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The Creative Personality

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7149966049_9b7a43b2a9_cIn modern western society, we like to pretend we love and support creativity.  It brings us innovation and entertainment, after all.  Without highly creative people, we wouldnot have personal computers, iPhones, Facebook, or movies.  We wouldn’t have great paintings or books to read or light bulbs or cars or drugs to stamp out tuberculosis. Creativity is an absolutely necessary element of society and moving society forward.

In fact, however, as much as we like the product of creativity, we often abhor and dislike the personality traits that go along with high creatives.  In college, as a psych minor, I took a class on the psychology of creativity. The text was Guiding Creative Talent, by Ellis Paul Torrence.*** It blew my mind.

For the first few weeks, I couldn’t stop journaling about what I was learning.  I wrote and wrote and wrote—because all this time, I’d thought I was just strange, and actually I was actually simply a high creative.  By then, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but the process of becoming one still seemed completely at odds with what my family did, what the people I knew did, what ordinary people did.  The class gave me validation.

It is not easy to actually be a creative person, as most of you probably already know. We are a society that values extroversion, concrete progress, measurable results. Chances are good you are at least on the introvert side of the line.  This is a helpful trait when you are going to spend your life sitting in a room by yourself, not talking to other people for many hours every single day. It isn’t so helpful when it comes to throwing parties or being popular with teachers in elementary school.

The mental and personality traits that make it possible to be creative can also be annoying and irritating to the rest of society.  Aside from the crime of introversion, creative people are often non-conforming, haughty, brilliant, intense, restless, prickly, with a sense of destiny (see the whole list here).  Steve Jobs is not know for being a real swell guy, for example, but his legacy of elegance of form married to power of function is one of the best of his generation. [Read more…]

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Default: Story

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I was recently in St. Louis and went to church with a long time friend.  As we were coming out, a mother, father and little boy were just ahead of us. The boy was about three, dressed nattily in a tie and crisp trousers, and over his mother’s shoulder, he was reaching for the church and crying.  My friend said, “Must want somebody back there pretty bad.” His mother gave a weary smile. “The drums,” she said. Marcia said, “That’s a passion right there.” Yes. Maybe even a vocation.  That’s … [Read more...]

B.I.C. (Bum in Chair)

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It is a cool, slightly overcast morning.  I’d like to be in my garden, planting more of the bedding plants I have waiting, puttering, pruning and plucking weeds.  It has been a very long wait for spring this year, and every fiber of my being is screaming to get outside, play in the dirt, create this year’s painting from the canvas of bare earth waiting for me. But I have to work. I could make the case that days like this one are rare this time of year, when the sun starts to blaze here at … [Read more...]

Boundaries and Burnout

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I have been noticing lately that the word, “work ethic” has been coming up a lot among writers, all of whom seem to be pursuing the vast pots of wealth seemingly just on the other side of a completed manuscript.  No longer do you even need a contract to hit the big time—just look! Every week another superstar explodes out of obscurity onto the top of the e-book charts, then the New York Times.  Every  month, another Horatio Alger, another starlet, another Big E-Publishing story. There are … [Read more...]

The 20 Minute Win

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The late great Ray Bradbury, one of my writing heroes, often said that a writer should begin writing before he lets the world in.  Before television, before conversations, before anything else happens. In my world—maybe yours, too-- this has not often been a realistic possibility.  Although I have written about one practice I use, getting up before the world to write for a couple of hours, it's hard to sustain that schedule, and on an ordinary day it’s not realistic to jump out of bed and run … [Read more...]

Day After Day After Day—Showing Up At The Page No Matter What

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There is a point in every novel I write where I am utterly miserable.  The book is a big mess, full of TKs (“to come”) and notes to myself (“fix this in line with Chapter 22”), sloppy writing and dull characterization.  It feels like it will never, ever be finished, and even if it is, it will be the biggest pile of manure to yet arrive on the literary scene. I am there now.  It usually lasts 2-3 months, and it is the reason I will procrastinate and procrastinate and procrastinate until there … [Read more...]

A Poem That Got Me Moving

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It’s 4:30 5:30 am and I am at my desk.  It’s dark, still, and there’s a bite in the air that tells me summer is drifting off to some other hemisphere. I have made a pot of tea, tucked under a cozy that was knitted for me.  There is a metal pitcher half-filled with milk, and a sugar dispenser and a spoon and a tub of Greek yogurt in case I get hungry. I do not particularly want to work.  In fact, I actively do not want to write.  I should have been up an hour ago, but we were away all weekend … [Read more...]

The Fire of Obsession

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Obsession is a writer’s way.  We are hard-wired for it, to collect details and study a subject with great intensity, like a four year old who memorizes all the names of all the dinosaurs in all the ages and can recite their diets and sizes and probable colors for hours if you let him.  (And if you let him, you will be his friend for LIFE.) That does not always mean it’s comfortable.  I have been crazy in love with the ancient Irish and the Black Death and Titanic, with weaving and dyeing, … [Read more...]

The Art and Power Of Interviews

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Interviews, in person, on site, can be one of the most powerful tools in a fiction writer’s arsenal.  A novelist does not need to be an expert to appear to be one, to fool even an astute reader.  We just need really, really good details—and an interview can provide more details in an hour than a dozen books on any given subject. My MIP is set in western Oregon, on a working organic farm.  I will admit that I have been struggling with one of the characters, and struggling a lot with my … [Read more...]

Time Out

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I’m going to write a whole post without using a certain 8 letter word describing something short people and aspiring writers can build and climb up on in order to be more visible. That’s not to downplay the value of other contributors’ recent posts about balancing your writing time with your visibility time, or the flurry of responses from the WU community. You folks obviously love to debate this particular issue and are mightily entertained when the monthly columnists start having a … [Read more...]

Take Five: Barbara O’Neal and The Garden of Happy Endings

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Kath here again! Bestselling author and valued contributor Barbara O'Neal's latest novel The Garden of Happy Endings, has released today, and we're thrilled to be able to have her share her writer's journey with us. Kirkus calls it a warm romance "about the healing powers of nature, love and community." Fans of Barbara's writing know that she's a master at crafting compelling characters who must make tough decisions -- and the outcome isn't always easily resolved. There's a reason why she keeps … [Read more...]

The Long Distance Landscape of a Writing Career

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This just in:  How to Bake a Perfect Life is a finalist for the RITA award this year!! In 2010, I walked 100 miles of the Camino de Santiago. I have been thinking about it a lot, partly because my new book, The Garden of Happy Endings, is coming out in a few weeks, and it is deeply rooted in that long walk. I am also thinking about it because some friends and I are mulling the logistics of walking the entire Camino, roughly 500 miles, in 2013. Every time I think of it, I get a jolt … [Read more...]

How to find your way to writing success? PLAY!

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Last weekend, I attended a conference for long-time published writers, where a host of industry insiders offered their insights on the changing face of publishing. Because of the NINC standards (only authors with two books or more published can join) and the desire to keep the discussion vibrant and flowing, I can’t share many details, but I can share the general spirit. When asked what authors should be doing now, to deal with the wild changes in our business, the insiders said, over and … [Read more...]

The Fruit of our Lives

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As I write this, it is the last morning of summer.  My yearling kittens are crouched in the garden, watching a squirrel on the fence make his way through the face of a sunflower, methodically plucking out striped seeds with his tiny hands, cracking their shells, devouring the kernels.  There are piles of hulls, here and there, through the garden, where I have tied the flower heads to the fence or a branch or a gate. Light angles at a long angle, illuminating the withering squash, the tired corn. … [Read more...]