Crisis Creativity: Creating When the World is Falling Apart
For the past several months, many creative people have been feeling… uncreative. The world is falling apart around us, and there’s nothing we can do about it—so how can we possibly feel creative?
Well… let’s take a step back. The truth is that for some of us—for many of us—the world has always been falling apart. For years. For decades. It might feel more universal right now… but for a lot of people, this has been par for the course.
And, somehow, literature has still been making it out into the world.
Sometimes, even, the situation can provide inspiration, what I’m coming to think of as crisis creativity. An extremely powerful work of creativity, Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, was written in response to the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Alabama that killed four girls. The story goes that Simone composed the song in an hour and said that the song “erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down.” In the song, she says,
Lord have mercy on this land of mine (…)
I don't belong here.
There’s where we’re caught, isn’t it? Between hoping and praying for some divine (or other) intervention, and feeling like our country isn’t a place we recognize anymore. “This is not,” wrote David Bowie, “America.”
As more news pours in about mounting tragedy and seemingly incomprehensible acts of cruelty, creative work isn’t necessarily a place to respond directly to the events or offer solutions; it becomes, rather, a place to think publicly about how we’re understanding and narrating these moments. In that way, the writing, the work, becomes necessary for individual processing—and, hopefully, adds something to a discourse that might someday contextualize this history.
Our world is very different from what it was even six months ago—much less a year or three years ago. With so much going on, creativity can either thrive or vanish. For a writer, personal or external crises affect the right brain—which can either serve us well or go completely, maddeningly dark. As a writer, I know this. As an editor, I see this. As a human being, I want to understand how to safeguard my creativity and that of other artists during these very uncertain and often scary times.
What I see around me to some extent is a lot of panic. Many of us are questioning the efficacy of our work. What is the value of this poem, this novel, this play I’m creating? How relevant is it now—and how relevant is it going to be? Is it even worth writing?
And yet it seems trivial to worry about creativity, or the state of one’s imagination. People are dying every day of a pandemic that could have been over by now. The current administration is eroding every safeguard FDR’s government created, keeping children in cages, and actively promoting a police state. Everything seems to be an absurd trip backward. Each day brings a new shock. So why get anxious about the inability to write? Isn’t that just a little frivolous, a bit self-centered?
I’d argue no, and for these reasons:
The creative state is what feels normal to so many of us. That’s where we’re at home. Take it away and you’re left with… what? Being… whom?
Shutting down the thinking, imagining brain for an extended period of time can turn into a bad habit; a week of “coping” can turn into years. I know I sometimes give myself a day off to binge-watch Netflix… but it’s important to get up the next day and get back to the work. Because whether or not you’re feeling it, the work matters.
And then there is the critical question: Am I going to let a group of psychotic criminals take away my words, my thoughts, my contribution to the discourse?
There’s too much to do. Virtual theater to watch. Books to read. (Books to write!) Hayden and Bach to listen to. Walks to take. Cats to purr with. Coffee to drink. Proustian moments to have. Blog articles to post. Stories to dream. There is life flashing in front of our eyes, and we need to grab it before it passes us by. That’s why this is the moment to reclaim your writing and creative time.
Know that you may still be preoccupied with the crisis, watching a lot of CNN, checking Twitter, commenting on who used bad grammar to say what thing about whom. A total news fast isn’t necessary (or even recommended), but if you can turn off the social media for at least an hour, your muse will thank you.
Schedule your creative time. I set an alarm or require a certain number of words, remembering that if I’m too ambitious, I won’t meet the goal. So I write a little at a time, with dust-busting and cat-chasing sandwiched in there. If I write anything, I give myself points. Major points. But it’s not just going to happen on its own—not in these days of things falling apart. You have to make it happen.
As you notice the silence around you, thoughts will probably come drifting your way. It’s very strange. Every morning just before sunrise I take a walk, and as I notice things around me, I also notice things inside me. Memories I thought had been locked away forever. Ideas for essays or plot twists. Descriptions of the sky and the water. When I get home, I try and capture at least some of those ephemeral thoughts on the page.
There are other ways to unlock what’s inside you. Find a book that has nothing to do with what you write or what you read from day to day. Get lost in something totally different. Notice things on your own, without having them presented to you on a screen.
For the roughly ten percent of energy you have left, by all means, tune into the world and stay informed. If there’s ever a time when it’s understandable to be confused or outraged or paralyzed, it’s now.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired, too.
There is no better time to reassess how you feel about the work you’re putting out into the world than right now. Maybe you aren’t able to create at present because part of you feels as if what you were creating is now rendered frivolous or it represents a compromise for you. Let that part of you speak its piece. Turn a moment of creative crisis into a referendum on how you’re using your skills and talents in the world. Maybe you’ll recommit and double-down on what you’re doing, and maybe you’ll embrace the realization that you need to make changes.
Whatever you do, and however you do it—be gentle with yourself. We all need a little kindness these days. Maybe especially us creative types.
I want to go back for a moment to Nina Simone. One of the lines in her song says, “(This is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it, yet)”.
Maybe we’re writing it now.