Living an inspired life

(Nimue)

Setting out to be creative will change your relationship with the world. In order to create, we need inspiration and ideas to work with. I’m going to write this post in relation to poetry, but I know similar things apply to other ways of creating, too.

In order to write a poem, you need something to write about. If you passively wait for inspiration to strike, you might go a long time without having any ideas. However, if you are being deliberate about writing poetry and trying to do that regularly, it will impact on how you relate to the world.

When you’re actively looking for inspiration, you are much more likely to find it. That might mean jotting down turns of phrase that appeal to you – maybe things you read or hear, maybe fragments that occur to you. You might spend more time reflecting on what you see. How exactly does this landscape make you feel? Which words would best convey the atmosphere? How could you express this tree, this emotion, this experience to someone else?

The intention to write can be a good prompt for reflection. There’s a journey from the raw experience to something shareable. Writing can also be a good tool for processing experiences, and making sense of life. There’s nothing like trying to communicate to help you focus on getting your own understanding of it clear.

In order to write, I have to live. I have to experience and encounter. A lot of what happens to me does not find its way into blogs, or poems, or books because there’s also a sifting process. I’m looking for the bright flashes amongst the ordinary things, and for the perspectives that might turn ordinary things into bright flashes. The more material I have, the better my odds of finding things I can work with.

It’s not as if ideas and potential experiences are in short supply. In theory, every moment of your day could be written into a poem. However, poems of binge watching television, scrolling endlessly through social media, commuter boredom and buying stuff don’t really offer much. To write poetry in a sustained way, you need a life that is of itself poetic. To create effectively, you need to live creatively first.

This is something it absolutely worth considering in its own right. What does it mean to live the kind of life that enables you to write poems about it? What would you need? Because those things are entirely worth doing whether you write the poem, or do the painting, or compose the music or not. Living an inspired life is the heart of the bard path, and being creative is a consequence of that. It’s not the case that you end up with a creative life because you write poetry. The life bit comes first, but you might find the signposts towards it within that desire to create.

Creating for fun and profit

(Nimue)

I’m a big fan of people doing creative things for fun. I firmly believe that everyone should have time and opportunity to be creative in any way that appeals to them. We should be able to do things for the joy of it and not in the hopes of developing some side hustle. We should have to feel that the only way to justify hobbies is the hope of turning them into paying gigs.

There is a huge difference between creating for fun and doing it professionally. Not least that when you’re doing something for fun, you can be relaxed about how it goes and what the results are. To sustain being professionally creative you do still need time for this, but it gets harder and more pressured. Having bills to pay can make it difficult to invest exploratory time in creating, and having to force your creativity so as to meet deadlines is hard.

Deadlines are inevitable. If they don’t come from other people, they will come from the need to pay bills. You can’t spend a year working on a single piece with no money coming in. You can’t try things to see what works when you’ve got to have something you can sell by the end of the month. That also means you can’t just work when you feel inspired or in the mood, you have to knuckle down and do it at times when you aren’t feeling it. Again, that can actually kill your creativity if you aren’t careful.

How much are you willing to compromise your vision, your values, what you do and how you do it for the sake of a paying gig? This soon becomes a question. Your passion project may not be marketable enough. There may be no one willing to pay you, or support you as you do it. Patreon helps, but to set up something like that you need to be well established, not starting out.

Plenty of people try working creatively only to discover that it’s a grind. There’s all the business side to deal with, and the issue of selling yourself, and selling what you make. Getting started is slow, not earning enough to live on is a common experience. Coming to hate what you once loved is a real risk. Selling your work can steal all of the joy from the process. Trying to be commercially viable can take all of the soul out of it.

I think a lot of people who haven’t tried it imagine that creative work is just swanning about being self indulgent, doing your hobby and having fun. Unless you have someone who is willing to fund you, or are independently wealthy, it doesn’t work like that. Getting creativity to pay takes a huge amount of sustained effort, and is no sort of easy option. I have no doubt that if more people knew what it was like, it would protect people from jumping into it when they aren’t equipped to deal with the harsh realities. It would also perhaps result in non-creative people being a bit more understanding about the ways in which this is also work.

Issues of enchantment

(Nimue)

The need for re-enchantment is an idea that comes up in both Pagan and environmental contexts. Our lack of enchantment as a species, and our lack of care are causing us to destroy the living world.

If you are exploring re-enchantment, then there are a number of things to consider. Firstly, who or what do you think needs enchanting? It is all too easy to create the impression that we humans are the ones who have to bring magic to the landscape. That can feed into ideas about human dominance. The land does not need enchanting, it needs us to see the life and beauty that already exists.

It may be tempting to think that what we have to do is get out there and enchant other people. That in turn can be about feeling more enchanted than everyone else, which can go with feelings of spiritual superiority. Once those qualities are in the mix we’re creating situations where we are going to be less able to enchant others because all they will see is our ego, or power-seeking behaviour. Enchantment doesn’t work on those terms.

So what does work? I think it’s most effective to focus on your own enchantment. Dedicate yourself to seeking inspiration and to exploring the things that nourish your soul. Come back inspired and enchanted, and share the fruits of that, and let other people do what they will. If you are inspired, then what you share of that will impact on other people – supporting their own journeys towards enchantment if they were already doing that. Trust the magic in the process rather than trying to direct others.

It makes sense to talk about the mechanics of things, in much the same way as we can talk about the mechanics of poetic structures, or the impact of specific words. It isn‘t easy to analyse the means by which magic gets in. There’s only so far you can do with technical analysis. The living, breathing soul of something, and the power in it to affect others is necessarily difficult to pin down. These are very much issues for anyone on the bard path.

This is not a post that has much potential to actually enchant anyone. The poetry David and I have shared this week is far more likely to achieve that. Talking about the mechanics of a thing is useful but works in an entirely different way. I don’t feel that talking about the technicalities of enchantment is disenchanting, but for me the key to that is how much space we allow people for their own experiences.

One way of thinking about this is that enchantment isn’t something we make and give to others. Enchantment is something we can invite to flow through us. We don’t own it and aren’t in charge of it. You can undertake to be a conduit through which magic and wonder can flow. You can open yourself to being a means through which beauty and compassion can enter the world. Arguably the work of the bard is refining your skills, knowledge and opening your heart so as to do that as effectively as possible.

Imagining your audience

(Nimue)

Creating for yourself is a fine thing to do. If you’ve made something for yourself and you put it out into the world, how that may go is anyone’s guess. It works better to imagine your intended audience. That might sound mercenary – and it can be – but it doesn’t have to be. You can also think about this in terms of service.

It’s not possible to create something everyone will like. Trying to do so tends to result in blandness and unoriginality. If you focus on a subset of people, and make something for them, the chances are that a bigger group will be able to enjoy or make some use of your work even though they weren’t the target. Adults who read YA fiction. Druids who read witchcraft books, Pagans who read eco-texts and so forth.

I try to factor this in when I’m reviewing. I am not going to judge every book on whether it’s perfect for me – that doesn’t really work. I’ve reviewed a lot of beginner’s books along the way, for a start. I try to figure out who the book is for and to assess how well I think it delivers on that score. I recently had a review book offered to me where I genuinely couldn’t figure out who the intended audience was, and I had to ask. I’m not going to be reviewing it, for a bunch of reasons. It did however get me thinking about how we imagine the audience.

It’s not really enough to just imagine an audience – you need to know who your people are. If they only live in your head, they may well be facets of yourself. I admit that I wrote my first non-fic – Druidry and Meditation – for the person I had been, who had to figure a lot out because there weren’t enough books on Pagan meditation back then. By that point I’d also spent a lot of time leading meditation groups, so I had some sense of what other people needed from me.

Writing is not a solitary activity. The bit where you put the words down probably is, but that’s only a small part of the process. Knowing who you are writing for, and why, and what’s needed is a really important part of the job if you wish to write for other people.

It also helps to think about this for managing your own expectations. There are blog posts I’ve written because I thought there was a decent chance there might be one person who needed to hear what I had to say. I set the bar a bit higher with books. I find Patreon very helpful for this because I have a small audience there and they feed back to me, and I am writing for them. I learn from feedback on the blog about what people who like my work find especially resonant or helpful. Creating is a process and a conversation.

There is a perception that what we create is supposed to pour from us in a wild gush of inspiration. It doesn’t really work like that. Creativity is an interaction with the world – what goes in, what comes out, and where it goes. I don’t think it’s possible to create anything without that interaction, it’s just a case of whether we’re alert to it and what we choose to do.

Becoming a bard

(Nimue)

Everyone should have the time and opportunity to be creative and to express themselves. The first step onto the bard path is to make time for your creative self. That means being creative on your own terms and in whatever ways speaks to you.

However, becoming a bard calls for more than this, and there are a number of things I think are necessary parts of the journey.

You have to be interested in things. It doesn’t really matter what enthuses you, but you need to be engaged with the world, and curious about it. Learning is part of being a Druid. The more we learn, the more we have to work with. To some extent you can just mine your own experiences for raw material, but that will only take you so far. The more of the world you let in, the more there is to be creative with and inspired by.

There’s a lot to be said for using creativity to heal and grow. It’s a great way to process your own emotions and to make sense of yourself. However, I think one of the things the bard path calls for is considering an audience that isn’t you. When you create for someone else, it becomes a conversation, and an exchange. No two people read a book in exactly the same way. When your creativity impacts on someone else, it becomes more than whatever you originally made.

It’s good to ask what others might need from your work. What good can you do? What can you share that would uplift, inform or inspire other people? These are very powerful things to do.

Money is not part of this equation. You are not invalidated as a bard if someone pays you for your work. Spirituality is not defined by an absence of payment, and you do not have to create as a form of sacrifice or service if that doesn’t work for you. Equally, the value of your bardic work is not measured in cash, and your economic success is not a measure of how you impact as a bard.

This is a process and a journey – there is no end point, no finish line. It’s a way of life, a way of being. You can step off the path if it doesn’t suit you, and you can take breaks. You don’t have to be constantly focused on your bardic journey in order to consider yourself to be on the bardic path.

Pronouns for bards

(Nimue)

As bards, we have to be alert to the nuances of language, and the power in how we deploy that language. Words have a huge capacity to impact on people in ways they are not always conscious of, and we must use that power wisely and responsibly.

I’ve written that first paragraph to illustrate the point. I’ve used ‘they’ to indicate a person, or persons of any gender. That’s a very normal use of the word ‘they’. It’s also worth noting that in the English language, singular ‘they’ is older than singular ‘you’ – it’s all evolved out of thees and thous anyway. Language changes over time.

The most important pronoun in that opening paragraph, is ‘we’. By saying ‘we’ I’m saying that you, dear reader, are also a bard, also thinking about these issues of language and that we are together in this. By saying ‘we’ I can create feelings of inclusion and involvement, and sometimes complicity. I often say ‘we’ when I want to talk about things people get wrong, because in that context its softer than a more accusatory ‘you’ – which would also imply I am somehow superior.

If I’d addressed the opening paragraph to you, telling you what you need to do as a bard, then I’d also be expressing my own authority. I do that sometimes in my writing, but my preference is to be more inclusive. We can all do this.

Pronouns can individualise or objectify. This is really important when we’re writing about aspects of the living world – when other beings are ‘it’ we make them seem more like objects. When we talk about creatures, and plants as living beings with their own experiences, we can build empathy and understanding. ‘It’ is an object we might feel comfortable using and exploiting. ‘They’ are individuals who merit care and respect.

Every now and then you may see people claiming that pronouns are difficult and a problem and that they are afraid of getting it wrong. I’ve taken to pointing out that if you do not know a person’s preferred pronouns you can just ask them (singular they strikes again!). When talking to a person, of course the most relevant pronoun is ‘you’ which isn’t gendered to begin with. Misgendering people by accident is socially awkward, saying sorry and moving on tends to sort it. Deliberately using pronouns that make another person uncomfortable is unkind and needs calling out.

The language we use has power. We can use pronouns to include, to validate and to value, and there’s a great deal to be said in favour of doing that.

Landscape stories

(Nimue)

If human stories merely have settings, that encourages us to see the landscape as nothing more than a backdrop for human activity. When stories engage with the landscape, they can create feelings of involvement and investment. When it comes to getting people to take better care of the planet, this can make a difference. For anyone on the bard path, this is an important consideration.

It can be as simple as making spaces specific – talking about actual landscapes or landscape features as part of the story. Have the landscape impact on the characters in some way. Include weather and seasonal details. If you create characters who have a relationship with places then that colours the story. This is something Pagan authors are already doing – MA Philips has a lot of landscape in her work. Laura Perry’s Minoan fiction is deeply in formed by Crete. Maria DeBlassie’s Weep Woman Weep is a landscape story. Nils Visser’s Wyrdwood books and David Bridger’s fiction all have this going on. (Get in the comments if you’re writing this kind of thing, add links please.)

The landscape I live in is very much part of my sense of self. I have written about my part of the world, in the Wherefore series and in Spells for the Second Sister. My novel Hunting the Egret is set on the banks of the River Severn, while Ghosts of the Lost Forest is very much about the forest of Arden – which used to cover much of the Midlands.

If you feel a sense of belonging you are more likely to care about a place. If you can experience your own landscape as magical, then this will enrich your life. If beauty and wonder aren’t exotic, distant things, you are better off. In practice a lot of people have no sense of belonging or relationship with the land. This alienation is harmful for people and planet alike. Anything we can do to try and change that for ourselves, and for each other, is well worth doing.

Davóg Rynne’s bardic work

(Nimue)

Today I’m sharing a song by Davóg Rynne which he has put out to raise money for Medicine Sans Frontiers in Gaza. It’s a good example of the way in which bardic work can make a difference.

Songs are good ways of engaging with people, and of fundraising. The horrors of Gaza are so overwhelming, and on such a massive scale that it is difficult to even think about it. I find I cannot make any emotional sense of the killing on this scale, of the deliberate harm being done to civilians, and especially children.

By making this song about specific children and what happened to them, Davog has helped humanise the horrors. Sometimes focusing on the individual experience makes it easier to understand the implications of things on a huge scale. Every child killed in the atrocities in Gaza was an individual, an innocent life snuffed out inexcusably.

Speak up where you can. Petition, protest, contribute. Share this song.

Telling partial stories

(Nimue)

How we tell stories is of course a significant consideration for anyone on the bard path. However, it’s an issue that affects everyone. What we miss out of a story is often as important as what we reveal. This can be considered both as a structural story issue and as an ethical issue.

On the fictional story side, the gaps we leave are the spaces in which readers or listeners add bits of themselves. Stories are a collaborative process and it’s worth thinking about what space you create. This is why excessively tidy endings don’t always work. Sometimes its better not to explain everything. Suggestion can be more powerful than clarity – this is especially true in the horror genre. When you make people do some of the work they can end up a lot more invested in your story than if you hand everything to them on a plate.

We all tell stories about our lives and experiences. Here the question of what gets left out has very different implications. The absence of key details can easily change the impression a story gives. One obvious example is that when women murder their partners it most usually happens in a context of the woman having endured long term serious abuse. Miss out the abuse part of the narrative and the shape of the tale changes dramatically. It’s often an issue around all kinds of abuse – if the person telling the story is able to miss out the thing they did that started it all, that can have a huge impact on what’s understood when their victim finally cracks under unbearable pressure.

We all see things from our own perspective, and will tend to foreground our hurts and our triumphs and not draw attention to things we messed up. Clearly there’s a degree of ordinary human mess that we should be allowed to get away with! Where it becomes an ethical issue is when our omissions impact harmfully on someone else. If missing out your actions or words makes someone else look irrational or more to blame, or it it gives the impression they’ve acted inappropriately, that’s not honourable.

I think what’s tempting about this is that it isn’t an outright lie. If you do it, you haven’t actively maligned someone, and it is harder to blame you for being misleading. If you tell people how hurt you were by a partner having an affair but don’t mention that you’d neglected them for years before that happened, you create a really misleading impression. If you’ve dumped an impossible workload on someone but only flag up that they didn’t manage to do something you asked of them, again that’s highly misleading. If you don’t mention that you said you wanted something and then get cross when someone acts on that information, you’re ducking responsibility. There’s a lot of that out there, especially around politics and hate crime.

In fiction, leaving bits out of a story can be a good choice. It can make more room for your audience. In real life the implications are vastly different. Speaking with integrity means acknowledging your own role in things. If you are developing bardic storytelling skills its important not to misuse those in ordinary life. Being able to tell the story of what happened tends to go with being a victor, and this is not a power to use lightly or selfishly to the detriment of others.

Visual art and AI

(Nimue)

Right now we have sophisticated software that can draw data from a lot of images and turn it into new(ish) images. Defenders of the process say it’s just doing what artists do – learning from other artists. This is such an absolute misrepresentation of how to do art that I felt it needed tackling.

One of the things missing here is the intense physicality of making art. We don’t learn to draw, paint or sculpt by looking at art. The first stage is to learn how to use a pencil – most of us learn the basics while learning to write as small children. We learn the fine motor control needed to do more than smear colour across a surface. Training the hand to do what the brain intends is a long process.

To create visually, most of us have to spend a long time learning how to look. I’m not qualified to comment on what visual impaired artists do, but I expect that exists and also doesn’t involve purely looking at existing art. Once you start looking, you start making decisions about what to prioritise – shape, texture, light, shadow, colour, mood, movement. The person trying to capture a sense of movement in the sea will paint a very different picture from the person trying to capture light on water, for example. 

Most young humans aren’t looking at art in a deliberate way. They draw for fun, are exposed to a whole world of experiences and are most likely to want to depict their own ideas and imaginings. Many of us only start looking in earnest at other people’s art when we’re taught to do that. When we start looking critically it’s not just about the surface appearance – we study technique, context and the ideas underpinning the kind of art we’re looking at. Art movements exist in historical and cultural contexts.

Some artists want to work in particular ways that align with existing kinds of art, and some don’t. Either way, how you do art will be really individual. Unless you specialise in art fraud, then the exact way that you put your chosen medium onto your chosen surface will make what you do unique. There’s something of the individual that comes through in how you draw your lines or put your paint down. With artists I know well, I can tell a lot about what mood they were in when they did a drawing because of this it impacts on the lines. This is all also true for digital art where an artist is creating a piece using their own skills rather than word prompts.

Making visual art is a very high percentage about study and practice. The rest of it is about developing your own way of doing things and having ideas about what you want to create. The way that ideas and technique combine is what makes your work unique. Anyone willing to put in enough time can learn to do this. 

Art isn’t something that happens by magic. Great paintings do not pop spontaneously out of an artist’s head to appear on a canvas. Pop culture has given us some really misleading ideas about the whole thing. Artists study, learn, practice, plan and rework their creations. It’s mostly about doing the work. If you can’t draw it isn’t because you missed out on magic drawing powers, it’s because you haven’t put in enough time. Generally speaking, invest ten thousand hours in anything and you’ll become an expert – some of those hours may involve needing to be taught by someone who knows the techniques. What you do in that ten thousand hours will be yours alone, and will be part of you. Doing this changes a person. Art isn’t just about having a finished piece, it’s about becoming the person who can create the piece in the first place.