The Bones of a Creator’s Life

Mother’s Day 2023

I’ve been thinking about productivity and creativity this week, mainly because the three primary obstacles to my work-related flights of fancy celebrated Mother’s Day with me this past Sunday.

I cannot even count how many times I’ve had to put away a manuscript – often just when the juices were really starting to flow – because one of my babes had a stomach bug, needed help with homework, or just wanted a hug and someone to talk to. Or the times we spent our vacation days and hard-earned dollars at the beach or at a theme park instead of an interesting locale and potential set piece for a story-in-progress. No role is more conditional than motherhood, if you’re doing it right. On any given day, at any hour, mothers are required to drop whatever they’re doing and tend to the needs of another human(s).

Just today (I’m writing this on Wednesday), my rising college Sophomore came home with a terrible cold, expecting to be treated with the same care she would have gotten as a ten-year-old: hot tea, cuddles, soup, and some company as she curled up on the couch and watched the early episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.

I’m not going to lie. Despite having to put away my plans of getting so much done on the new noir series I’m writing; I was in heaven.

Age 10 sick day. Redux.

This scene of domestic sum and substance is not exactly what most people envision when contemplating the creative life. Artists are often thought of as rebels and eccentrics with decidedly unconventional home lives. There is some truth in that, of course, and I’d say most arty types are certainly individualists. As I reflect upon my life as a young woman and some of my choices – taking spur of the moment road trips all by my lonesome, joining comedy troupes, moving to a foreign country – a case could be made that I haven’t always followed the way of the common horde.

But to be honest, it never felt that way. In my experience the road less travelled always seemed pretty full to me, and I met my share of likeminded people along the way. That would seem to indicate that this artist’s choices weren’t necessarily rebellious or even original; they were just not in line with what most of my motley crew of Midwestern homies were doing at the time.

Me with one of my Prague homies during “Ball Season.”

Those flights of fancy way back when – the literal and figurative ones – fed my imagination, introducing me to places, people and ideas I might never have discovered had I not left home. Even if my home was the vibrant, artsy, gritty, decidedly uncommon and unsafe city of Chicago.

There’s no denying that.

Yet, when I look at the actual bones of creativity, the foundation upon which wild notions and beautiful things are built, I see less of the restless, unruly and defiant nature of the artistic process. The cultivated eccentricity and roaming the world ethos is fun, but it’s only the very tip of the creator’s iceberg. It just happens to be the one the sun shines upon the most, producing a brilliant, celestial glare.

The unsexy truth of it is, being an artist isn’t about being artsy at all. Like parenting, there’s a lot of tedium involved. Hours upon hours of changing, fixing, and refining. It’s a colossal outpouring of love not just for the completed work, but all the small, sometimes microscopic movements that made it. At its core, it’s about possessing a sense of innate curiosity. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t require an unconventional lifestyle or hairstyle. Because it’s not really about the quest for what’s “out there” – the customs, geography and dress that make us different. That can be found in your average Google search.

It’s about the drive and thirst for knowing what’s within and connects us all.

Three creatives sharing a beer.

The fundamentals of daily life – family, routine, a neighborhood walk, an unexpected interruption – are the massive, invisible base of every imagining. They remind us that the tip of an iceberg on its own would just melt or float away to nowhere in particular.

What we do day to day with the people in our lives does more than just ground us. The byproduct of having to give of ourselves, adhere to the prescriptions of obviously restrictive institutions – like marriage, for instance – is that we are pressured to make important choices, which in turn strengthens our ability to stay a course. We are goaded into reflecting on why a precedent might have become a standard, on the nature of a particular law, the efficacy and importance of manners, the utter necessity of love.

My wedding and biggest creative engine.

Of course, there are times when busting through the guardrails is not only called for but feels great! There’s an energy to that; a firework of daring-do. But demands and protocols make us think. They require something of us as individuals that the hilarity of chaos and novelty do not.

And as I look through the content of some two hundred plus essays, dozens of podcasts and video diaries, a book of short stories, seven finished novels, and a partridge in a pear tree, I can’t see a single word or notion that hasn’t been colored by the presence and needs of my family, who are without question the greatest inhibitors of my quietude and freedom. They are the lens through which I make sense of the world and am endowed to have true empathy for the characters I create – even the killers, thieves, players and lunatics.

So, in the spirit of this post Mother’s Day week, as we contemplate all of the things that ground us, even hold us down with what can feel like ropes and chains on some days, let’s take a moment of gratitude. Strictures can be frustrating, even infuriating – it’s true. There are moments when they can feel crushing. But when embraced and properly channeled, they can also muscle us into excellence; take us down paths of insight and ingenuity we never could have imagined while running footloose and free.

Me, backstage – twenty-three and footloose.Victoria’s Amazon Page