Stoking the Creative Fires: 9 Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination

The Creative Journey

O for a Muse of fire that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention.

William Shakespeare, prologue to Henry V

Traditional ways of learning can teach us a great deal, but what they can never provide is the serendipitous moment in a musty old bookstore when you stumble across the words that set your soul on fire.

Many years ago, on a blustery afternoon in Galway, Ireland, I was meandering through the labyrinthine rooms of Kenny's, the legendary bookstore, when an intriguing book title seized my attention. Down the spine of the book ran the words In the Chair. The book was a tantalizing collection of interviews with poets from the North of Ireland. I opened the book at random, in the spirit of the ancient practice of bibliomancy, hoping to find an auspicious line or two to inspire me.

My eyes fell on the words of the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, one of the writers who has most deeply influenced me. Speaking about his own rigorous standards, Heaney warned that a writer shouldn't waver into language or tame the strangeness of his work. The luminous turns in his poems, he says, are a matter of following on down that road of truth. He concluded the interview with what he called the famous Dublin triad: This is it. This is the thing. This is what you're up against.

Who knows why some words ignite the hearts of some readers while others are like wet matches that won't light? Who can say why some words seize the imagination of one reader and not others? Who can say why one person's epiphany is another's cliché?

All I know is that, at that moment, those strangely commanding lines felt mythic, as if they had been written directly to me by an unknown hand. I really had no idea if they were verses from an epic riddle, chants from a battle cry, or some raffish advice Heaney overheard at McDaid's, Dublin's famous literary pub. I only know that they sent a shiver of recognition right through me.

My fingers tingled as I read the words. They had a flintlike quality. They threw off sparks; they ignited the kindling of my imagination. I was transported into the distant past where I could hear the voices of my parents, coaches, mentors, and friends voicing a hundred variations of "No excuses, no alibis, no apologies. Just do what needs to be done now. I'd lived with that sense of urgency. So why did Heaney's words haunt me? Why was I suddenly stricken by a riot of emotion," in the tumultuous words of Ireland's modern mythmaker, James Joyce?

Suddenly, I knew.

I was stuck. I was lost. I'd lost my fire. Worse, I was waiting, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a miracle, a muse, a breakthrough.

By that time, in early 2001, I'd been blessed with some success, publishing a number of books, shooting many documentary films, and lecturing all over the world. But I'd hit the wall and had the brick marks on my forehead to prove it. I was mired in the quicksand of an unfinished companion book to one of my documentary films, discombobulated about ghosting someone else's book, and confused about how to tell the truth about my own unlived life.

Stuck and, some would say, unfocused—although, if pressed, I preferred the baseball metaphor of just being in a slump. I just hadn't had a hit for a while.

Sure enough, in the strange way of mythic language, Heaney's haunting words seemed to have been written for me, for that moment, for what I was up against. Deceptively simple words, but somehow expressive of my own coiled feelings of amazement and terror. Those three lines reverberated in me like a Celtic carpe diem—a reminder to seize the day, live life to the fullest, use time wisely.

As the Roman poet Horace wrote about the mysterious power of mythic language, Change the name and it's about you. Uncannily, the chance discovery of the incantatory Irish verses drove home to me questions that are perilous to forget: What are you waiting for? Why are you avoiding the real work? What will it take for you to go deeper?

What I heard that day in Galway was an echo of the secret struggle I'd been engaged in from the time I was a skinny, idealistic sixteen-year-old cub reporter for my hometown newspaper. Since then, I'd written millions of words and shot thousands of hours of film. But in every one of my projects, I'd gotten as stuck as Brer Rabbit in that nasty old Tar-baby patch. Stuck so often, I realized then and there, standing in the cold Irish rain outside the bookstore, that I hadn't written anything more original than a check or a postcard for months. In the frenzy of life, I'd lost my focus.

All right, I thought. So I'm stuck. I'm lost. I admit it. That's life. I recalled how the maverick mythologist Joseph Campbell confided to me once at the Clift Hotel, in San Francisco, that the essence of the journey is that a hero is stuck—and has to get himself unstuck or there's no adventure, no story, no art. The point, he added, isn't the agony of the quest, it's the rapture of the revelation. That note from the herald's trumpet meant the world to me.

As I left the bookstore, a soft rain fell over the medieval city. I sauntered past Nora Barnacle's old slate-roofed house, which her husband, James Joyce, visited only once because her parents believed he wrote dirty books. In the town square, I gazed at the statue of Padraic Colum, who spent his life wandering the West Country collecting Irish fairy tales. Fiddle music floated across from Collin's Bar around the corner. I felt a wild surge of joy for the first time in years, a kind of vertigo in the stark beauty that surrounded me.

And then a fugitive line came back to me, as if tossed like a life preserver by my own soul. When the great Tennessee explorer Daniel Boone was asked if he'd ever been lost, he replied, No, but I was bewildered once for a few days.

My fingers twitched with the old desire to put pen to paper; get some ideas in motion. My mind turned to the warm turf fire in the Connemara cottage where I was staying and it occurred to me that I'd better get home before my own fire went out.

That's the moment this book was born.

THE CIRCULAR ADVENTURE

That day, an image rose in my mind that reminded me of Campbell's idea of the hero's journey. The myriad-minded mythologist, combined the ancient circular symbol of the soul with the eternal wheel of life to create a dynamic image of the search for self-knowledge. For years, I'd kept a sketch of his simple diagram pinned to a corkboard in my writing studio. It helped me visualize the dramatic journey that underwrites movies, novels, and plays. I came to love the adrenaline rush I got from recognizing the three stages of the mythic journey in the three acts of dramatic structure. And on this fateful day in Galway, I recognized in that same iconic voyage the three stages of the creative journey.

For over twenty years, I had taught the hero's journey model in Myth and Movie workshops from the American Film Institute to the University of London. I had adapted it as The Pilgrim's Journey for gatherings of spiritual seekers in monasteries and churches, and even as The Business Journey for corporations looking for a competitive edge. The journey model is useful in all these contexts because it offers a clear image of the adventure of self-knowledge, the mystery of change, and the promise of transformation. But until that storm-clouded day in Galway, I hadn't recognized it as a road map for the adventure of creativity.

For millennia, the circle has been the symbol for the Great Round of life. Philosophers, writers, and artists from Aristotle to Robert Frost have considered its power. Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Life is probably round. Chuang Tsu also comes to mind, At the still point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things. Around and around we go on the circular journey. Filmmaker David Lynch sees every movie as a circular movement; choreographer Twyla Tharp uses overlapping circles to chart the progress of her ongoing projects. Albert Einstein considered the circle an immortal image. Years ago in an interview I did with beloved religion historian Huston Smith for our book, The Way Things Are, he mused, [T]here is something magical about a circle. For one thing it is geometric; it can encompass more space than any other shape. But this is more than just mathematical. It is also symbolic. A circle travels without leave-taking. So it combines a journeying with a center. Finally, painter Francis Picabin mused, Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction. My revelation in the Galway bookstore showed me that the center he described could be my center and your center, and that the journey he referred to could be the long, hard journey of creativity. In turn, being stuck creatively means you're caught in a vicious circle and must turn around and try another way.

The English art critic Herbert Read, writing of Paul Klee in his book The Meaning of Art, observed, The artist must penetrate to the source of the life force, the power-house of all time and space, and only then will he have the energy and freedom to create with the proper technique a vital work of art. For Brenda Ueland, that source of the life force is always the artist. "There is only one you, she wrote. Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original. So remember two things: you are talented and you are original." The moral is we must learn to say something new, from the center, from our core, as honestly as possible. If we do so, we can't help but be original; it may not be great, but at least it will be original. That's all we can ever hope to control.

Igniting your creative fire requires focus. And it takes practice, focused practice—determined practice of the thing you love until you do it right, until it becomes natural, a habit, a way to conduct yourself. I believe we learn by practice, said Martha Graham. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. This takes great resolve; it also requires the ability to imagine what you do before you do it. This is harder than it sounds; it requires a leap of faith, a respect for the utter mystery of creativity. Fortunately, great spirits from Lao Tzu to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Willa Cather, and Fred Astaire have partly demystified the process for us by telling us how to begin. Take the first step. And then take the next step and the one after that. If you take enough steps, it's called a journey.

Fire Within, oil on canvas. Self portrait by Laila Carlson, 2007.

THE JOURNEY

Imagine the wheel of time turning in a seemingly endless round, revealing that the beginning is the end of another beginning. This is the cyclic nature of the inward journey of creativity, which is by nature back and down—back in time and down into the soul's depths. Its endless line suggests infinity, the way time moves, becoming and passing, symbolizing unity, perfection, and eternal progress. This is the archetypal circle that inspired Joseph Campbell's famous model of the hero's journey. Which he divided into three stages: separation, initiation, and return. By contrast, this book will focus on a journey that changes direction—a journey that goes backward, against time, against the grain. All that againstness is a visceral way to describe the overwhelming resistance of the universe to your attempt to do anything original. This is called the left-hand path. This is not the demonic path of superstition, but widdershins—literally against the journey—reflecting the tension of the real adventure that poet-essayist Edward Hirsch calls in The Demon and the Angel, the downswerve into darkness and the unknown.

Now, imagine this path as a spiral and you'll see the path of the creative journey—that yearning for self-expression and 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