Writing AS the Distraction

For most of my long writing career, I've had demanding day (or day-and-night) jobs. I've been an editor for a university think tank, a college professor with a full-time academic appointment, a mom of two boys, and now I'm a grandmother who watches my two small granddaughters ten days each month.

This means that writing has always been my private passion, my secret joy, my stolen pleasure. It's what I did in the early morning hours before others in my family awakened, what I did on lazy weekend days, and what I cherished during holidays. My idea of a dream vacation has always been having time to write - preferably time to write in a little cottage overlooking the sea.

So I identified completely with Elizabeth Gilbert's recommendation, in her delicious book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, that we should consider having an "affair" with our creativity. She writes, "Stop treating your creativity like it's a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art!"

I love this way of thinking about our relationship with our creative work- not as work at all, as something we have to do, but as play - something we get to do, even though maybe we shouldn't - and sexy play, too. Gilbert continues, "Lie to everyone about where you're going on your lunch break. Pretend you're on a business trip when secretly you're retreating in order to paint, or to write poetry. . . Slip away from everyone else at the party and go off to dance alone with your ideas in the dark."

Ooh! Just from reading this, I feel my fingers itching to find a pen and whisper sweet nothings with it to an enticingly bare page....