Creativity Night
Currently reading:
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
Yes, still working on it. I’ve been knitting a lot.
Books finished this week: 0
Library updates:
I did a bit of writing, a good amount of drinking, and a lot of TV watching this week. I’d like to bring up the writing level some more and maybe tone down the drinking a touch, but otherwise, it felt like a good and balanced week. I hit my annual Guinness quota on St. Patrick’s Day and had a good time doing it.
Ruh roh.
The highlight of the week, ungodly number of Guinnesses aside, was Creativity Night at Greenlight Bookstore. The host gives everyone a few prompts over the course of the evening, and guests have ten minutes to respond to each prompt however they’d like to——prose, poetry, doodles, scribbles. When time’s up, guests can share what they created, but there’s no pressure to do so. It’s a low-stakes way to exercise your imagination.
Britt (hi, Britt!) and I planned to meet at Greenlight, so I walked around a bit while I waited. Of course, within five minutes of stepping inside, I had purchased two books (details below). But one of them came in handy for a prompt later in the evening, where we were all challenged to write the first page of a book in the store based solely on the cover.
Britt and I went to another Creativity Night a few months back, which was at a different location, and I have to say that I really preferred the bookstore vibe for the evening. It was a smaller group, so it felt more cozy and less intimidating to think about sharing——which I did! I was especially pleased with my response to my book cover of choice——Vagina Obscura by Rachel E. Gross——and I didn’t feel awkward or nervous at all as I shared the start of a fantasy novel about the adventures of Chameleon and Duck on their way to meet the mysterious Queen Vagina Obscura (though I did say the word “vagina” to that group of strangers far more than I ever thought I would).
I woke up feeling so light, hopeful, and inspired on Friday morning, the day after Creativity Night. I told my therapist in our last session that one of my goals for this past week was to write more. I really haven’t written much at all—my inspiration kind of dropped post-NaNoWriMo and finding the motivation to keep going or to start something new to kick myself out of writer’s block has been a real struggle. At the start of the week, I was feeling a little bit like a failure on the writing front, too. I had planned to go to three writing group meet-ups between last Saturday and yesterday; I went to none of them. I did write a bit at home on Wednesday, after deciding not to go to the official meet-up, and that felt like a step in the right direction. But I didn’t get very much done and I didn’t feel driven to keep going the next day.
But Creativity Night shook something loose. I don’t mean that I went home, sat down, and immediately finished a novel. In fact, I haven’t really written anything but journal entires and this blog post since. But I feel okay about that. Spending the evening writing just because writing is fun and interesting helped me remember that writing really is fun and interesting. I initially felt like scribbling down some screwy ideas at Creativity Night “didn’t count” as writing, because I wasn’t working on an ongoing project or completing a story I could submit to a magazine or contest. But of course it counts. Writing is writing. And it’s supposed to be enjoyable. It’s supposed to leave you feeling energized or moved or inspired. That’s why we do it.
Closing thoughts:
Create something just for yourself. Not to pay the bills, not to impress someone, not to feel like you’re “making it.” Just make something for the sake of making something. Let yourself be inspired by a prompt and see where it takes you.
(Also a note that there probably won’t be a missive next weekend. I’ll catch you up on why in the missive the week after that!)
Total books read from the Moratorium Library: 31
(Total books added to the Library: 44)
You can’t leave me alone in a bookstore and expect me to not buy anything.
