Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.
Let’s talk about writing… Let’s talk about your writing method.
Have you been searching for a method that helps your writing? What are you doing about it?
This is me, constantly searching for the best method. I guess, no other literary activity has capture my attention like searching for processes that could help in my writing practice.
But, how may I find my own writing method? Find or create it?
In ‘Candide‘, Voltaire writes: “One must cultivate one’s own garden.” An aphorism that has been interpreted in different ways. To me, it means to take care of our own domain, to find our own tastes and methods.
Because when we talk about the creative act, there’s always a confusion between what may be considered a hobby and true work.
As I’ve been told, in repeated circumstances, it’s common-knowledge that we can’t make money with a hobby. Not seriously. As soon as this happens, that said hobby turns into a job, and from that point on, everything gets more difficult. Creative ideas flow away, the pleasure from the creative act itself disappears, and purpose solidifies on obligation instead of satisfaction.
It is said that if we go in search of a method that helps us keep a creative practice, — even if we feel discouraged by the expectations we had, not having how to assure any achievements,— the probability of finding dozens of methods that work for others, and still may work for us, but of which we cannot stick to and make them our own, is huge.
To experiment new strategies, different methods that seem productive and interesting, can be a potent motivator but they are not a miracle in a fun package. Not forgetting that, meanwhile, we are adding a pletora of knowledge (learning from others), ways of doing and thinking things differently, some with better results than others.
Different projects means the use of different methods, and the need to adjust the process, or parts of it, to the theme itself. Each project will require a different version of the process, suitable to that particular construct.
There’s no scarcity of creative methods to adopt, but the one that makes sense to me it is not someone else’s method. Does it seem arrogance speaking? It is not. I am grateful to all the sources that informed me, and helped me go search for my own writing method. Other methods have inspired me in the constructing the idea for my own method, and I have learned immensely with others articulations about different writing subjects, past and present influences.
I find that we develop a particular taste for those things that dazzle us. So we follow our intuition and go towards those things that enchant us and help us create something of our own machinations. And this is the principle to a valuable method. My method.
To come across our own particular taste for something is invaluable. And to find our true will to write, — or to do the creative activity of our choice, — while feeling the appreciation for the act in itself, not just the product after completion, but the joyous Doing is the best method ever.
Of course that, if this was easy everybody would do it. Sometimes is very hard to appreciate the work of doing something. But, to not appreciate parts of the process, doesn’t mean we should give up. On the contrary, if we can find pleasure in what is hard, boring or tiresome, we find an advantage on the work itself.
Maybe the ‘better method’ problem resides in our will to get results, without ponder what does it really mean to do the work. How much the creative work requires from oneself and our personal reality. Our own personal method, independent of the learnings that we benefit from, must ground itself in who we are as a person, as creatives and as members of general society.
As a person, because our daily life, health and economical means have a big impact on our creativity. As creatives, because access to different things and our own personality have a direct link to our art. And as a member of society, because there’s always expectations and contributions that we have to do towards family and the assorted communities that we are active part of.
I suspect that the best method only depends of the best professional, writer, creative artist that we can be. And nothing else.
So, I ask: Who are you as a creative constructor? Where do you find inspiration? What are your processes? Through what actions do you feel motivated to do the work? Do you recognise your own method glimpsing through the outer noise?