I sincerely believe we are created by a Creator to be creative. This is part of His image we bear, this bringing forth of beauty, life, newness. This bears out in one thousand different ways: we write, sculpt, paint, speak, dance, craft, film, design, photograph, draw, bring order, beautify, garden, innovate, produce, cook, invent, fashion, sing, compose, imagine. It looks like art, it looks like music, it looks like community, it looks like splendor. That thing in you that wants to make something beautiful? It is holy.
So let’s start there: you are worthy and capable of creating. Full stop. Making art or literature or music isn’t reserved for the elite. We are all seeded with creative gifts and the corresponding urges to bring them forth. I know that craving so well; it feels like a balloon expanding in my chest, filled with words, filled with ideas, filled with longing. For me, there is no relief from the pressure except to write. The exchange between creativity and expression is incredibly fulfilling, even if not one other eye ever reads those words.
There is something courageous about acknowledging your ability and right to create, even in the midst of “a real job” or mothering or managing. Women have the innate capacity to nurture their own art without a paycheck, audience, outside permission, or charitable intentions. Do you understand what I mean by charity? You are not required to save the world, or anyone for that matter, with your art. It isn’t valuable only if it rescues or raises money or makes an enormous impact. It can be simply for the love of it. That is not frivolous or selfish in the slightest. If the only person it saves is you, that’s enough.
The expanding balloon in your chest requires a few things. Time, for instance. Creating takes minutes and hours. Living a creative life means making room to dream, craft, compose, produce. It often requires a firm rejection of martyrdom, and I mean that sincerely. The narrative we accept sometimes includes prioritizing all other humans, tasks, and line items to the exclusion of creativity. How dare I? we ask. There are more pressing needs in my life than this artistic expression.
I am here to tell you with certainty: if you wait until you have natural margin to create, you will go to the grave empty-handed. I wrote my first book with two kids in diapers and one in pull-ups. It was absurd, obscene, a fool’s errand. The expanding balloon demanded my partnership, so I did what all creatives do when their art is not their profession: I figured it out. I treated it like a calling. I was not remotely set up to be a career writer, but that is not why you start creating. It can’t be. I didn’t even start with an inkling of that notion.
If you want to produce something, if the balloon is filling, go ahead and create your thing. There, permission granted. This first step is a doozy. If you are waiting for someone to beg you to do the work or promise to give you a huge paycheck or rearrange your schedule to clear the time or somehow make this whole part easier, you might as well take your little dream for a long drive into the country and say goodbye. Creators create. It is one of their main characteristics, as a point of fact. Makers don’t wait for someone else to tell them they should or can. They already know they should and they can.
Next, sorry to deliver this news, but creating requires work. Kind of hard, brutal, sanity-threatening work sometimes. All the dreams and ideas in your head have to transition to your hands, and I’m afraid there is no other way. Art requires time, which, of course, you have none of. This is the creator’s dilemma. You will not miraculously produce by carrying on exactly like you are. It’s a whole thing, and you have to make room for it.
Maybe that time for you is in the earliest wee hours, which is when legions of creators make the magic happen. Maybe you engineer a child swap or childcare to generate time. Maybe you let something go and free up a slot. Know this: something will have to give. I mean that sincerely. Creating will take time away from other things: sometimes kids, sometimes a spouse, sometimes a thing you used to do, sometimes sleep. Work does this. You don’t get to keep everything as is and also add creativity. I have to regularly tell my kids this truth:
ME: I’ll be in my office working.
KIDS: What do you even do out there? (If you think ten books will up your credibility at home, think again, grasshopper.)
ME: I’m writing. It is my work, and it is a real job.
KIDS: side eye
ME: IT IS.
Of course my kids wish I would devote every second to keeping them in the center of the universe, but creators create and creating is work and work takes time. And listen: art and innovation is good work. It means something. It is noble and important. It always has been.
I cried a river when my mom went back to college when we were in elementary, middle, and high school because she was less available to manage our whims, but it soon became a source of great pride for me, because I watched my mom do meaningful, hard work that mattered. She went for it, right in the middle of living life. I needed a mom who mothered, dreamed, worked, and achieved. We all did. Her creative environment was the classroom, and thank goodness she heeded the expanding balloon, because she touched and changed thousands of kids’ lives during the next twenty-five years.
Finally, one last key point to remember as we talk about creating is that everyone wants to be famous or important but fewer want to work on their craft. Take a class, take a course, go to a conference (this is both how I developed and initially got published), join an artist group, study creators you admire in your genre, invite constructive criticism, pay attention to what good art does: How does it use language? How does it convey emotions? What are the obvious elements? What are the intangibles? How does it move the story along? How does it develop? How does it sound? How does it look? How does it feel? Notice what inspires you and moves you and speaks to you.
Do you know where I encountered my first vision for becoming a writer? What’s that? The Bible? Oh no, sweet reader: A Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy. I read it in 1998 while pregnant with my oldest, and for the very first time I realized it was possible to write on a serious nonfiction subject (childbirth in this case, Jesus in mine) in a funny-funny-funny, friend-next-door, sometimes tender, and often inappropriate way. I guffawed and boohooed my way through Vicki Iovine’s book, and as I closed the last page, I remember thinking: This is how I’ve always wanted to write, a thought I’d never actually had until it entered my mind fully formed.