What It Feels Like To Have A Writing Idea
Whether it is a word, a sentence, or a paragraph’s worth of writing, the seed of an idea that blooms into a poem or a narrative is a powerful thing.
I’ve been contemplating ideas…imagination…their connections to each other, to the body, to our internal and external relationships. In essence, I’ve been thinking about how creativity lives and breathes in our daily lives.
Where do ideas come from? Why do they arrive when they arrive? What makes the ‘writer’ have the motivation to take the idea from the floating shape it is in the mind and express it words that make a poem, a song, a story?
For me, this ability was formed in childhood. I spent a lot of time alone, (even though I was often surrounded by others), my state of being was, or should I say, my body in the space, was often singular. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to read a book or write an idea down. I don’t remember a time when my brain wasn’t afire with the flames of curiosity, wonder, and hope. It was also filled with fear and worry, but as I move through therapy and learn about coping, shame and my nervous system, I’m beginning to understand the relationships between these emotions, how the lived (and live) in my body, and how that affected my identity as a writer/reader.
I taught myself how to cope with creativity. I taught myself creative ways to cope. Creativity has been a constant partner in my life. I felt belonging in stories – from hard-cover children’s pictures books to early chapter books to full-on novels that I was voraciously reading when I was nine. I still have many of the books I read when I was a child. There was a voice inside that told me to ‘keep’ these books. I have my copy of the Judy Blume novel ‘Forever’ that solidified my desire to want to be a writer. I have this book on my altar and when I look at it I’m zapped back into my 12-year-old body and the feelings it was filled with as I read the book. I have all the Judy Blume books from my childhood as well as countless others that I read over and over, that were friends to me.
I had this stirring in my chest when I read that voiced: I want to do this. I want to write. I want someone to read my books. I didn’t know how I would heed this voice’s call, but I’ve always had the stirring of energy in my centre, this knowing, that writing was for me. Over the years, I’ve called it purpose, identity, spirit…and it is all these definitions and more.
But at the core of my knowing that I want to read, that I want to write, that I want to be doing these things…is the counterpart that is idea-generation. Included in my life-long love of how it feels to read words that evoke and provoke me, is a reactive response that results in an idea…is a lick of flame that shoots from the fire within that holds a word or a line or a holding space for an idea.
I am grateful that my brain…that my body…has this ability. Maybe it seems obvious that I have this ability…that we all do when it comes to the things we want to do, in relation to our purpose, identity, spirit. This is the knowing that leads us into our ‘work’ – whether it’s paid or not – but it is that energy, that voice that leads us in the ‘doing’ directions that express our ideas.
I was talking to a group of first-graders about writing. This is no easy task as a 6-year-old is just beginning her journey of understanding letters, their sounds, and the mind-bending realizations that come with language and definitions. I had to be creative in my ‘entry’ point in their minds and bodies about reading and words. Again, at this point, much of their relationship with ‘reading’ was being read to, was as ‘listener’, was as the one who connects an image to a word to the sounds of the letters in the word. The kids could not sit still. Their experience of everything around them was so profoundly mixing in their bodies and their minds, I could practically see all the sparks of their learning flicking out of them. They were bursting with curiosity, with exhaustion, with hunger, with delight! It was so exciting! I decided to ask them about imagination.
“Can anyone tell me what an imagination is?” I asked. Hands shot up like daffodils in spring. “It’s when you…use your imagination to tell a story!” “It’s your brain.” “It’s silly!”
I followed up with, “Can you tell me where you imagination lives in your body?” This one gave them pause, but not for long. Many put their sticky hands to their heads. “It’s in here, Miss. In my brain.”
“Does it move around, your imagination?” I asked. And then they were squirming, completely unable to sit any longer. “Stand up, then show me where your imagination is your body!” The children bolted upright and pointed to different parts of their bodies, laughing and twirling and jumping.
I think about this phenomenal experience all the time. Witnessing children being children shows/teaches us how ideas live and burst forth. A 6-year-old simply cannot sit still for all the energy and neurons and bursting of ideas that is constantly happening inside them. This is how it feels when I get an idea! Like I’m a child bursting with light. Like I can’t sit still. Like my imagination is zip-zapping throughout my body and it’s startling and hilarious, a delicious mix of awe and heat inside me.
But I am not in a 6-year-old body anymore. Add forty years of living to my vessel, and there is much more weight that the idea has to push through to get me to write it down. I often get a barrage of ideas when I lay down to sleep. It is not easy to fall asleep…and so my mind will grow a farmer that sifts through the thoughts and experiences of the day, and lean down and search for ideas. It will pull them up…a word, a sentence, an emotion, and hold it up for me to see. I don’t force my body to move and write the idea down. I know there are many of you who do this. The habit/skill of keeping something near the bed on which to record your ideas is in tact. For me, I take the idea and I pin it to my eyeball or heart or brain…to some part of me that I beg to remember the next morning. And if I remember, I know it is a good idea, one that I will work with. Then I write it down.
Other times, ideas seem to run at me, clamping on my face like the facehugger in Alien! Or I’ll be doing something physical – vacuuming, exercising, eating – and ideas will come skipping in. The ideas keep coming. And I do my best to hold them, to extend them out of my interior and into the external realm where we can play and indulge and grow together.
What happens with each idea changes. There are many ideas I have that haven’t reached the outside world yet. Some of these ideas I’ve had for years. They’re like recurring dreams…but this gives me comfort because it shows me that this tandem between imagination and expression of ideas is alive and thriving.
I agree that my imagination is in my brain, but I also agree that it moves around. That it wriggles and jiggles and squiggles inside me.
Like love, imagination is something that we all have, and that we all cultivate, that we can give and receive. It shows its form in art, in science, in all the ways that humans create. Even though it does not get an organ…like love is attached to the heart, imagination is still an alive, active part of our bodies. I love all the ways that we’ve ‘imagined’ our imagination into being!
For me, writing is the voice of my imagination and ideas are the grand love language of their expression. I’m sharing this with you as the first in a three-part contemplation about ideas, creating a writing piece based on ideas, and getting those written ideas published.
I want to share what the process feels like for me….inside and out because I believe that my relationship with the process of creativity, with my imagination and ideas it makes, profoundly affects who I am a human being. And this matters to me.
Having shared this, I’d like to also say that writer’s block, a term and an experience that many writers write about and/or feel/experience, is part of the relationship in the body between the imagination and ideas. I believe that a healing gesture to this experience, if you’re experiencing it, is the Pause. Pause. Wait. Shift your attention. Engage in a different creative endeavour. And trust. Trust that the ideas will find their way…wriggling and jiggling and squiggling inside you – once again, onto the page.
link to artwork by Sam ShennanWhere is you imagination right now? What ideas are bursting forth?
