What Allows Creativity to Happen?

Kent Meyers

When I was a junior in high school, my father died. He left me and my younger brothers with two-hundred acres of corn and soybeans to plant and harvest and two hundred head of cattle to feed out and sell. In a three week period, from the afternoon he had the stroke until he died, my brothers and I were transformed from farmer's sons into farmers. For as far back as I can remember, we'd been working beside our father in the fields, the feed bunks, the barns. My mother knew the books and the financial workings, and we knew the physical labor, the machinery and routines, and so the farm passed without noticeable transition from our father's care to our own.

During the winter we spent most of our Saturdays grinding ear com into feed for the cattle, grinding enough to last through the next week. After the regular chores were done we would hook the International Five Sixty to the hammermill and drive it to one of the corncribs. We'd swing out the hopper on the mill, engage the tractor's PTO, open the throttle, and watch the blue diesel smoke pour from the Five-Sixty's muffler as, inside the mill, the hammers swung out on their centripetal force, and the whole machine howled and rocked.

If it's possible for a machine to gain a mythical status in one's memory, then that New Holland hammermill is mythic for me-its noise, its power, its simple brute presence. We served it so often and with such labor, shoveling com all morning as the wind and cold of Minnesota winter pierced us. It silenced all other communication, leaving each of us with our thoughts only, and the rhythm imposed upon our bodies by its demands. But that mill dominates my memory mainly because of its simple and sheer necessity. Without it, ear com was useless as feed. Without it, the cattle wouldn't eat. And since we made our living by feeding cattle, their not eating was both an ethical and an economic disaster.

Perhaps half a year after my father died, one of my brothers turned too short when pulling the hammermill, and the PTO shaft, bent from a previous abuse and unable to telescope properly, pushed the mill on its angle-iron frame completely out-of-line with the pulleys that drove it. When my brother came and told me, and I went and looked at the absolute ruin of twisted metal and skewed pulleys, the paint chipped off the angle iron where it had bent, and the metal strained and feverish looking, I felt something beyond despair or desperation. It was Friday. We had enough corn in the wagons to feed the cattle twice more. Unless I could fix the hammermill within twenty-four hours or less, we'd run
out of feed. There were other options- having the grain elevator send out a milling truck, buying feed, taking the hammermill to the welding shop in town for repairing - but at the time the only thing that I could see clearly was this: with our father gone, we had wrecked the hammermill, and it was my job to fix it.

I'd seen my father straighten bent metal with a Handyman jack. We pulled the mill over to the workshop, and for over an hour we tried to insert the jack into various places between the mill and the frame. We tried the jack both with and without a log chain, but nothing worked. Either there wasn't enough space, or else the angle was too steep, and the jack slipped when we applied force. Frustrated and worried, with dark setting in, we stopped and fed the cattle, halving the supply of corn in the wagons. After supper I went back outside and, in the quiet of despair and failure, sat on the hitch of the hammermill, in the dim yellow light of the Five-Sixty's rear bulb, and stared into the weird angles and distorted shadows. But nothing changed. All the angles that had been there were still there, and nothing new revealed itself. When I went to bed that night, those shadows and twisted lines played behind my eyelids, as if they had been burned there, as if they had become the branchings and bendings of my blood.

The next morning I woke with the hammermill on my mind. We fed the caule the last of the corn, and with every basketful we carried to the bunks I thought of the hammermill, saw again in my mind the frame and the bends in the metal. When chores were done I went back where I had sat the night before, to stare and think again. But hardly had I sat down on the cold steel of the hitch, when a transformation took place in my mind, or in my perception, my eyes. It was so real and so strange that it seemed to have taken place in the mill itself. The metal seemed to undergo a shift, the angles seemed to change, and suddenly, instantly, I saw how the whole thing could be straightened.

As with most sudden creative transformations, it's difficult for me to describe the magnitude of the change. In one moment the mill was a wreck of ruined metal, beyond hope of repair, and in the next moment instantaneously-I saw clearly how to fix it. I saw how a hydraulic jack could be inserted into a small space between the mill and the axle frame, placed in backwards so that I would have room to work the handle, and I saw precisely and exactly the vectors of force, and how the metal would unbend, and how the pulleys would come up and align. It was as if I could imagine the pressure applied at one small point on the hammermill frame working outward through all the angles and bends, diffusing throughout the metal, carrying the pulleys with it. I could see it all, the whole thing, at once.

I stared, not quite able to believe what I'd seen. It seemed too simple. I went to the pickup, got a five-ton hydraulic jack, brought it back, inserted it into the space at the angle I'd imagined, twisted the valve, and began to work the handle. Slowly the jack eased outward, touched the mill, locked against it and then gradually, sighing, straightened the mill out.

Except for three or four creases in the angle iron, everything looked normal. The PTO shaft ran straight into the bearing, the pulleys aligned, the mill sat perpendicular within its frame. I looked down the pulleys. The belt ran straight between them. I reached in and turned the big pulley by hand. Inside the mill the hammers chinked and dropped. I stared at what I'd done, almost afraid of it. Finally I climbed on the tractor, started the engine, and full of doubt and wonder, slowly pulled back the PTO lever.

The familiar howl of the spinning hammers came out of the metal, and a puff of corn dust rose from the dust collector. I expected to hear some awful crash of metal against metal, some note of high destruction, or to see the belt suddenly ride off the edge of the pulley and flop to the ground.

Nothing happened. I opened the Five-Sixty's throttle. The diesel engine built to a roar, the mill howled and thrummed, the metal resonated-all of it normal, all of it familiar. Blue smoke streamed from the tractor's muffler and the noise of working machinery enveloped me. I sat there, joyful within that noise, feeling as if I were engaged in a miracle.

Creativity, of course, is always a kind of miracle. The moment of seeing how the mill could be fixed remains for me one of the most powerful creative moments of my life, an almost overwhelming moment when all the patterns that I'd trained myself to see suddenly disappeared, and a new one-simpler, more cogent, more powerful, more elegant-rose to replace them. It was a moment of perceptual creativity, when I actually saw differently.
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As writers and teachers of writing we are, of course, constantly trying to see differently, to replace old and ineffective patterns of perception, thought, and emotion, with new, living, and powerful ones. We are trying to get our students to do the same. I believe that certain contexts and attitudes are more likely than others to lead to this miracle of creativity, and that what happened to me with that hammermill suggests five important lessons to teachers of creative writing.

ONE: ABSORPTION: Between the time that I first saw the wrecked mill and the time that I saw the patterns that would fix it, my mind was completely absorbed in the problem. No matter what else I was doing, I was thinking about the hammermill. I'm convinced that I thought about it while I slept. I believe that this ability-or willingness-within a person to become absorbed in a problem is the basis for all creative thought. Such absorption changes us. Our minds tremble on the verge of discovery, and any new bit of information, any new angle of vision, any new word or experience, can precipitate-in a flash, instantaneously-a new pattern, a totally new thought or viewpoint.

Certain experiences, through their emotional intensity, create this absorption without any help from us. When we fall in love or experience someone's death, we think about it all the time. This is certainly one of the reasons so much poetry is written about love or death. It may also be one of the reasons that artists have a popular reputation for being a bit unstable-whether because they seek out emotionally intense experiences which keep them absorbed, or because they become more easily absorbed by feelings that others might shrug off.

This need to be absorbed, however, is also the reason so many artists are so strongly self-disciplined. We know that we can't depend on emotion to provide us absorption constantly, so most of us find ways to become absorbed by other means. For instance, I try to write a minimum of three hours every day, six days a week, usually in the early mornings when no one else is awake. I also keep the wall in front of my typewriter full of Stick-It notes with ideas, good sentences, story or chapter ideas written on them, so that every time I look up from the typewriter I'm re-absorbed into some element of writing. Other writers may write for long stretches of time in which they do nothing else, and then not write for equally long stretches. Some writers keep copious journals. Some write down their thoughts as they're lying in bed to sleep. All writers read a great deal. All of these seemingly disparate methods are linked by the common theme of self-discipline and absorption into the creative process in order to allow or nurture what non-artists call "inspiration."

I don't believe in inspiration in the sense that it's commonly used. If a student tells me she can't write unless she's inspired, I tell her that she'll never become inspired unless she writes-or more accurately that she can't depend on inspiration to occur unless she writes. Writers set themselves up, through self-discipline, to become inspired.

This concept of absorption, and the self-discipline it requires for inspiration to be sustained rather than merely accidental is a crucial concept to teachers of creativity.

Students come into creative writing classes immensely distracted-by their own insecurities, by family, television, friends, various conflicts and pressures. Just when their minds begin to get settled (it usually takes me about a half hour to focus and prepare myself to write), the bell rings, and off they shoot again to new distractions. Writing teachers have to find ways to absorb the student as fully as possible, to return the student to the work, to the writing process-whether through varied writing techniques, small-group work, suggestions for re-writing, major changes or questions. (One of my own favorites is to ask the student to switch genres: if he has decided he has a finished poem that requires no more work, then ask him to write it as an essay or short story, in order to force re-absorption and a new perspective.)

Writing teachers, to truly teach creativity, and the self-discipline and absorption it involves, need to find ways to keep the student totally "in" the work at least during the time that the student spends in the classroom.

TWO: SOCIAL CONTEXT: The idea that creativity takes place within a context of other people and their needs is a point that usually escapes students. They like to say: "But it's my story. That's the way I want it."

Even in fixing that hammermill I had a social context, to which I was responsible. I had two-hundred non-human creatures dependent on me, and nine humans-my
family-and no matter how "creatively" I might have used a jack or torch to bend that metal, no matter into how many interesting shapes and patterns I might have cut it up and formed it, if I wasn't able in the end to respond to the needs of those humans and non-humans, my creativity would have been mere decoration, surface changes upon the world.

The same is true of words. While the responsibility of high school students to the social context of readers and tradition is different than for a professional writer, still students need to be made aware of this context, need to understand that they do not write within vacuums. Creative writing is not simply expression nor decoration. It is formed, designed, molded, disciplined and restrained by and within the writer's relationship to her readers and her responsibilities toward them. Though students by and large resist this notion, and often want to cut the hammermill up into pretty-or ugly-shapes, we have to sometimes insist that once they've "expressed" themselves, they also have to feed the cattle.

THREE: KNOWING THE TOOLS: If I hadn't known of hydraulic jacks I could have stared at that space between the mill and the axle for hours and never seen the solution to my problem. I don't know whether I thought of using a hydraulic jack and immediately reperceived the problem, or whether I saw the space and then thought of using a hydraulic jack. These things occurred at once, part of the same mental process.

Without knowledge of the tools, creativity is impossible- but at the same time knowledge of tools can limit our creativity. I knew too well, perhaps, how to use a Handyman jack, and it prevented me from thinking of another tool. In the same way, students may learn to do certain things well-write a certain kind of poem or a story, write in a certain voice or style (tools for meaning or effect or expression)-and they may not see that another kind of poem or story, or another voice might serve their purposes better.

The flip side of this is that if I hadn't known how to use a Handyman jack, I wouldn't have been able to apply that knowledge to using a hydraulic jack. Given that, it would seem to make sense to allow students to perfect the things they do well, to learn their strengths and limits- but to also expose them to other methods, other voices and techniques, so that when they encounter a problem that their perfected forms and voices can't solve. they can make the leap to another form or voice.

At its most basic level this comes down to having students read at the same time that they write. We writers learn our tools by reading. We learn-through reading-of new tools, and better use of our old ones.

FOUR: INEFFICIENCY: Recently I finished the second draft of a novel. The draft was 378 pages long, and when I finished it, after two years of work, I thought: "Who would ever want to read this?" I was mildly depressed for a week, thinking how bad the book was.

I waited a month before beginning the second draft, and during this time, while I considered comments a couple of readers had made about the book, I began more and more to think that I ought to switch from a third-person to first person narration. Then I realized I would need more than one first-person narrator if the book were to do what I wanted it to do. When I began the second draft, I had four narrators in mind, but soon other narrators suggested themselves, and I let them have their say. Eventually I had a dozen different narrators, several of whom hadn't even been in the first draft. Two of these new narrators became major characters in the second draft and changed the novel in important ways.
The second draft was constantly new and revelatory to me, always changing and becoming something unexpected. I now have a third draft to do in order to tie up the loose ends. Obviously, none of this is very efficient. Creativity is by its very nature inefficient. We are working at discovering new patterns of thought and perception. If we knew an efficient road to them, there would be no discovery.

Students often grow impatient with the inefficiency of writing. In spite of their complaints, we must remember that we are, finally, teachers of inefficiency, standing against a culture that pushes efficiency—assembly lines, fast food, multiple-choice tests—as the cure-all for all our problems.

If we are to be open to any suggestion, to whatever the work or a reader whispers to us, we must allow ourselves a creatively inefficient space in which to think. We must be willing to go sit on a hamemrmill hitch in bad light and stare at shadows. We must nurture inefficiency. If we do, our works will speak to us. Often, like the hammermill, they contain their own solutions. They wait for us to give ourselves the time to open our minds, and see.

FIVE: PHYSICAL WORK: Creativity always involves work. In the end I had to go to the pickup, lug the jack across the yard, hold it up until it locked against the frame, and work the lever. If I hadn't done that the recognition of the solution would have been hollow, held only within my head, and useless.

Unless we do the work, it isn't creativity. It's only imagination.

And while imagination is fine, it isn't as fine as creativity. If we are creative, we are bringing something new into the world. This involves, yes, labor, and labor involves pain and strain and sometimes grunting and sometimes screaming.

Taken from our minds, our imaginations, and put into the world as things that haven't been there before, poems or stories (or children) are real things that affect real people. So we labor not only to bring the work into the world, but to make it a good work. It interests me that the word "work" functions as a noun when we speak of creativity: a literary work, a creative work. Our language knows how hard it is and names it properly.
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These five points, finally, are not separate ones. We become absorbed in the creative context by committing ourselves to the work of it, by understanding the social significance, by studying the ways others have used their tools, by allowing ourselves to become inefficient. And we allow ourselves inefficiency by working, by becoming absorbed, by studying our tools, by...

Nevertheless, when we ask a student to write or re-write, our request or response invariably takes its impetus, I believe, from one of these five general areas. We suggest new tools or a closer attention to social context, or the need for more work, or an openness to inefficiency, or a deeper absorption in the creative activity. Perhaps, aware of these things, we can find ways to more powerfully guide our students and serve as creative mentors for them. Perhaps, too, we can come to a clearer understanding and recognition of the distractions within our own lives and find ways to counteract those distractions and to absorb ourselves more fully in the work, the tools, the awful and wonderful inefficiency of writing.