Tag: creativity

Reinvigorating my Creative Life

I have returned to writing in the past few weeks, and I have tons of poems to post as we start 2019. My painting has been full of experimenting.

To jumpstart my creativity, part of what I am using to keep myself inspired is the planner I wrote about before that was custom designed for me. Seeing everything written out that I should do each day, from reading to writing to learning, helps give me that accountability. I write for the love of it and because I have images in my head that just must come out. But the reality is I frequently don’t feel good and doing anything can be difficult. This week in particular has been hard. But I am creating.

I have used the times Angelica has been getting tutoring to read, write, and blog. She gets tutoring for an hour at a time and rather than just sit there, I get stuff done. The new environment is actually stimulating.

I may start doing digital poetry, in this case meaning poetry on images, and I definitely want to start using dyed and cut up words in my paintings.

Collages are in the cards. I also want to do still life photography around the house with journals, art supplies, salt, flowers, bibles, etc.

I have a few little plans in the works and I am looking for more. I want to be as creative as possible this winter

Rediscovering an Old Passion

Before we left on our vacation to tour the Northwest, Craig decided to look for our cameras and bring the nice cameras on the trip with us. I didn’t think it was a bad idea. The cameras are nice, and haven’t been used in years. However, I didn’t care that much. I enjoy taking photos on my phone, and  the editing apps I like to use are all on my phone. I really like the results I can get on my Galaxy, and using an actual camera just hasn’t been on my radar.

Using a camera takes more work and dedication then using a phone camera. Aside from the fact you have way more settings to learn, if your camera doesn’t have wifi (and mine doesn’t) you have to take the time to clear out the memory card and dump the files onto your computer. If you love your phone editing apps, as I do, then after that you have to hook up your phone to your computer and transfer them there for editing or sharing. It also gives you one more device to have to charge. Basically, it is kind of a pain.

I Love my Camera

It is so worth it! The photos I got were so much better than what I typically get on my phone. Portraits were crisper and cleaner. The high contrast black and white setting created some stark, moody images. I got to experiment with long exposure. I still have a long way to go with that, but just experimenting with the possibilities awakened something in me.

Miniature Photography

My favorite thing, by far, was playing with miniature mode. I can get some decent black and whites on my phone. The portraits it takes are not always stunning, but do the job and can be edited. However, for taking miniature photos (or tilt shift, as they are otherwise referred to) I have found nothing on my phone to even remotely measure up to my camera. The miniature photos I took on my camera were miles ahead of the miniature images I have created on my phone. The phone camera apps that do miniature are clunky and unsophisticated. The other miniature/ tilt shift photography apps that turn photos into tilt shift images after you take them with your regular camera app just don’t do a spectacular job. The finished look is never that beautiful. Some apps are certainly better than others, and will do in a pinch, but after spending days using the miniature mode on a decent camera I will never look back, and I can see clearly a difference between miniature photos I’ve done with my phone and the ones I’ve taken on my camera. Miniature is my absolute favorite, and I have lost sight of that over years of using a cell phone camera for convenience.

My Love of Photography Has Been Rekindled

Years ago, in college, I spent a lot of time on photography. It was what I did the most, besides writing. Every weekend and some weekdays were spent photographing the world around me or editing photographs I’d taken. After that, when I was using a cheaper camera and had not yet fallen into the habit of using a cell phone, I fell in love with tilt shift photography. I saw some miniature images online and knew immediately that I wanted to do that.

Recently I have gotten back into photography on my phone after a long dry spell. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my phone camera and I’ve seen people make gorgeous art with their phone cameras. My favorite editing app of all time is on my phone, so I will have to transfer my photos to it. But there is something so special, artful, and magical about using an actual camera, and the detail and lighting and miniature mode on cameras outdo phone cameras by a long shot.

Being able to take good tilt shift images again has reignited my creativity. Long exposure is something I’m dying to get good at, and to use to create really surreal and sublime images. There is so much to discover on my camera, and I am only scratching the surface. I definitely want to build my skills with macro mode. Having a new creative outlet, especially one that gets me in touch with my past self and which sparks an old flame, makes my soul sparkle with excitement and glow with satisfaction. I’ve been dipping my toes in the water of photography for a while, but now I am going to slip beneath the surface. The water is like silk, the waves a tender, clean coolness.

After a Fashionable Year of Industry

The next day I stay

Stay awake.

In another land a woman

Locks a book in her heart chest.

I recreate blue with my face,

Talented flesh,

And the thermometer crusts with ice

As the heat peels away from my skin.

 

Look,

I’ll tell you what to do.

Bury the sewing kit

And all the afghans.

Lay your knitting needles in a raft,

Set it ablaze in the neighborhood duck pond.

Let other women gawk with scorn.

 

These women are not your neighbors.

Stalagmite fangs,

Sweeping the breath away from you,

Leather handbags stuffed with original creature.

 

I will be wakeful, watchful,

Unable to create the heat I need

To close my eyes.

Will you rededicate your life to sleep?

Nervous to Dive In

Today is the first day of the goal I set yesterday – to write my poetry every day. I have not yet written anything new, although I am revising some poetry I have already written.

For some reason, I am afraid to dive in. My mind is sort of ducking in and out of my emotions like a rock skipping over water. If I dive too deeply, I may not come up.

On some level, I’m afraid of my mind. I don’t write confessional poetry, so it is not as though I’ll be diving into personal problems and emotions in a direct way if I begin writing a poem. But I get into this space, this cold silky space, when I write and sometimes I just slide deeper and deeper into solitude once I start. This can feel rejuvenating, but I am on the border mentally right now and if I slide too far below the water I don’t know what will be waiting for me there.

I have to push forward. I’ve set a goal, and that goal must be accomplished. I can’t just give up, especially on the first day. It might be cold, but I need to sink down and scrape the images from the coral crusted bed of my head.

New Goal

I have perhaps the strangest Inspirations sometimes for writing. Well, my inspiration can come from anywhere and sometimes appears so randomly that I cannot pinpoint a source. But I mean the inspiration to keep writing on days that I don’t feel well or days that I am extremely busy. Sure, part of it is my innate drive and love of the written word, but on the days when I really don’t feel well mentally or physically or when I have a lot of housework, there’s something else that helps keep me going. I absolutely love collecting gorgeous journals. Buying a new Journal makes my soul sing. However I can’t keep buying journals if I’m not using up the ones that I have. Although I like to collect journals, I don’t like to preserve them as though they’re going to sit in a museum. Seeing a blank journal on my desk compels me to use it. The only thing better than a pristine new Journal is a journal that has been well-loved and used to the maximum. There’s nothing like a perfect, artistic pair of covers with poetry or diary entries or Bible journaling and prayer filling the inside. I have several journals waiting to be used, and I have more I want to get. So I’m going to write and write and write. However, I do all that writing when I am feeling creative. Then I write bunches. Sometimes I hit dry spells and I stop.

I’m not necessarily one of those people who subscribes to the theory that it doesn’t matter if you put out absolute crap as long as you’re getting something down on the paper. I’ve really had mixed results with that. For the most part, at least with my poetry, if I sit myself down to write when I really really don’t have anything to say, nothing good comes out of it. If I’m feeling utterly uncreative and mentally stymied, the writing I produce is absolutely hopeless. Like everyone else, or at least like most people who write, many of my rough drafts are not very good. They need a lot of work. But most of them, if I edit ruthlessly and revise, have some potential. They may or may not realize that potential, but they give me something to work with. The stuff I write when I really do not have any creativity in me is almost always unusable. I suppose it’s worth trying just to maintain creativity as a daily habit, and of course if I do manage to pull something out of my mind that has some potential usability, I’ll be glad that I sat down to write. But most of the time it is just pointless.

Journals don’t necessarily help me push forward in times where my creative well has run dry. But sometimes I am very creative on days when I am mentally or physically sick, or when the housework or errands are calling my name, and on those days having a journal that I long to fill really inspires me to sit down and take the time to get my thoughts put on paper. Annoying but true, some of my most uncreative days where I have completely run out of things to say and I feel as used up as a reservoir in a desert in August, are the days where I have almost no housework and no errands, and where I feel mentally and physically fine. Sometimes I just need to recalibrate and recharge, and on those days not much writing gets done. I wish I could somehow schedule these creative dry spells for the days where I am too busy or too sick to write anyway! Wouldn’t that be nice!

Because of this inconsistent output and waste of some valuable hours, I find myself weighing the possibility of writing every day to keep my mind sharp. It’s not that I don’t write a lot, because I do. Right now I have tons of poems just waiting to be typed up. It’s not that I’m not creative frequently. Even on the days I don’t write I’m usually messing around with photography or painting or collage. And it’s not that I don’t spend enough time with language, because on the days I don’t write I am always reading to engage my mind and expand my imagination. I love reading. It’s an absolute guarantee that if I have not been writing I have been reading. Not a single day goes by that I don’t do one or both. I just wonder if I could be doing more.

It might be good to develop some discipline.

Angelica is getting older and my life is only going to get busier. We are now homeschooling everyday. On top of that she has speech therapy twice a week. She may also be joining the Children’s Choir soon, although I am not decided yet. And as she gets older even more extracurriculars will come up. Having a commitment to write no matter what might encourage me to do more of what I love.

As much as I have never seen the need for making daily writing part of my routine, so many writers recommend it. I do wonder if there is something to it. It may be that my best writing will still come on the days where I feel inspired, but the writing I do on the days when I feel uninspired may improve my writing enough that the writing I do on the days when I am inspired will be that much better.

I have always put the inspiration first and the writing comes second. But it might be worth it, as an experiment, to try writing first and see if that makes the inspiration come more frequently. I have been thinking about experimenting with structure lately, or maybe with subject matter as well, but first I think I will experiment with my schedule. I’m going to set up a goal, and write it down in my daily productivity planner, to write at least one poem every single day. I’m going to do this for a month and see what the results are. If I got something out of it I’ll continue to do it for the rest of my life. If I don’t, well then I’ve got 30 poems and maybe I can make use of one of them. This goal is really going to be a challenge this month because on Thursday we are leaving for a two-week road trip. I’m going to be traveling from state-to-state every day for two weeks. It’s really going to take commitment to make sure that I’m being productive  in the middle of a vacation. No matter how much driving we’re doing or how much there is to see I need to write a poem. Let’s see how this goes.

Coursera, Rainbow Notes

I have been dying to learn new things, and after reading a book called, “Don’t Go Back to School,” or something to that, I have decided to listen to iTunes lectures, buy textbooks, use online MOOCs and other learning programs, AND to start taking notes on what I learn so that I remember it. I have actually done a ton of nonfiction reading over the past ten years over many subjects, but for some reason as my mood swings got worse my memory got worse and I just wasn’t retaining things like I wanted to. But when I was in school, I could always retain things by taking notes. Rather than using some notebook, I am using a colorful notepad app that lets you add notes in literally any color. You choose the color you want from the color spectrum wheel. It is so bright and fun to look at my notes! I have my phone with me a lot, so I can review what I’ve learned whenever and wherever I want.

I am starting off by taking some little Coursera courses. Right now I am going through a class on gender roles in Korea. It is fascinating! I am enjoying taking notes. I have so many other courses I am going to audit as well, and so many books I am going to read. I found a really fun book online about philosophers who were unlucky, or very unskilled, in love. That should be really fun to read and learn from. I love any form of biography, I love humor, and maybe I’ll come across some philosophers I want to study in depth. Starting this week, I am really diving into things. I like to keep my mind  honed, to stay interesting, and to challenge myself. These are my goals.  I want to stay interesting for myself and my husband. I want to learn about the world for my own edification, and to broaden my horizons in my writing.  When I don’t learn anything new I start to feel so dull, and my writing feels so flat. My imagination slows. I believe that education should never stop. It enriches the soul, creates human connections, and builds character. I feel more like myself when I am studying something.