My (psuedo) brother-in-law Tim used to talk about the creative process. I never really understood what that meant until the past few years or so. Back then, he said it in reference to printmaking. Something about being a visual arts major helped him understand his own creative process, and he's taken that and used it to help him write and make films.

When I started at the Buddy Holly Center, I was an intern. One day, my boss Connie asked me to write a press release about a Summer Showcase event happening at the Center later that week. I had never written a press release before, much less even read a press release, but I decided it couldn't be as hard as it sounded and just set out to put words down on paper describing the planned event.

I gave Connie what I had written an hour and a half later or so. When she handed it back to me, it was covered in red pen, almost unrecognizable. I didn't care though, I was happy - she trusted me to write something, and she trusted me to revise it. It was a breakthrough moment, even though it seems small. From that one release, she asked me to write press releases for other events at the Center - gallery openings, more concerts, upcoming exhibitions. I started making plans in advance for upcoming events, scheduling deadlines for press releases and media advisories.

Each time I turned in a release, it would come back disfigured by the red pen. Gradually, over the course of at least year, the red pen marks lessened. There were less "Rework this entire paragraph" comments and more circled typos and spelling question marks. There were several conversations about "The Royal We", for sure, but the conversations were less grammatical correction and more content-driven.

I remember sitting in Connie's office one day, about a year after my first attempt, handing her a press release and watching her skim it. It took less than twenty seconds, and she didn't have a red pen anywhere in sight. "Looks good, send it," she said, handing it back to me, already checking her email again before I could pick the press release up off of her desk. I almost danced out of her office, I was so proud of myself. I remember running through the back office to show the BHC girls my approved, red-free release as though it were a freaking hundred-dollar bill.

Over the course of that year I researched media outlets and press deadlines and image specifications and email addresses. I created deadlines for press releases, schedules for newsletters, procedures for relating our news to the public. Over the course of that year I had been dubbed "Public Relations Coordinator."

I created a process.

There were smaller processes created along the way, procedure binders and files and calendars and meeting agendas were thrown in here and there. Still, what tied everything together was a system for creating something - in that case, public attention - from an idea. From a conversation. From a goal.

I've realized that creating a process isn't taught in schools in a general context, though it should be. Oh, sure, they teach you other processes - processes that in retrospect can be applied to any goal in life. But when you're writing a term paper for your junior-year English class and you are required to research, take notes, find sources, brainstorm, and generate a thesis before you even write an outline, no one says, "Oh, by the way, the reason we're making you go to such painstaking lengths to sort out the details is to show you a method that works - a process for creating a Thing out of an Idea. THINGS do not just happen, unless you're the Virgin Mary. THINGS are the end result of a process. Learn the process now, and you've got a big head start on all those people waiting around for life to happen to them."

Well, maybe they did say that once. Once, on one of those days that I ditched class to drive around Buffalo Springs Lake with some guys from drumline. If they did, though, they should have said it more often. Am I right?

Right now I'm trying to figure out my own creative process. The hard part for me is that I have these ideas swimming around in my head, and then suddenly I'll get a wild hair and try to throw them down on paper in some form in order to make them recognizable to myself, and I'm usually disappointed. The words on the page aren't quite capturing the vague images in my mind.

I think it's because I'm skipping valuable parts of my own creative process. All through my adolescence and young adulthood (I'm begrudgingly trying to accept the fact that at 27, I'm pretty much an adult now), I kept boxes and spiral bound notebooks filled with pictures and quotes and words that were inspiring to me. I quit keeping those a while back, I can't remember quite when. Now I'm opening boxes and pulling notebooks off the shelf that contain all these past inspirations, looking for things that still ring true. I'm looking for a hint of my former self, the one who innocently believed that beauty could be found in random places, in books and photos and movies and life. In my reluctant transition from forgivably flawed young girl to you-should-know-better young women, I've lost that wonder I used to feel for the world.

Back in my first year of AmeriCorps, I felt that wonder. That first experience living in Charleston, completely separate from my recognizable life, was a heady and exhilarating time. I had a good friend then named Shawn Gephardt. Along with the rest of our circle, Shawn and I spent many nights wandering in and around bars in downtown Charleston in (drunken) wonder at a world we had just fallen into. Everything was new and exciting and fun and - as Shawn used to say - spinny. I felt spinny. Like standing on the playground as a little girl with my arms out, spinning around and around with the world swirling around and around me.

Later in the year, when things got hard and I missed my friends and family and I had to ask one of my teammates to please not talk to me at 8:15 a.m. REMEMBER HOW I DON'T LIKE TO TALK AT 8:15 A.M., ESPECIALLY NOT ABOUT WHO ATE THE LAST TOMATO?! every morning, I didn't feel quite so happy and in wonderment and awe at the great big beautiful world. My friend Shawn wrote me a letter after yet another depressing phone conversation in which I had little happiness to report. "Have you lost your spin?" he asked. It made me cry, just a little, when I read that. I HAD lost my spin. Where do I go to get my spin back? I wondered.

I got it back then, it little ways. I'm trying to get it back now, after the last few months of non-spinniness. I'm trying to find the small things that make me feel glad to be part of the bigger picture. And, in my writing, I'm trying to find the small things that will ultimately help me create a bigger picture with my words.

I'm creating my own creative process, I guess. I'm going back to the drawing board, with notebooks and quotes and things that inspire this vision I have. I'm trying not to rush into creating the final product before I have the pieces ready to put in place. I'm teaching myself to let go of unrealistic expectations and to see my first efforts for what they are - a draft, an outline, an attempt to create a world on paper that exists right now just in my head.

As I go along, I'll keep you posted if I learn anything good. Wish me luck.

Lucy loves you |