On Passion and the Creative Life

"Are you fascinating?"

The question, posed to me today by a young brown-haired woman in a white lab coat, left me momentarily speechless before I realized that I had misheard her. The actual question, in preparation for a blood draw, was: "Are you fasting?"

"No," I replied to the fasting question. The question I thought I'd heard, though, has stayed with me.

Blame it in part on the fact that I have been reading the books of pioneering creativity coach Eric Maisel: most recently, his book called Coaching the Artist Within.  He writes extensively about the importance of passion in the life of an artist. (In fairness, he also writes extensively about the importance of goals, self-discipline, and developing ways to make art regularly despite the real and numerous demands of everyday life. But I digress).

In my last post, I wrote about taking the steps and making the space for creativity and art to happen. These are the practical parts, and when I don't apply them to my life, nothing much happens. Especially finished pieces.

But the passion part of art-making is, as Maisel puts it, the gas the drives the creative process. I have to know what I love, what things compel me emotionally and intellectually. This is true for technical, craft-oriented things (i.e. I love the way that poem just engaged me with all of my senses, or, I love the way that short story ended so ambiguously, and now I can't stop thinking about the questions that it raised, or, I love how nuanced that character is). It's also true for the subjects and themes that captivate me, and for the things that captivate me in my everyday life.

Maisel writes, "People are trained to avoid displays of passion and even feeling passionate. They settle for a life that fails to nourish them, one that feels safe rather than wild and out-sized".

Today I am looking more deeply at the presence and/or absence of passion in various parts of my life, including my creative writing.

Am I fascinating?

I don't know. But if my creative life isn't fascinating, at least to me, then I certainly need to make it so.