Channeling Creativity

A friend of mine has stopped writing, which bums me out because she wrote beautiful stories, and she has several that are unfinished and I want to know what happens.  Her point is that her life has been awesome lately, and she no longer needs to use writing as a form of escapism.  But then she also feels guilty about not doing any work and asks things like "how do you channel creativity?"

I think that if you don't want to write, that's fine.  Don't write.  If writing is something you do for fun, and it's not fun for you, then don't spend the time you have for fun things doing something you think is a drag.  There is seriously no need to feel guilty about that.

Then I think it's interesting that she wrote for escapism.  I write because I have trouble being heard, trouble expressing myself, and if I take the time to craft a story and I get to polish and mold and iron, I can get across what I want to say.  I guess if I get way better at expressing myself vocally, I might lose my desire to write.

Then I think it's interesting that she asked about channeling creativity rather than fueling motivation.  That's like the creativity is inside her, formless and festering, and has no channel to get out.  I can't really picture a formless creativity, like just a mess of creative energy stewing in her gut like a big scribble.  That's not how I experience creativity.  Instead, I'll have an idea sparked by something around me, and that seed of an idea will get stuck in my gut, hardening and rotting unless I can regurgitate it like an owl coughing up a pellet.

I have advice for getting that out: cough up that owl pellet!  Write it down, even if it's an outline or snippets of dialogue or God awful prose.  Draw a picture.  Tell someone about it.  Just get the idea out there so you don't have to cling to it anymore and you can sleep at night without the idea spinning spinning spinning and keeping you up.  Sometimes just talking about your idea is enough for it to run its course and for you to be done with it, so you have to be careful if you want to do anything more than release that creativity into the world.  If you want to form it into some finished product, plowing through writing it down in full, flowing sentences, and editing it and editing it and editing it, that's much less about channeling creativity.  That's about dedication and motivation.

So what strikes me about talking with my friend about this (other than how sad I am that I'll never get to know how three of her stories end) is how differently we approach and even think about writing.  A lot of writing advice and writing quotes make no sense to me, and I guess that's because the people giving that advice also think about things in a different light.  But I've never felt it as clearly before, and it makes me think about how personal an experience it is, from how seriously you take it, to why you do it, to how you envision the creative and crafting process.