How Rest Feeds Our Creative Subconscious

Plus: Five ways to refresh your long-term creative project

This post is part of an ongoing monthly series on the creative process, wonder, and the numinous. Thank you for liking and sharing my work!

If you’re in Chicago, I’ll be teaching a class on “Writing Into Wonder in Amazement” at StoryStudio on October 1st. Details are here and you can read a full description of the class at the end of this post. 

In late July, I finished a new draft of my novel manuscript in the library of our Chicago suburb. I walked out of the building with an unusual eagerness to get away. I felt emotionally famished. I wanted to devour something that I couldn’t find in a book. I wanted to soak up life, not some representation of it. 

This happens to me at least once a year.

When I think of this stage of the creative process, the word fallow comes to mind, a word used to describe farmland that is left to rest in order to restore its balance and fertility.

Allowing a creative project to lie fallow feels like a invernal lesson. The natural world isn’t dead in winter—it’s renewing its energy in a place that we can’t see. Likewise, creative work originates from a place that is dark and nestled, that exists pre-verbally, in the gut and in the image and in the subtle, tilting sensations of attention. When we’re in a fallow stage, we’re still engaging with our creative work, but in a way that is indirect, absorbing, and porous. 

It’s taken me years to feel comfortable with the fact that I am not a machine of production. The language I inherited to identify how to work creatively is loaded with allegories that compare artists and writers to gadgets, to tools, to machines. 

Anne Lamott, in her classic writing guide Bird by Bird, wisely suggests that we need to “fill up our tanks” when we are blocked. The blockage indicates that we have been tapped out of energy. I love this book. And while I agree with her about writer’s block being related to a need or lack of creative resources, I also feel like the process of restoring our creative energy is more porous than that. 

Less direct, more open. 

I never describe myself as feeling blocked anymore. There are simply times when I need to rest and not write. I used to feel like I was not pushing myself hard enough, or that I was being lazy, or that all of my ideas were gone forever and ever. 

This happened especially when my eldest child was a toddler and I was working two jobs. The hours to write were few and hard won. I would wake up at 5am and write until 6:30am. Not using that time felt decadent. I was terrified that I’d slip out of the rhythm of waking up at dawn and never get back to it if I took time away from a manuscript. When I felt tired, I would take it as a sign that I was done as a writer. I would frantically Google alternative career paths, thinking that I needed to change my life. I downloaded brochures on Masters in Public Policy, flirted with obtaining certificates as a permaculturist, a sex therapist, an urban planner, and a research psychologist.

I’ve learned to trust the periods when I need to interact with my creative work in a way that isn’t consciously engaged. I’ve learned not to panic. Nothing is ever completely dormant: we’re still engaging with creative work even when we’re not writing. 

There is an aspect of creativity that works beneath the ground-level of thought. Our subconscious is like healthy, fertile soil, a teaspoon-full of which can host billions of organisms. Deep beneath our waking, conscious life, exists a lively part of us that is never fully seen but perceiving and working anyway.

My other favorite word to describe this fallow period is “chthonic.” For one thing, I’m a recovering goth kid. For another, it describes the gods of the Greek underworld, the creepy ones beneath the earth’s surface. It makes me think of all those living beings that are alive—like mushrooms and bacteria—but thrive in a context so different from what we’re used to that they strike us as spooky and strange. But what’s wrong with that? The vitality of Persephone doesn’t disappear. Persephone just goes to where we can’t see her. 

What are we supposed to do with ourselves when she’s gone? 

I once read a permaculture book that suggested taking a bagful of soil from a nearby forest floor and adding it to your vegetable garden. The forest floor is incredibly fecund with varieties of organisms and fungi typically lost in a mown, tidy, suburban lawn. The introduction of just a bagful of wild forest soil increases the biodiversity of living organisms and eventually, the overall health of the garden. 

One of the best ways to restore the soil of our own creative subconscious is to seasonally add to it other, unfamiliar layers of composted richness. To add layers, we have new experiences. We leave the creative work alone so that it can breathe. We do things that don’t really have a point other than their own enjoyment. Stepping away from a project allows the underground part of us to take over and naturally enrich itself. 

These are my recommendations on what to do during fallow stages:  

1. Learn something that has nothing to do with your artistic discipline. I watched a ton of bachata videos on Instagram and practiced steps in the kitchen while unloading the dishwasher and cleaning up. Dancing is an art I enjoy and get excited about, but it’s not an art that keeps me up thinking at night. I find it incredibly freeing to not feel ambitious about every creative thing I do.  

2. Engage with your discipline, but from a side angle. While I let my manuscript rest, I avoided fiction and read books outside my own genre. I read two books in the last month, The Light Eaters, by environmental journalist Zoë Schlanger, and Plants Have So Much to Teach Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask, by Mary Siisip Geniusz, an Annishabbee elder and traditional healer. These are books I cannot imagine having written myself; they’re so outside of my domain. I read them to simply feel delighted, not as research. 

3. Connect with nature and/or your spiritual practice. I used the time I normally designate for writing to jog to the beach near our house and practice Ati Yoga under a linden tree by Lake Michigan. I spent the afternoons wandering the prairie with my three-year-old daughter, looking at plants and butterflies, and throwing pebbles into the lake.

   

   So many pebbles to throw!

4. Do something with your hands. (If you already get your hands dirty in your artistic discipline or day job, work on a project that’s more cerebral.) I volunteered at the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center where I helped demo a deck and spent a lot of time pulling out stubborn nails and prying off boards with a crowbar. I also ate good food, spent time with my heart teacher and sangha, swam in a pond, hung up prayer flags, and laughed a lot.

5. Spend time with people who are only vaguely familiar with your artistic discipline and who don’t know about the “world” you’re in. In August we hosted family-friends from Kentucky. One of my friends in this couple is a mathematician who reads sci-fi and has absolutely zero interest in who was long-listed for the National Book Award last year. We did not talk about literary agents or the decline of the Big 5 Publishing Industry. I temporarily forgot I was a writer.

Two weeks ago, my fallow period officially ended. I picked up my manuscript and read through it while taking notes. The process lacked the tedium and exhaustion which I had felt only a month before. 

I spent enough time away from my novel to see it with new eyes. I could see with editorial clarity what wasn’t necessary, and what needs to be cut or amended. I made an outline for the next draft and a “rewrite” to-do list. 

Time away from the novel manuscript reminded me why I was passionately in love with the project in the first place. The novel still needs work, but I would sometimes come across a sentence, paragraph, or section and think, Damn, she’s good, as if the person writing the story wasn’t me, but some alternative version of myself who is a much better writer than I actually am. It makes me think of this quote by Milan Kundera: “Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”

This is always how I know that a work is on the right track: I have the uncanny feeling that it isn’t me who wrote it.

There’s some element of truth to that, I think. There’s soil in the field that comes from a place that’s wilder and bigger than me. 

How do you know you’re in a fallow stage of creativity? What nurtures you during fallow periods?

Class Announcement!

I’m very excited to be teaching a class in Chicago at StoryStudio this fall! Join me for “Writing Into Wonder & Amazement” on October 1st from 6:30-8:30pm. The description is below and you can register here. 

What makes us feel awe and wonder when we read something amazing? “The numinous” is a word often used in relation to the spiritual; it describes a tremendous experience that fills us with mystery, wonder, awe, fascination, and sometimes even terror.

Within a text, a sense of the numinous is created through an engagement with poetic language that disorients us into amazement. Although this is evoked through the medium of language, we’re left as readers with a feeling of speechlessness.

We’ll deepen our understanding of the numinous by reading writers and poets such as Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, and Carson McCullers. We’ll reflect upon the occasions that the numinous is most often engaged and why. Using in-class writing exercises, we’ll explore the kind of attention that separates a numinous experience from a mundane one.

Students will leave with a few pages of writing on a new or pre-existing project, ideas on how to connect to the numinous in their own work, and hopefully, a renewed sense of enchantment. This workshop is open to both prose writers and poets.

Sign up to Receive A Package of Three 1:1 Writing Coaching Sessions!

If you become a Founding Member to This Is All Going Away, you’ll receive three, 45-minute, 1:1 writing coaching sessions with me.

You can read more about my background and the coaching process here. A recent client, Ines Bellina, creator of The Cranky Guide, wrote that my writing coaching is like “a really good Tarot reading.” More testimonials on my teaching can be found at the bottom of this page.

Also: If you would like to reach out to schedule a free fifteen-minute coaching consult, please send me a direct message on Substack or reply directly to this email. If we both think it’s a good fit, we’ll move on from there!