Figure it out. I really can’t stress this enough.
Figure it out. Figure it out. Figure it out. By doing stuff. Experimenting with and tweaking your ideas as your discoveries arise. Be a scientist with your art.
Figure out what kind of artist you are. There are a lot of ideas out there as to what makes a creative type productive and successful. For poets, the ideas can be particularly negative at times (alcoholism, mental instability, suicide). And for all writers, there seems to be this popular idea that, “If I could just get away for a while, away from people, away from the world, and become a hermit, an emotional slave to my art, then I’d write something amazing and become famous. After killing myself, of course.”
Writers can be a little dramatic.
Personally, I’ve never been that big into self-destruction but I did once buy into the idea that I needed to get away from the world in order to be productive, that people were holding me back.
And I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I got my chance at solitude when I was teaching abroad in Japan. More or less. I had a few close friends nearby but I certainly did not have an English-speaking community of artists with which to share my work, nor was I living in a context that could understand my own. For a couple of months, I even lived alone. It made me anxious. I felt like poetry was pretty pointless if my best hopes for it was to submit it to journals online back home for people I’d never see to read it. (Of course, there was also the practical issue of feeling like my English language skills were deteriorating as I was helping others’ to improve.) I’d rather be out exploring and finding people to communicate with, however it was most possible to do so.
I traveled a lot in my early twenties and it was exciting, perspective-enhancing, and just plain full of many positive lessons and experiences one should be able to have in their lifetime. But it did not make me a better writer. At least not immediately.
I did learn though, after moving so much, that what made me most creative was stability. I had to adjust to being somewhere new first, and become somewhat familiar with it, for my muse to come out and play. It’s my relationships with people, the whole range from acquaintances to family, that inspire me to write. It’s the daily frictions that come about when we interact with each other, when our conversations become more personal, that makes me want to write.
And ultimately, without a community of writers around to share my insights with, what’s the point? Writing, after all, is a form of communication, and it’s not enough for me to believe or even to know that someone somewhere will read my work and be affected by it; I want to see it firsthand.
It’s different for everyone. This is how it works for me at this point in time. Some people really do work better as hermits.
So like I said. Figure it out!