a Fun Time and a Deadline

a performative, horn-tootin’ fest that I should save for LinkedIn

A friend sent me a list of writing prompts from a Patreon project she did, and the suggestions about revealing the creative process intrigued me.

I don’t feel like I have a creative process, but I suppose every person does. Let’s explore Alex’s creative process and see where it goes.

I have ideas every day, all the time. I joke that I execute about 50% of my ideas, but because I have so many it’s not a bad track record. Interesting ideas that have gone from my brain and into the atmosphere in the last few years include:
- Using public transport to travel through the Southern USA
- The Carrington Folk Festival
- The Flow Poetry night, where I did my first (public) interpretive dance.

- Performing classic poems I’ve memorized.

- The annual 8 To Create Challenge which encourages creativity under time constraint. This is also what my Substack is.

My Substack is my biggest idea and challenge thus far, not because I’m a genius writer, but because I’ve never missed a week in four years of writing it, even if some weeks the quality is definitely better than others.

Does that feel a little boasty? Is this post examining my creative process just a total performative, horn-tootin’ fest that I should save for LinkedIn? Well damn y’all it’s now 6am on Tuesday morning and I’m still trying to pull this Substack together, so I can’t back out now!

When it comes to my creative process, I am comfortable with putting weird ideas into the world that might not be well received. That’s a big factor in how I get things done, I just don’t care that much what people think.

In a lot of my endeavors, I collaborate with a friend. We bounce ideas off each other and encourage each other throughout the work. This ideally makes any project more enjoyable.

(A Substack for another day is about how collaborating is risky. Every time you go into a creative project with someone, I suggest you consider what you might do if the friendship ends. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it, but it is to say it’s always a possibility. It’s happened to me and to many creative people I know.)

But writing is a solitary activity which I enjoy in a different way. I love waking up knowing that I have a story to deliver by the end of the day. It can be stressful, yes, but I always pitch stories to editors that I genuinely want to write. Substack, while it doesn’t pay, does give me creative freedom to write whatever I want.

Sometimes I worry it’s too much freedom as I stroll down a meandering word path with the destination and conclusion vague. I often read my Substack to my sleepy partner at 11pm and he says “I have no idea what you are talking about, there is no point, and you need to start over.”

Yet more time does not always equal a better Substack. People have suggested that I do one Substack per month and just make it impeccably good, but knowing my creative process, I predict I would procrastinate until the night that it was due and then produce the same quality work, just less quantity. However, I do go back and reread and tweak my Substacks a few weeks/months after I’ve written them and then pitch them to new publications, which sometimes works!

I have promised myself that I will write every Monday night (or Tuesday morning) until I die. I put it out there, even when it’s bad, and pray I get better along the way. I could just write this all in my journal and not publicly publish it, but I doubt I’d keep it up. Substack is evidence that I’m committed. This is a record and a form of accountability that conveniently caters to my incessant need for attention.

I am not driven by the idea of lots of exhausting work. I am driven by a fun time and a deadline.

Ideas are best when they’re fresh in my head. Delays can make me question or give up on an idea. I should work on this. Years ago I told my friend Oliver I wanted to write a poem about socks. Every now and then he messages me asking where the sock poem is. I confess, Oliver, I do not want to write a poem about socks anymore. The sock spark has been snuffed out! It disappeared like a garment gone missing in the dryer. It’s lost like a bootee in the breeze!