Writing, Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd

Although I don't remember being that much of a fan of Sue Monk Kidd's fiction, 

I LOVED THIS BOOK! 

As most of you know, I devour books on the writing process.  These assist me with my creative (painting) process.  I just substitute the word, "creating" or "painting" for the word writing.  It works for me 99% of the time.

Here are my chosen excerpts:

The act of writing involves the creation of the self.

I grew up in a world where quiet ladies who held their tongues were loved and lauded.  There was a cross stitched picture that hung on my bedroom wall when I was a girl that said, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." You have no idea of the sheer volume of words I swallowed.  Controversial beliefs, upsetting questions, uncomfortable feelings, wild ideas.  You know, my truth. It is any wonder I have a soft raging spot in me for those who have been silenced?  For anyone who has felt the need to swallow their words? or dilute their truth in order to avoid disapproval? or ostracism? 

Writing is a solitary enterprise...the creative person, the creative process, the creative work are all vastly affected by the support and sustenance that surround us.  We all need someone to hold up a light.  To say, "I see you.  I see what you're doing."

Are writers born or made?  It doesn't really matter.  It can be both.  What's important is that this impulse of the heart exists.

 

Give up all the other worlds 

Except the one to which you belong. 

                - David Whyte 

Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive, is too small for you. 

The true search in a writer's life is for the necessary fire.    - John Gardner

If you make an announcement that comes from your true self and seems to require you to risk your neck, it's often followed by an internal backlash.  Sure enough, right on cue, the naysayers in my head surfaced, arguing that the pursuit was too big a risk.  Sometimes one hour is all it takes for the lot of them to show up and explain how impractical, misguided and reckless you are...

In an act of terrified surrender, I gave myself over to my great absurdity.

Longing is one of the most eloquent and insistent ways the soul speaks. 

 

I found my way into full time writing not by acquiring money but by, initially, doing with less of it.  It hadn't been easy.  I wouldn't recommend this route as a universal solution.  I don't, in fact, have a universal solution only an acknowledgement that needing money in order to write was still a relevant and vexing question that writers struggled to answer...

My fear didn't matter as much as the writing.  What mattered was writing in spite of it.

I am out with lanterns looking for myself. - Emily Dickinson

We each have inside us, the makings of our own largeness.

The real writer is one who really writes. - Marge Piercy

 Whatever you can do and dream, you can.  Begin it.  - ?

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise - Rilke

The root of genius is in the unconscious. - Dorothea Brande  In the broadest terms, the idea is to write from the inside out.

When we humble ourselves to all we don't know, we open ourselves to what's possible.

Encapsulating an emerging idea into a sound bite is exceedingly difficult.

Research has shown that when a worker is distracted or interrupted, it can take around twenty three minutes for her or him to regain focus.

Writing can suffer from a lack of loitering...creative loitering is important to the writing process... 

Einstein's most beautiful epiphanies seemed to come when he was not engaged in so-called "productive work".  He was a superb creative loiterer...being aimless made space for his imagination. 

I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence and the truth comes to me. - Alfred Einstein

In times when we found ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished and much was begun in us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

...I will ask for a dream. It works like this.  As I fall asleep, I plant the idea in my thoughts that I WILL dream a solution.  I place a pen and paper at my bedside table so I can write the dream down when I wake, but also as a way to heighten my expectation...if we respect our dreams and possess a healthy expectation that if we take the questions from our waking life into our dream life, our unconscious will try to answer them.

The soul should always stand ajar.  That's how the mystery gets in. - Emily Dickinson

Return to your longing.  It will teach you everything.

When we become uncommonly weary, stressed or discouraged, the energy that drives the creative life can waver.  It can even go out.  This is the time to breath in.  We're just going to write because we cannot help it.  There is something in you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.

At some point the whole thing becomes so maddening, so overwhelming, so nuts, I can hardly remain in the room.  This is the moment I tell myself that everything is proceeding as it should.

Creativity begins in chaos.  That's just the way it is.  The challenge is to bring form and order to it.

I keep bankers' hours... Be regular and ordinary in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustav Flaubert

A writer does not need stimulation but the opposite of stimulation.  A writer needs regularity...A writer needs self ordered patterns of time. -Virginia Woolf

In writing, as in life, perfectionism is not so much the quest for excellence as a response to fear.  Fear of limitations, fear of failure...

If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot and shout, "Begin!" (Twyla Tharp inspired)

To be continued.  I stopped at the end of the chapter titled "Making a Scene" and at the beginning of  "Hurry Slowly".  

When my ideas seem mediocre..and I cannot seem to come up with anything better, I play an old world game: I think the opposite.

Sometimes I feel like I am 100 years old and I can see clear around the world and other times I think how I am nothing.  I don't have one thing on my mind.

Your style shouldn't be dictated but come organically based not a cultural literary imposition but on what you're writing and your own, innate preference.

The process of writing (a memoir) not only taking me into myself, it frees me from myself.

Why are we here? To love and create.

Writing, it turns out, is a difficult joy.

A writer must work so hard and so long that a brain develops and lives in his fingers - Ray Bradbury

I suppose (when writing) it's the closest I've come to levitating.

Writing is making meaning out of anguish.

on menopause: Plagued with vague laments about my body, the alteration in my appearance, my first sense of mortality, doors closing, the leaving of my younger self and an unsettling hunger to find a third act, a new kind of fertility. I felt all of this as a new kind of grief. 

If you ask me what I can to do in this world, I, an artist will answer you: I am here to live out loud. - Emile Zola