Tag: Writing

Posted on

Creating to be Consumed

Today, and really for the past few weeks, I have asked myself why I continue to keep this blog up on the internet. I do not update all that often (though the past few weeks have felt more productive) and I really have things I need to spend the energy on that might suffer so I can create for this “pointless” project.

I realized that I write to be consumed. Much the same way I cook to be consumed and I preach to be consumed. I do these things, offering parts of my heart and soul for other to take and read or hear or eat, to find nourishment or healing or comfort or conviction or whatever I created to offer.

I do not sit above the capitalist fantasies of wide audiences and incomes, but really I just want people I love and respect, or strangers in want and need of what I have to offering, to receive my creations and consume them. I do this so my thoughts can leave my head and maybe touch folks beyond my usual circle of influence — especially those things I might want to include in a sermon but know do not fit the Word of God the Holy Spirit and my position tasks me to give.

I do it because, when it works, I know I did exactly all those things. Writing about not knowing how to continue ministering, writing about losing the most innocent of us to a virus that would ultimately kill millions, writing about how I stood still and received a different political identity over the course of a couple of short years all did its purpose of touching, feeding, and healing, and writing those things just for myself would have never allowed others to consume them.

I write to be consumed, which means I ultimately write for a reader other than myself.

I realized, even while writing this, that plays out in my thinking. When I say I write to process, I realize I write to process because I have to say what I will say in a way someone else will understand, and that “someone else” does not have my internal thoughts and experiences. It makes me speak the details and think about them when I might think I already have it all pieced together.

But it needs to be a person, not a rubber duck. I do not deal with coding, and our hearts and souls do not function like computers.

That is all well and good. I actually think creating to be consumed can be valuable (if you keep greed and selfishness away from it). And frankly, I really enjoy it.

But creating to be consumed can create frustrating discouragement when other do not consume your work. Or an unintended audience consumes it and misinterprets your work.

Again, it still annoys me that the now fourth-most viewed and absolutely most “Liked” piece on my blog is a throw-away piece about trying to get back into physical fitness — and that physical fitness was not supposed to be the primary topic, just the vehicle.

But that would sting less if the next two real posts, an Ash Wednesday reflection and thoughts about ignoring and acknowledging trauma, did not become two of my the worst performing posts ever. And the garbage vent post between them did better than both (even if not well).

I write to be consumed, and not being consumed hurts. Putting your heart out there, even a tiny, little fragment of it, and having it not taken hurts.

To the eight people who probably read both and the couple of read one, I am actually quite thankful for you. I know at least a person or two received it.

But today, I am thinking about if creators should continue to create to be consumed if no one consumes their work, or if my ego should take the blow from the internet and just move on.

I think I wrote this for creatives, and not to encourage but to say, “I get it, and my livelihood is not dependent on the success or failure of anything I do here.”

I create to be consumed. When I am not consumed, I find it hard to create.

Do not know why this exists, but it does now.

Peace,
– Robby

Posted on

My (Terribly Broken) Creativity Tap

This morning I sat down at my computer, endeavoring to finish Advent planning and not go week-by-week YET AGAIN this year. I opened the document for the Advent Candle Readings I’m writing and…

The cursor on the screen goes
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
The curser on the screen goes
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
All morning long!

Okay, fine. Worship Materials. We can do that. We do that all the time and have for over a decade, and I have already done most of the planning and the prayers just get adapted from the previous week for advent. We can do this!

Second verse, same as the first!

The cursor on the screen goes
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
The curser on the screen goes
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
All morning long!

Okay, fine. Maybe the coffee has not hit yet. I will not beat myself up about not getting anything done in the timeframe I would have liked and instead open a lengthy blog post draft to work on to prime the tap. I quickly wrote 1000 good words the other night and felt really passionate about the post. Not sure if it will ever publicly see the light of day, but it helps me work through some things I have mulled over and maybe by just writing the tap will open and I can get real work done after.

Fun fact: leaving half a sentence that starts “I do not want to make…” for the beginning of a new paragraph sitting at the bottom of the document with no notes about what the sentence should say and no clues from the previous paragraphs where you intended go with your next thought does not make it easy to resume a piece of writing.

Third verse, same as the first…

The cursor on the screen goes
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
The curser on the screen goes
*BLINK* *BLINK* *BLINK*
All morning long!

At that moment I started writing what you see before you. I had a strong emotion and a thought about something; combining those makes the fingers start pressing the buttons on the stupid RGB keyboard. This event, this place where I cannot, for the life of me, do anything useful but I can write this probably useless piece that I will post to the blog* because I have not posted in months despite paying for my piece of the internet with a real URL but that I actually kind of like and have done some live editing of, I realized somewhere my creativity tap broke. Broke terribly.

When my creativity tap pours, it pours hard. I can crank out a thousand words in an hour or two, I can plan a good and creative worship service in thirty minutes, I can work through questions and thoughts and philosophies I have wrestled with for days or weeks or even years and put the conclusions on paper in record speed.

When the tap pours, it pours with the greatest of pressures and fills many mugs. Thankfully I can usually edit the foamy beer filling those mugs into something drinkable and usable after the fact, no creativity tap needed.

In non-metaphorical terms, I usually just need to copyedit and maybe rearrange to match a “normal” thought process and not my crazy thought process. I get to a point where I do not need the creativity tap and can just work like a happy little worker bee to finish whatever I have started.

When the tap opens, it flows from me.

When the tap opens.

I have resided in this body for nearly thirty-six years. I have considered myself a writer for twenty. I have written sermons weekly for eleven and planned most of the worship services that went along with those sermons. I still, someday, hope to professionally write in some capacity.

But the creativity tap does not open for me without one of three motivators:

One, stress. My Stress/Productivity Curve rises very slowly and then quickly peaks late in the curve. When the stress cranks up, I can crank it out; when the stress does not, I slog through and usually do not finish until the stress cranks up. Terrible for editing, terrible for quality control, terrible for my mental health (and the mental health of my church admins, I have been told).

Two, place. This one could actually work in my favor expect for one thing: that place is outside. November in Iowa does not encourage outdoor office work. Worked great writing my paper in September, not so much now. Unfortunately, too, I have not found an outdoor place for doing work at church and offices without a ton of sunlight and without a big table for a desk I can move whenever I want discourage my creativity.

Three, emotion. This one wins almost universally. If I get a topic that triggers an emotional response in me, especially a strong emotional response but sometimes simple like “I just want productivity this morning!”, it opens the creativity tap and it just flows out of me.

I get inconsistent results with motivators one and two. I have looked at an empty page at 1 AM Sunday morning for a sermon I will preach at 10:30 that same morning. I sat at the table outside writing my paper and wrote 200 words in 4 hours on multiple occasions. Often, I need both stress and place to hit that point of creative flow to actually get work written.

But emotional motivation just opens the tap. In a weird way, emotion actually clears my thinking instead of clouding and biasing it. It opens me to make connections and see relationships I could not previously. It takes away the doubt and fears of imperfection and just lets me get something on the page — and again, that something usually ends up good.

If that emotional trigger gets tripped, the creativity tap opens.

John Green mentioned something in a video recently that just came to mind. He started talking about his current writing projects and said that he writes to think. In writing this thing that ended flowing out of me like an over-pressurized stout tap, I began to realize I do the same thing.

Actually, I realized it when I saw the video, but it came into focus writing this.

More than once I have found myself in an emotional state, every emotional trigger flipped and every nerve raw, while trying to go to sleep. This happened a lot on Saturday nights before Sunday mornings my last year in Fort Wayne, wanting so badly to just get a good night’s sleep and have the physical energy and “rested-ness” to do good enough a job that next morning that maybe some of the things that eventually lead to my resignation would start to undo themselves and I could find success there again.

That anxiety, stress, and emotion needed a place to go, and at 2 AM I have no physical way to relief an “emotional shitstorm.” More than once I opened Word Mobile, an absolute miserable experience for writing, and just started putting words on paper. More than once I would get a few hundred words of useable writing out of it, and almost always it would taper off the “emotional shitstorm” enough for me to go to sleep.

I write to think, I write to process, and somehow that has broken my creativity tap. For some reason I can now only write and crank out the words when I need to process or think through something.

Unless, again, I have the exact level of stress and/or the exact place needed to open the creativity tap without triggering intense emotion.

I started this out just wanting to vent and prime the tap for the productive work I need to do today, but now I find myself wondering if writing became my therapy, my place to deal with everything in a way that I could also share with the world if the opportunity to do so safely and well ever arose.

We all had and have no place to frankly share what so much of what clergy (and I assume healthcare workers, educators, and other helping professionals) experienced with the pandemic. So many of the spaces we thought we could share ended up unsafe or unwelcoming to “divisive topics” like the politics of an apolitical virus killing people. Writing with the hope of someday have a space to share what I experienced through those writings gave me the ability to write when I could not write anything else.

Writing is thinking to me, more than anything else. So, unless I have something to work out, the writing just does not come to me anymore (if it ever did in the first place).

My creative tap broke in terrible ways. Anyone else?

Peace,
– Robby

P.S.: “Emotional Shitstorm” is the technical term for when you are so emotionally overwhelmed that you cannot function in any meaningful way, the emotions are having an acute affect your physical being in that moment, and the only relief can come from something that acts as a trip or reset for it. Usually, people recommend physical exercise or patterned games without stories (Tetris comes to mind). And no, I did not come up with that; someone wise gave me that language.

* It always feels weird writing future tense when, by the time you read it, I will have already posted it by the nature of you reading it on said blog. Why this feels weird to me, and why I need to tell you it feels weird, I have no idea, but alas I needed to share my thoughts on the matter because of course I did.

Posted on

A Random Memory (And a Rabbit Hole)

I had a memory flood back to me like that I hadn’t thought of in a while:

When I was young, I really struggled with spelling.  I mean, I still struggle with spelling, but I have those wonderful red squiggles to help me out now.  Anyway, I remember sitting at a parent-teacher conference in fourth grade – I think – and there was conversation about how I was still not reading chapter books and I was still using “inventive spelling,” which was unacceptable at that level.

I guess.

This memory is always spurned by a slightly earlier memory, I think first or second grade.  I was trying to write “The Indians are our friends.” and what I wrote was “The Indians are are friends.”  I knew they were different words, but I didn’t understand the spelling difference.

Chronic bad speller.  I legitimately thank God for whomever added the squiggly lines to Word, and also whomever added them to browsers.

That one popped into my head because I meant to type “our” and I typed “are.”  I deleted, corrected, and then the memories flooded back.

There is always a third thing that pops into my head.  There is a story from this guy talking about a girl on social media who is obviously a teenager with teenage theories and beliefs.  He goes through how dumb she supposedly is – again, probably because she’s a teenager1 – and yet she always used the right version of there/their/they’re, as a righteous condemnation of anyone who gets it wrong because “she’s dumb, and even she can do it.”

I wonder how much brilliance is ignored because communication isn’t everyone’s forte.  Sometimes saying something is more important than saying it properly.  Sometimes the thoughts get ahead of the grammar, and the thoughts are much more important than the grammar, yet we condemn anything not written properly as stupid.

I’m as guilty as anyone.  I’m a little bit racist in this regard, in fact.  There is a pronunciation of “ask” that makes me immediately discount the speaker as less educated and less wise.  Now, I recognize this about myself and I consciously snap myself out of it – I have casual racism within me, like anyone else, and I believe just acknowledging it and then putting it aside when it happens will make me, and anyone else, better at interacting with the world – but it’s a thing for me.  And it almost made me discount the wisdom of someone in CPE, someone who brought a lens to my experience I was so very lucky to have because her presence was so very atypical to the CPE process.

We need to become better judges of the thoughts expressed to us and stop using our biases against certain types of communication in that judgement process.  How often have you discounted something because it isn’t well written?  How often have you discounted something because the speaker is angry, or upset, or emotionless?  How often have you discounted someone because they lack education, or are highly educated?  How often have you discounted someone because of their level of privilege, be it high or low?

Because I have.  Probably every day.

There was a great article – and if I find it, I will tweet it and link it here – that has an argument that we can’t possibly be fully “woke” and trying to attain the title of “King Woke” or “Queen Woke” is a fools errand.  Instead, we just need to acknowledge our biases – in the terms of the article, racism, but all biases that divide and silence – and do our best to set them aside as we live in this world.

So I issue a challenge.  Read a poorly written article and judge is based on the merits of its argument, not the quality of its writing.  Read an article arguing a position you disagree with – hate, even – and evaluate it honestly, not biased by your current preconception.  If we do this, we can both widen our minds and also widen our arguments when we come up against something we find abhorrent, attacking it at its core and its logic instead simply in a way that can be described as “divisive” and “political.”

And instead of pretending you have no biases – and especially no internalized and/or casual racism – acknowledge it and work to set it aside.

Maybe we can start interacting with each other and loving each other fully if we try.

Okay, I need to stop procrastinating.  Hopefully this mind-dump makes sense.

Peace,

– Robby

1For anyone my age and older, you should be insanely thankful that all the stupid thoughts you had as a teenager were not recorded as a permanent record for all to read forever – and to nail you to the wall about because you are a stupid teenager. Every election around/after 2032 should be pretty entertaining…