The creative ebb and flow of writing

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:1 min read

Some of my most unexpected writing, the stuff that arrives with power, flow, and inspiration, has come after a few days or weeks when I have felt deeply deadened and bereft, as if abandoned by the creative spirit. This creative ebb and flow is distinct and repetitive enough across the years to constitute a pattern, and one that I can’t help but find striking and worth mulling over.

It’s as if the times when I wonder whether I’ll ever write again, and even if I will ever want to write again, represent an inner ebb tide, with the water of the psyche receding in preparation for a tidal flow. The subjective, conscious experience of that ebbing is a feeling of being totally becalmed and even averse to action, especially creative action like putting words on paper or screen.

Eventually, if this lasts long enough, I just give up and accept that I will not be writing anymore. And then, without fail (or at least so far), writing happens again, and with intensity. Learning this cycle has been an ongoing discipline of self-discovery and self-acceptance as a being rooted in the creative action-and-retreat cycles of the cosmos itself.

On writing the personal to express the universal

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

As writers, we would do well to remember that our art conceals a hidden paradox: What is most private and personal in us is also the most universal. Our deepest truth, which seems to be the most hidden and idiosyncratic thing about us, is actually what resonates with all people. In our writing, it’s when we delve deeply into ourselves that our work makes a profound connection with others.

Haven’t you experienced this in your own life as a reader? Don’t you find that when you come across writing that is palpably personal, writing that clearly shares the writer’s most intimate views, thoughts, and feelings, that’s where you can see yourself most clearly? The sense of connection is practically hypnotic.

This is why pandering to others in an effort to appeal directly to them and/or to extract their money is counterproductive. It alienates the reader and makes the writing sterile, whereas the act and art of writing honestly instills life in what we write, which transmits its energetic charge to our readers.

The psychologist Carl Rogers put it well in his classic 1961 book On Becoming a Person:

I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.

For a deeper look at this phenomenon, not only in the art and craft of writing but in the practice of spirituality, see “The Writer’s Paradox: Personal Is Universal.”

The wisdom of silence and peril of social media

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

A week ago, Substack launched its new “Notes” feature, which you may have heard about. As the company’s first foray into social media-style interactions, Notes is a kind of Substackified rival to Twitter. I have been using it for several days now and rather enjoying it, since, as a writer with a newsletter on Substack, it enables me to share short ideas, quotes, links, etc., that wouldn’t add up to a full newsletter post but that can still serve to connect with readers and foster enjoyable communication.

And yet, as I have used it, I have also noticed myself gravitating toward a realization and a principle that is necessary to bear in mind: Writers in this age of online hustle need to make a deliberate practice of focusing on the writing itself as an end in its own right. The other alternative is to give free rein to our egoic-addictive craving for attention and validation, and thus become its slave. If you’re actually meant to write, anything of value that might come from doing it will arise out of an inner attitude and outer practice of silence, not from a frenetic grasping for validation via likes, clicks, or shares.

Yesterday I published a reflection about this matter at my Substack newsletter. And yes, I’m aware of the inbuilt irony of using an online newsletter to publish a cautionary reflection on the creative and spiritual dangers of online writing. Still, maybe it will speak to you: “The Wisdom of Silence in the Age of Online Writing.”