Confessions of a Creative Slacker
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Caveat Creatrix, or Through the Store-Window Glass and What Alice Found There
Everyone has her own chosen venue for mercantile distraction. Bookstores do it for me. If I spend enough time in a bookstore, looking at the bright and shiny new books, hefting their weight in my hands and smelling the new paper as I thumb the pages, I give myself this little charge, a faux-literary fix. I am near books. I am touching new work. Someone else has created and I am on the receiving end; what's more, I am thinking about my own creative work (which I am not doing), and therefore a link has been made. Their activity is mine, and I've done something. I don't even have to buy anything (although I often do). Amazing, isn't it?
This is a true story: I went to a large local bookstore cum bazaar (three stories and plenty of chairs to sit in) last month, looking for a particular book. Nowhere do the paths of art and spirituality collide like this place. Where else can you find wrought-iron sconces for your temple room (I don't even have a temple, except the two on either side of my head), super-duper special candles imbued with the energy of your individual working (how do they know? The candle-dippers, I mean, not the candles), finely-illuminated journals full of recycled parchment paper and embossed with your personal zodiac information (and here I was writing down my dreams in a spiral-bound Mead notebook; what was I thinking?).
Having successfully woven my way through these goodies (but only after experiencing great and grave temptation) I soon found myself in the Wicca/Paganism section, which of course had nothing to do with the topic of the book for which I had come, and started noticing that there were some -- nay, several -- introductory Craft books that I had not read. Lately I had felt a little less than inspired in the rites and rituals area, so I thought I might browse through these for some ideas. Besides, I might want to review them for the magazine. (Research again.) I don't know if it was the incense which had seeped its way into the spines of the books, or some kind of backward masking on the suitably hip, not really New Age music on the store's speaker system, or if the books just had a geas on them -- pick this up and you are bound to buy -- but before I knew it, this feeling came over me: "You need this book. You must have this book. This book is the one -- buy it and be completely fulfilled!"
It sort of seeps through you like a slow spill. Soon, you just know that you won't be able to do a thing without any of those items. You cannot create until you have in your possession a royal purple, parchment-papered blank book with your magical name in gold runes on the front (even though you don't even work in runes) and a matching fountain pen (even though you never could write with one of those things). You will be permanently blocked without sconces, even though you couldn't possibly see without your overhead light. Your spell will not work unless you have those candles, even though you have a house full of candles in all colors of the rainbow and in more sizes than you have pairs of shoes.
And it doesn't stop: Beautiful statues and posters of the Goddess that seem to say, "All you need is a boost! This can give it to you!" Mouse pads with Van Gogh's Starry Night and Michelangelo's Delphic Sibyl! Magical jewelry! Inspirational music! Pithy bumper stickers!
Now, I'm not blaming the particular store, mind, because this is something that happens to me in other shops as well. I have had to walk around mainstream bookseller chain stores with a book about writing clutched in my hands, chanting, "I do not need this book, I do not need this book" -- and sometimes I've even left without it. It's that feeling of destiny that comes over all shopaholics when they find something they know will Change Their Lives (at least until they get it home). Sometimes it even does, whatever it might be.
The thought process goes something like this: I am not writing; this book will change that. (Or, I am not doing ritual, not playing enough, whatever.) It has occurred to me that if I didn't spend so much time, say, reading about what I need to do to be a writer I could be doing something else about it, like, oh, I don't know, WRITE?!? But when the urge comes over me, I often forget that in a haze of rationalization (This is what I've been looking for! This is just what I need! That's why I haven't done anything before now!).
Getting back to the tale at hand, I managed to escape the store with just the book I had come for, but I went back later and bought myself that Delphic Sibyl mouse pad. Does she make me more creative? Probably not. But she certainly provides a more visually satisfying work area, even if there are no sconces on the wall.
A Vague Conclusion to a Rambling Piece, Just as I Promised
The astute reader might suggest at this point that I am thinking too hard about all of this when I should be doing instead. Of course, by angsting about this (I love English; you can verb anything), we enter the final dimension of creative slackerdom. If you are too angst-ridden to create, then you can spend time instead examining all the reasons why you might be blocked.
You might even get an article out of it, if you try hard enough.
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