Suzan-Lori Parks

[zenithblue]

Last night I went to a lecture by Suzan-Lori Parks, playwright and author of the novel Getting Mother's Body. It wasn't a very formal lecture--she mostly talked about her creative processes--but it was fun. She was incredibly kind and funny and generous and real, and I bet you anything she's a kickass teacher.

The thing she said that stayed with me the most was something she said she learned from James Baldwin, whom she studied with at Mount Holyoke. She said the thing she learned that was the most important was how to behave in the presence of the spirit. That you treat the spirit like you treat an honored guest, invite it in and offer it something to drink. You treat it like a lover, with gentleness and appreciation. That you treat it like a volcano, as a thing unpredictable and mighty. That you don't question the form it picks--that however ludicrous or banal or whatever you shut up and listen to what it's doing. I'm paraphrasing a lot here. But essentially, what she was saying was that you have to entertain all your most far-out ideas, that you can't dismiss any of those voices that come to you. Or that you shouldn't.

This is something I've learned from writers like Haruki Murakami or Aimee Bender or David Foster Wallace or Mary Gaitskill. The idea that you tell the story that's living the most vividly on the inside of your eyelids, and don't worry about who is going to care about urban fetishists or junkies or child tennis prodigies or who is going to believe in a thing like a cat flute or a boy with a pumpkin for a head. Your job isn't to worry about that, at least not on the first go-round. Your job is to shut the fuck up, and listen to the spirit. You can worry about the people who will be listening to you later.

So tell me: how do you entertain the spirit? How do you all invite it in, with a welcome mat or a red light outside your door or with a big open house barbecue? Let's drop the metaphor. When do you feel most in sync with your creative selves? How do you get to that place where you feel like this is really, really happening?

Comments

[scribbleeso.livejournal.com]

With my music, I usually feel that what I'm doing has very little to do with my own mind. I just turn off my thoughts and let whatever it is that flows through me, well, flow through me. I avoid over-thinking it. I sort of see myself as like an idiot-savant channeling something outside of myself. I'm 'on' when I'm being creative, but the rest of the time I'm pretty out of it. I am fortunate to not have too much trouble getting to that place. I hope it stays this way for awhile.

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

Lucky girl.

Do you find yourself going into like a pseudo-trance, when you're channeling? Like lost in the note by note or beat by beat movement of a piece? That's how I know a story is working, when I find a cavity in the story and fall down inside it and it's like an hour and all I've done was a paragraph, but it was the paragraph everything else hinges on.

[blozor.livejournal.com]

In the shower. Something about showers rejuvenates my mind and body. I come up with the most sinister ideas in the shower. My shower time is spent one part singing, nine parts laughing maniacally. Whenever I'm stuck at a part for a story, I take a shower, just to organize my thoughts.

Other than that, any time after midnight and before 8 AM works too. I'm at my creative peak when most people are sleeping. Unfortunately, right now, it also means that I'm at my creative peak when I'm being driven slowly insane at work and have no time to find an outlet for my ideas. God damn, I need to find a way to become economically unemployable.

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

Re: economic unemployability: you and me both, brother. Let me know when you get that one figured out. Maybe we should start a crime syndicate. Except I think both of us are a wee bit too conventionally honest. Bah.

Some days, though, it sounds like a freaking awesome idea.

Re: showers: bathrooms have always been a great retreat for me. I grew up in a house where I didn't get a lot of privacy, but head to the bathroom and turn on the fan and it's like you're in your own private world. You can't hear shit. And water, water has always been good for me. Hiding in the shower or bathtub and feeling warm and buoyed up. It's good. When I don't have to keep myself on some reasonable sleep cycle for work I do a lot of writing and showering in the middle of the night myself.

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

I wish I had a good answer to this question, but I think that for me it's really about effort and concentration. I have to just sit down and force myself to wade through all the stuff that's wrong, wrong, wrong before I can get to the stuff that's right. Eventually, after I've produced enough false starts (and if I'm lucky), things start to flow and take on a life of their own, but it always feels like it takes work to get there.

Another thing that I think is important for getting in touch with my creativity is not shutting down, but maintaining a sort of alertness and openness to the world at large. That sounds so basic, but this is something that also takes effort and concentration for me. I hate my job, see, and that makes me want to go into shut-down mode as soon as I walk into my office--all I care about is getting those eight hours over with so I can get out of there. Being totally disengaged for 40 hours of my week makes it very hard to break out of that mode during the rest of my time. It's difficult for the spirit to visit you when your habits of mind are all about killing time and getting through! One of the best ways I've found to combat this is by exposing myself to other people's creativity. Reading can do it, but it works even better when I'm appreciating other forms of expression, like music, art, theatre... It really helps wake me up when I see other people taking risks with and for the sake of their creativity: a musician getting up on stage to perform their work in front of a room full of strangers, for instance.

So there's my long-winded answer. What do you do to welcome the spirit to your life?

[zenithblue.livejournal.com]

Amen to the openness to the universe. That's the reason I sacrificed some physical well-being to get a 30-hour job, because I really struggle to be open to anything when I'm working full time. I really admire people who are able to keep the creativity going while working so much.

I have tons of little tricks, and they're very fluid and very fickle sometimes. The most important thing is honestly for me to have some slack-off time programmed into my life. I used to think all I had to do was slot out time for writing, but honestly, I need more than that. I need lots of down time for my imagination to balloon up into.

RE: false starts, I do that a lot too. My "creative process" I put up recently wasn't really an exaggeration...I have to crap out some seriously bad drafts and struggle long and hard before I even have something to show someone.

Man, writing is hard. Let's do something easy like being rock stars or something.
I do the same thing, reading a lot and watching plays and movies and looking at art. I eavesdrop like a fucking freak, too. I like some really lowbrow stuff, because I'm drawn to the grotesque and to pulp influences sometimes, so keeping open to all sorts of freaky stuff and letting it fuse and mingle with the more erudite stuff is what propels me. Sometimes I get a vision or a phrase and it takes off, but more often I get a compulsion (before my jurist story I had a period where I couldn't stop researching serial killers, for some freaky reason, even though I'm not interested in scandal rags so much as interested in weird psychologies. It was the fact of my compulsion as much as anything else that fueled that story). I get hung up on some weird thing and won't stop picking at it until it's a story. It figures that the spirit would manifest in my life as some kind of unbalanced freaky neurosis. Ha.

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, writing is absurdly hard. When I think about how hard it is, I usually think things like, "Ah, if only I could be made happy by something totally dry and straightforward like accounting..." But rock stars is a much better idea. Let's totally be rock stars.

I definitely agree that it's important to have slack-off time, but the thing that's hard for me is having the right kind of slack off time. I'm bored during a large portion of my workday, so I spend lots of time anesthetizing my brain against the boredom. I have a tendency to fall into the same sort of brain-deadening activities in my slack-off time at work, and I have to be careful not to do that. Lounging in the bath is good, for instance, zoning out in front of bad tv is not good.

It's funny about the false starts--mine are rarely full drafts, but I endlessly write and then throw out the beginnings of new stories. I've been known to throw as many as ten first pages, but once I get a first page I can live with, the rest of the draft tends to be kinda sorta semi-okay.

You know, this sort of conversation is why I wish I knew more writers. I really have no idea how the process works outside of my own head.