The Creative Process..

Here's an excerpt from a book I've been reading as part of my dream research. It's called Writer's Dreaming and was compiled by Naomi Epel. Essentially it's an entire book of writers talking about how dreams have affected their writing or their creative process. There's one writer near the end of the book named Robert Stone that has a really interesting way of talking about the practice of making work. He's talking about writing, but it feels pretty bang-on for visual art as well. Definitely comforting, especially when one is in the midst of trying to make 'stuff' in solitude in one's apartment...Anyway, here it goes:

The practice of art, the practice of writing fiction is an act against solitude. It's ironic because one of the great difficulties of the writing life is its solitude. You do so much alone. You end up being much more autonomous than you want to be because, not only have you got to start yourself, but you end up having tremendously strong experience in solitude. Anyone who's ever written anything he cares about has found himself in a deeply emotional state and all alone. All by yourself. You get yourself worked up into states that are quite intense. I think this is necessary and it's not a bad thing. it's tough on the psyche to have to be enduring all that emotion with no one else to take it to, but there's something about the way the  emotional buildup progresses and resolves itself that makes me think there's a really primary need being served in this process. That this is a response that is necessary. And that I might be in real trouble if I wasn't able to do it. Because the drive to do it, if it's not satisfied, becomes eventually destructive, something that turns against itself.....

And later:

You've got to get into the process. The process is liberating. The process is good. You have to take it by the day. You just can't find yourself sitting there saying, What am I going to write next? Ultimately that is what you're saying but you just can't obsess over that. You take it day by day. And you have to not worry too much..

It's all about letting the story take over. It's surrendering to the process, letting yourself become involved in the process, that is necessary. You can't be outside your own story, as it were. You can't be just constructing it consciously, self-consciously, moment by moment. You've got to let your imagination go. And begin to hear voices, figuratively speaking. Get into it and do it. Beguile yourself. Entertain yourself. And keep yourself inside it.

Hm.