Has Anyone Seen My Creativity?

Cattle Drives Are Back

*****

“May I recommend,” suggested Mr. Chirac, “that since we are the solitary guests of this venerable restaurant, we celebrate the successful conclusion of your quest for renewed youth and vigor by enjoying a robust Ukranian Vodka and a dinner of fine salyutka?”

“I didn’t travel half way around the world to eat things I can’t pronounce,” said Prigmore. “Now can we get on with this? My people don’t trust you and that makes me nervous.”

While Prigmore spoke, Mr. Chirac palmed the pearl handle of a long, scalloped-edged steak knife from the tablecloth with his left hand. From behind a curtained alcove along the wall, Ricci stepped out. In the flickering orange and yellow light cast across the room by the fireplace, the jagged scar from the corner of his mouth to his chin seemed to spark and move.

“Your people?” inquired Mr. Chirac politely.

“My private detectives,” continued Prigmore, “can’t find anything on you. I find that disturbing. ”

“And yet,” said Mr. Chirac with a grand wave of his right hand at the empty restaurant around them, “you are here in Kiev, far, so very far, from the safety of your home.”

Prigmore grimaced.

“I despise travel,” he said. “And I particularly dislike this inconvenient country. But I’ll do anything to be young again.”

“So, just so,” said Mr. Chirac.

He raised the knife to the level of his eyes and turned the blade this way and that, studying the way the candle flames reflected in its mirror-like blade.

“The silverware at this table,” said Mr. Chirac, “has an interesting yet terrible history, as does the Ukraine itself.”

He continued to stare at the knife, angling it to one side, resting it on the ridge of one hand, moving it closer to his face as though to kiss it.

“I didn’t come alone,” announced Prigmore nervously.
excerpted from "Ricci's Last Night," by Ferrel D. Moore

*****

As a writer, you're supposed to show a little creativity now and then. So let's talk about creativity. Let's begin with mapping where you go every day. I don't mean to get personal, but how many lines would such a geographical overview of your day require? Do you wear grooves in the carpet of your life by walking back and forth along the same paths everyday? I suppose we should throw in what destinations you achieve at the end of your lines, but might they be a bit....ummmm....repetitive? Do you follow the same routes, go to the same places, ignore the same things everyday?

Or let's look at your creativity potential a little differently- what's the biggest risk you have taken so far today? Yesterday? In the last week? It the last month? In the last year? You get the picture.

Have you rolled in wet grass recently? Pressed your nose to the glass window of an expensive restaurant? Lusted after someone as though you would die without them? Have you practiced and practiced to be the best at something, anything? Have you built a kite, flown a kite, or built your own hot air balloon? Perhaps, in a moment of wild abandon you ordered a new pair of shoes from the internet? Not good enough if you want to be creative you must do new and different things and meet new and different people. Don't be afraid. Be terrified, but terror and joy yield creativity. Mentally flabby people are rarely creative.

Has your life been on the line recently? Have you gone over the top? No? Hmmmm. Should we be worried that you're in a rut, which is, as they say, a grave with two ends open for now?

How can a writer be creative when they have so few stimulating new experiences? Well, the average writer solves the problem handily by simply recycling what they've read! Brilliant. With each successive recycling, does the story being told suffer just a little in the way that conversations being repeated from one person to the next are often distorted so badly that the original conversation is lost. Here I must make the argument that to be creative, we must be stimulated. Let me re-phrase that for the faint at heart. We need new experiences, new encounters, and new people to interact with to remain creative.

When I was sixteen, I ran away from home and took a train to New York City. I was amazed by the human tragedy of so many moving down the sidewalks like aumotatons, shunning human interaction with the frightening number of people passing by. While I was there, a lion escaped from something or other, and nearly died of anxiety. The great masses of humanity moved past the poor beast as though he wasn't there. He wandered the streets like an abandoned kitten for nearly a day before a passerby thought to call animal control. The people who passed him were High Priests and Priestesses in the church of the mundane, and were not about to let this fearsome beast interrupt their ritual.

Years later, I observed the same ritual while walking with a friend who was lecturing me on the insensitivity of Americans to the poor. As we were doing so, he stepped over a homeless woman sleeping on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Believe me, I'm taking no liberties with this story. I actually saw it happen.

Have you made a tremendously embarassing mistake recently? Has there been a scandal in your life so horrible that your friends won't speak to you and you're this close to being a front page story? Is your idea of adventure eating food from Africa or Asia so that you can feel worldly? Perhaps you might go to the country of origin and marry someone there instead of ordering their food. Have you had sex with someone from a different culture recently? Perhaps I've gone too far. Yet, the idea is that seduction and intimacy are far too often written about without the experience to back up the description. I was once asked to read a love scene for a writer friend describing the seduction scene between an American woman and a Japanese man. Before reading it, I asked if he had ever romanced a Japanese woman. "Why," he asked. "What's the big deal? Sex is the same everywhere." It's really not, you know, but more importantly, netiher is romance. What is romantic here is not romantic there.

Is your idea of literary creativity to swap gender roles in a story? Or, perhaps your idea of creativity is to swap racial roles? If so, clearly you've been reading too many creative writing books, attending too many writer's workshops, or perhaps worshipping at the altar of movies or television instead of having exciting, terrifying, compelling, thought-provoking experiences of your own.

Have you been, perhaps, too safe with your own life to be creative?

“You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.” Margaret Attwood

To be creative, we need to be stimulated, engaged, conflicted, triumphant and even horribly confused. Do the only ideas you get seem to be, well, predictable, prepackaged, and vacuum baked? Are they tepid? Or do your literary visions come at you like a meteor screeching down from the sky? Live your life with gusto and verve and write with excitement.

Do this for me. Look at what you do every day as though it were important to your writing.

Because it absolutely is.

It's Called the Suicider-

Guess Why?