How our brains' creativity changes

I used to write poetry all the time. I’m talking high school age here, but I already thought of myself as a writer then. And I wrote poetry. All the time. I’d start composing poems in the shower. While driving. Then I’d forget what I’d thought of and drive myself insane.

See, today, I started looking at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Fellowships in Literature, only to be reminded that the fellowships for Prose alternate annually with fellowships for poetry. Poetry? I thought. Well, no way I’m applying for that. Guess I’ll have to put off applying another year. I was doing the dishes later when it hit me that once upon a time I wouldn’t have thought of becoming a poet nearly so preposterous.

Now, I may have mischaracterized myself a bit as I’ve presented this story so far. I didn’t just write poetry back then. In fact, even then I knew that if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I would want to be a novelist. That is, Prose has always been foremost for me (remind me to write, sometime, about how hard it was for my friend Emily to explain to me what Prose is — funny story). That said, I wrote a lot of poetry. I also wrote a lot of prose. I also wrote a lot of one sentence… I don’t know… thoughts. I just thought they were cute. I remember one of them:

“Madness walks among the living and the dead.”

I used to say it really dramatically. I think I knew, even then, that it didn’t mean anything. It just sounded cool. It still sounds sort of cool, doesn’t it?

Then, there were all the pieces that were a sort of hybrid between prose and poetry. Just sort of pure imagery without a narrative exactly but not quite so pure that you could call it poetry. I guess what I’m saying is that when I was younger I wrote all sorts of different crazy-ass ways. So why did it stop?

College seemed to put a lot more constraints on my thoughts. Or maybe constraints is the wrong word. Maybe college brought order and structure to my thinking. I gained something with it. Hell, I gained a lot, but I also lost that sort of creative agility that I had growing up. Ideas just flew at me constantly in those days. I was always scribbling something into the odd notebook and burning hours at my decrepit computer, pounding out weird science fiction stories that I would force all my friends to read and critique when they should have been paying attention to their English teachers.

Is this something a lot of other people go through? Do they remember a younger, creative self who seemed to dip into everything. Now, as you grow older, do you find yourself returning to certain forms again and again?

I can still write poetry. If I want to. If I set out to. I write one every year or so. Here’s one. My mind does not naturally turn to poetry anymore; not like it once did. That’s sort of sad. My mind never turns to any of those weird, abstract forms I used to take such joy in. Never at all.

In fact, as long as I’m going down this road, I might as well tell you three forms I turn to these days. I’ll explain my comforts and discomforts in each.

Flash Fiction — when I was in high school, I used to like to open up people’s 5-subject binders and write them a weird story on those brown pocket pages that divided each of the subjects. I would just start writing. I never had any clue what I was about to write about. I would just start with some image and before long it would become a plot and it would always, always, always wrap up precisely at the point my writing had precisely filled the page. I’ve picked up the old habit on occassion since then, but Flash Fiction makes me nervous. When I do it best, it’s sort of like breathing and I don’t remember it when it’s over. I can only do so much of it at any one spell, though, because then I start psyching myself out. I start trying to recreate the magic of a past creation and all the spontaneity and spark and good-storyness gets lost. Plus, when I get into a flash bender, I pile up such a stack that I don’t even know what to do with them. I have dozens of stories on my computer that I’d like to submit somewhere, but I don’t even know where to begin. I have the devil’s own time telling the good from the bad.

Short Stories — I write a new short story every year or so. It depresses me to admit it’s gotten that slow. I used to do them a lot more often. The trouble is, I’ve lost the knack for keeping them, well, short. Ha. I can never tell if I’m working on a short story or a novel. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference once I’m done.

Novels/Novellas — now, here’s the one form I am really comfortable with. This is the form I can put it all into. I’ve written enough of them now that I always know when I’ve started one I’m going to finish, and they kind of become a part of my life. And that’s nice. They keep you going. There just not such a hot form for the beginning writer to focus in on. Exceptions abound, but that’s assuming your exceptional.

Anyway, I bring this up because I wonder if there are landscape painters out there who used to do still lifes, abstracts, historical paintings, imagined scenes and figure paintings who later found themselves only really leaning to one or two of these things? Did Woody Allen used to dream up Action Movies?

I think you can see where I’m going with this. I don’t know if it’s good, bad, or inevitable. No doubt, you can take it too far. I met an artist in Madison once who told me that he felt like he was only being honest with his creativity if he sat in his studio and painted these little self-portraits. I mean, he wasn’t that handsome of a guy. How much did his face have to say? I don’t think I’ve narrowed myself down that far, but my brain seems to be planning its play and playing its plan, no matter how adventurous its younger version may have been.

Am I alone on this one?