By Olivia Clare Friedman
A poet muses on the creative process and the ways she’s learned to keep the creative thoughts coming.
Photo by charlesdeluvio
As I am sailing around the room, feeding the cat, or mopping up a mess, I have a thought. A rhythm. An image. A sentence. A word. Usually something for my writing. It is a flash, a zing, that I want to write down for later. We all know these thoughts come at the most ridiculous times, when you are not sitting down to actually make the thing. And this is no wonder.
Movement helps thoughts brew inside you. Movement in the world—your feet stepping through real time—helps your thoughts strum through your brain, thoughts broken or continuous.
So I am feeding the cat, and the thought comes in. For a while, I try to hold the thought in my head. But then I have another thought, and another. I am still sailing around the room, doing, what looks to be from the outside, something I must do—like completing some byzantine paperwork, or cleaning out the sink, or loading the dishwasher—but then all those thoughts keep coming. And there is another. I will remember, I tell myself. I will remember all of them. I will get to the end of the day, or I will get to tomorrow morning when I’ll be at my desk again. Then I will write all these things down. I will record the thoughts.
But then—in all my sailing about the room, in all my day-to-day dillydally—I forget the thoughts. In the moment, I was sure I wouldn’t. Each one was such a good thing—its contours, its rhythm—that I knew in the flash of having it, in its headlong passing through my brain like a fire-tailed comet, I would not forget any of it. And yet I have. I’ve even forgotten what it was about. The duties of the day, very innocently, took the thought away, in just an hour, or even mere minutes, and the thought’s gone.
When I realized this was becoming a pattern, I began a trick. Or maybe I should say, I began a different way of going about my day. It’s very simple, but it’s the obvious things that can escape us. What I do is wear a long cardigan—the rattier, the fuzzier, the better—with deep pockets. Around the house I keep the most generic-looking stacks of square paper. Note cubes with pens beside them. When the thought comes, I let it come, and then, quickly, as soon as I can, I pick up a note and pen and write the thought down, or I write down the shorthand of the thought. I write one word or a phrase or whatever I need to write, so I’ll remember the thought for later. And there’s something significant about keeping the notes on my person, the pieces of paper rattling around in my pockets during the day, ready for me when I’m ready for them.
At the end of the day, I take the notes from my pockets and put them in a stack on my desk. Sometimes there’s one, and sometimes there are many. I don’t even look at them until morning. Right now, with a two-year-old, I write at 3 or 4 a.m., and that’s when I look at those notes. If I like them, they go into my journal, written out more broadly, fleshed out, more rendered. Then some of them get typed up in my computer. And then I blissfully tear up the little note and throw it away. I love to tear things up and throw them away.
This is how I capture those flashes. Nothing, of course, will record the flash in its entirety, or the zap and zing you felt when you first had it. But so often that’s what making something is—you have the flash, and then you try to record it afterwards, with as much energy intact as you can.
If I am driving, if I am at the store buying groceries, I let the flash live in my head until I can write a note and stow it in my purse. Until then, I hold the thought in my head. My head is a vessel, keeping the firefly.
My tiny written notes serve a practical purpose, but they serve a spiritual one too. They keep me connected to my inner life. They keep my creative life humming and steady, a continuous river.
Just now, for example, I had to get up from writing this to clean up cat vomit. Honestly, I let the vomit sit for a minute, so I could finish a paragraph. Then I got up and cleaned. This is my life, sometimes, and probably yours sometimes too. But I was thinking about my next sentence while I scrubbed the carpet.
I once heard of a poet who was also a server and who’d compose her lines in her head while she was going from table to table, serving diners. She’d pick up food from the kitchen, carry the large tray to the table, say her piece, Is there anything else I can get you?, all while saying her own lines to herself, over and over, reciting, adding more lines each time. Later, she’d write it all down. Not only did she remember her lines this way, but of course this affected the way she composed—her rhythms, her breath.
Some thoughts you won’t want to write down, of course. You’ll just want to hold them in your head for a while and then let them fumble.
You must go to the drugstore. And you have to go to your day job, which I hope feeds you in some way, but maybe it doesn’t. You must do mundane things that can feel antithetical to your spiritual life, the source, the muse, the spirit, however you want to think of it. You have to pump gas, load the dishwasher, fold the towels. (Or maybe those mundane things feed you too. Sometimes, they do!) Outwardly, you are doing these things. Inwardly, you can reach into the self, hold your inner thoughts to you, memorize them, recite them, shuffle them around. Within you are fishes and loaves.
Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of a novel, Here Lies, a short story collection, Disasters in the First World, and a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Available Now
Olivia Clare Friedman’s An Arm Fixed to a Wing seeks out the spiritual elements that haunt the everyday, the divine wing fastened to an earthly arm. Elegies and poems of nostalgia appear alongside pieces celebrating the speaker’s present moment, with the underlying knowledge that such moments slip past too easily. Several poems explore the theme of motherhood—the excitement and novelty, the routine and translucent sleeplessness. At the book’s center sits a sequence of narrative pieces, titled “Camera Poems,” exploring experiences of isolation, hopefulness, and self-awareness.
While the poems in An Arm Fixed to a Wing acknowledge that loss is a constant, their tone is frequently wistful, evoking the desire to recover feelings of attentiveness and wonder toward one’s surroundings, both the mundane and the extraordinary.