All the Things We Consume As Artists

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and what better occasion than for one of @ablaze's #threetunetuesday posts? I struggle often with explaining creative work to people who live outside that sphere. I love talking to fellow writers for this, for instance, because they never ask you to justify "work" in the way others do, and all the multiplicity of things "work" can mean when you're a creative person.

Personally, I don't much like the word "work". It just carries negative connotations I don't much care for, you know? My work isn't a draining 9-to-5 that I secretly despise. I won't bitch with my "normal" friends over how tired I am. I love being tired from my work. I do sometimes worry over the bits of my mind that don't seem to be there anymore. I worry that if you jump ship long enough, you eventually risk drowning.

I do say "work" to people who I know won't understand, who need me to translate what I do into their understanding of life. I also sometimes need to say "work" because I know how endlessly hard it is for people to take creative work seriously.

In that way, @holoz0r, I do understand and appreciate communicating with fellow artists and creatives, because only fellow writers get it without questioning how confusing and frightening this kind of work can sometimes be.

But work isn't only writing. Work, for me, is often being by myself and sitting on a bench in the park. Having a random conversation. Crying. Immensely related to creative work, though it wasn't always. I havw a strong imagination that sometimes decides to see quite vividly what different tragic, terrible scenarios would be like, and shows me. It took me a while to understand how to work with and not against that.

Consuming content is a huge part of creative work. It's one of those things that is hard to explain as a real thing. You're not working, you're watching TV. But the thing about ideas is, they need constant nourishment and nurturing.

You need to sit and watch other artists at work for your own creative reserves. Reading, but not just reading, and frankly, it's one of my favorite aspects of this life. That I can enrich and replenish my own creative well from any and every source. Reading, of course, helps a lot, as broad a range of subjects as possible. Television and movies help. Music, for me, helps tremendously, because it lets me walk down foreign avenues in a way.

What would this feel like if it was sound? It's a great, immensely enriching experience.

Photography, also. I've no wild ideas as to my skill as a photographer, but I do enjoy it, and more importantly, see how much more productive and creative I am when I get to express myself through other artistic forms. My writing is better if I spend three hours on a random idea photo shoot like this, or this.

It's immensely helpful to let yourself fall into other artistic pursuits. Music. Photography. Even badly. They all come back and feed into the well.

But so does taking, learning to let other people's art and ideas replenish you when you run dry, what a tremendously useful thing to know.For me, writing is inevitably accompanied by helpful music. For a while, the thing I'm working on was accompanied by "Fruit Bat" from the new album my Of Monsters and Men (terrific from head to finish), but I already told you about that, didn't I? :)

The trick is to listen to that inner guide called intuition and recognize the voices and moods that resonate with and enhance your own. That's how you feed the beauty in your ideas, by first recognizing it, and then stewing in it a while.

I'm finding a lot of inspiration, conscious and not, in female-led music at the moment (though perhaps, arguably OMAM are 50/50 led). A lot of Alison Mosshart, and it's interesting, because it's old songs mostly that I can trace back to other write-ups from previous years.
That's a bit of an unusual experiment - looking back at yourself through a song, and what it inspired then, and what it inspires now.

Florence, of course. Buckle has been continuously in my ears and my soul, so that it accompanies me when I wake, and when I'm silent. And sometimes, it feeds into my work consciously. I do think my recent writing is more feminist, in ways, than it was five years ago. And it's a reflection of who I am becoming as a person, and I channel it sometimes, while writing, into conscious, attentive thought.

And sometimes, I sit and think randomly about the time Susie Cave designed Florence's outfits,
and what a shame it is The Vampire's Wife doesn't exist anymore,
and how and why Susie Cave loves Nick Cave,
and how today it's Tuesday,
and it's all just this tangled, tangible mess that is creativity, in a nutshell.