About LJ and blogging and creating things

[goingferal]

I like LJ and I feel like leaving because of the DDOS attacks is giving power to something I don't want to empower.  So, I won't stop checking here until they pry it out of ... well, until there's nothing left here. That said, I am on G+ and FB and my dogblog and Dreamwidth, too, and at some point in the last 2 years I stopped working so hard to keep my online and my "real" life separate--because they are really too close to each other nowadays, anyways.

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I started reading something yesterday that was so beautiful written and so astonishingly creative and world-crafted that I have consciously thought "how does she think of these things." And I've begun to wonder where my creativity has gone. Where is my imagination?

For many years of my life, I was deeply involved in writing creatively and in drawing and painting. And at some point in the past 16 years, that has all drained out of me and into the practical, the grammatical, the commas and the parens and the clauses, the cya and the getting to work on time, and feeding the dogs and paying the bills and getting dishes washed and laundry folded and taking care of those around me. And while an awful lot of creative energy goes into working and training the dogs, that is more crafting more than creating. Raising puppies is, quite literally, about creating, but it's not about imagination in the sense of creating anew. Blogging is writing and it uses my word skills, but it isn't about imagination and creating--not as I have used it of late, at least.

So much of what I create or plan or plot nowadays has to do with arranging things in my life -- furniture, things, dogs, cats, chickens, planting a garden or flowers or putting up fencing to create a more attractive sight-line. It seems to be all tied into working toward a goal, being clever for the sake of problem solving. And while this takes up a lot of thought time and creative/plotting energy, it isn't really imagination based.

I think this lurking beast of creativity comes out and hunts me in my dreams, as they are often long and complex and plot-filled and only very little about myself or my actual day-to-day life. They often drag me in because I get involved in the story and I want to see what happens next.

So I am going to think about ways to be creative that involve crafting or building something just for the sake of itself--written or visual.*. You know, like.... art--creating for the sake of creating, for the sake of stretching the muscles of imagination and seeing what else I can hold in this head.

* not aural b/c I have the aural aesthetics of a Cape buffalo--that is, I like really obvious, thumpy things.

Comments

[healersheart]

ISTR that one of the reasons you wanted to go into business for yourself was to give yourself the freedom to be able to write the way you wanted to. Of course, that memory is a few years old and so fairly fuzzy, but...yeah. I had a point somewhere.