of the calendar year and I have probably written fewer words this year than in any other year of my life.
Writer’s block is the colloquial term though I don’t much care for it. Lack of inspiration feels more appropriate. Lack of anything new or particularly interesting to say. And yet my world is filled with new experiences, new inspiration, new prompts, and an abundance of hours in the day to put pen to paper (proverbially speaking, of course, because I use a purposefully colored mechanical keyboard as my weapon of choice).
So I come to you with four simple snippets of advice for unlocking your literary static and unleashing words:
Engage in other art forms
Read
Read letters
Stop trying to write what you are trying to write
Despite the dearth in prose, there have been a few literary sparkles this year. They came after unique experiences that had nothing to do with writing or my typical flavors of inspiration (new cities, one way travel, coffee shops, water of any kind, unique cocktail bars and even more distinctive libation). And they somehow managed to temporarily unhinge the door slammed shut on my intellect and artistry. Before I share some writing with the broader writing community, I thought I’d share a lesson or two (and a story or two) on how that writing came to be.
Join me in this oasis of a year - equal parts respite from and anxiety towards the desert of a career I’ve been exploring for the past decade.
So here we go. How to unhinge.
Engage in other art forms
It might seem counterintuitive to temporarily abandon your skill and primary passion for… well… something you may not be very good at. The beauty of not being very good at something - of not knowing how to do it - is that one tends to remove internal pressures and expectations that the outcome be anything other than an exploration. I recently heard creativity described as not a thing but a mindset; a mindset involving play where there is no purpose and any outcome is inherently okay.
This mindset gives permission which is something us goal-oriented doers desperately need. Permission to be. Kurt Vonnegaut instructs to “practice becoming;” to do something creative and show it to no one. Do it for the sole purpose of learning what is inside you.
Permission to become.
For me, the other art form was collage. I threw myself into it accidentally, and then ardently, and did not write a single word on page for close to 90 days. Upon return to the written word, I was deeper and more purposeful, more engaged, and, most importantly, inspired. Inspired by the images I had seen and created, the other worlds and wonders that I had chiseled from the marble slab of magazine print and empty canvas. It gave me something to write about.
So what happens if you don’t have another art form? Well… I didn’t. I was a writer and nothing more (unless you consider my culinary pursuits and recipe crafting an art form). Just because you don’t have another art form in the moment of disquiet doesn’t mean you can’t go explore one, albeit temporarily. My random collision with collage art was likely foreshadowed by a brief, multi-week foray into acrylic paint. All this from a girl who has never drawn, painted, or ceramiced anything in her life.
Read
This one is obvious.
My goal here is not to state the obvious; rather, share a few things I’ve recently read. I consider them to be unconventional, beatific, and otherwise capable of shifting the mind .
Borges on Magic, one foot in the rigorously academic and another in the delightfully fantastical | Dawson Eliasen
The Ants and the Grasshopper, a modern fable, set forth on how to be Less and Less and Less Wrong (also, The Sharded Theory of Human Values)
The Free Energy Principle, in plain English. For a more academic review and discussion around how to construct behavioral logic for cognitive agents in reinforcement learning from this theory, drop a comment.
Men You Don’t Know You Know, short book by my friend Chase Burke.
A Quick Overview of The Walled City of Kowloon, which served as the environment inspo for my favorite RPG of last year Stray (you play as a cat).
Read letters
This one is less obvious.
People used to write letters (you know, before we wrote e-mails and text messages). People kept stationary. People used stamps. And they would mail letters to each other back and forth. Entire relationships unfolded in letters. Truth was written in letters. And there are few things more affecting than reading a great writer’s truth.
We tend to read their prose and their productions. Many have read Borges’ The Aleph, but fewer have read the essay Partial Magic in the Quixote. Here we can observe what Borges learned from Cervantes (and what an honor to become privy to what one great man learned from another!). We also see what of his own ideas he may have projected onto Cervantes’ work.
“… these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional world can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.” (p.231)
Borges wrote Partial Magic as part of Labyrinths in 1962 but his 1940 short story The Circular Ruins features a man who dreams a man and then realizes he is, himself, dreamed.
Many have read Of Mice and Men, but fewer have read Steinbeck’s nonfiction account of his six week tidepooling excursion with his best friend down the California coastline while trying not to get divorced. It may sound quirky. And it is. It is humorous, philosophical, and celestial. It moves elegantly from an argument with a temperamental dingy engine to an observation of the metaphor that exists between ecology and the mind (inspo for my essay Ecology of the Soul… which I am still working on…)
“Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tidepool - a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tidepool stretches both ways, digs back into electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.” - John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
The truth of great writers - their thoughts and deliberations, questions, emotion - is in their letters. And in their nonfiction accounts of their lives.
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
Stop trying to write what you are trying to write. Write something else. And so I wrote this post…
This is good advice.
Loved this. Thanks for the shoutout :)