My Creative Autobiography

The first creative moment I can remember happened when I was three years old. My father was at work and my mother was outside, and I was bored. I decided it would be a fun idea to play with food coloring and “bake” something pretty. I took out a tray and proceeded to decorate it with bright (and extremely messy) swirls of red, yellow, green, and blue dye. The creative endeavor that had seemed so beautiful to me was somewhat less appreciated by my mother when she came inside and saw the mess I had made of her clean kitchen.

The first successful creative act that I can remember happened in my second grade class. I wrote a story about going to the beach with my family. I drew pictures to illustrate my story, and then my teacher bound all of the pages into a little book. Then she told the class that our books would be displayed at the parent-teacher night, and I felt just like a real author. This success inspired me to continue writing, and I decided to start writing a series of mystery novels. I never got past the first few chapters of book one in the series because I got distracted by other ideas for stories to write, but my interest in writing was piqued by those first successful creative acts.

My creative ambition is to be a published novelist and, someday, maybe even make it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. Time is one of the major obstacles to my ambition. There always seems to be something to keep me from spending as much time on my writing as I would like to. With such a busy schedule, I’m often left with just small pieces of time in which to write. It’s hard sometimes for me to get much accomplished because it seems that just when I start to get a good flow going, I have to stop and move onto something else. Another obstacle would be my own inability to accept the quality of my work as it is. I have a tendency to revise my writing to death, spending so much time on revision that I’m not as productive as I perhaps could be. Some vital steps to achieving my creative ambition would be to learn to make the most of small gaps of time by jotting down ideas or lines of dialogue to develop later when I have more time and to focus on finishing a complete draft before I allow myself to do a lot of revision.

My ideal creative activity would be writing a piece of historical fiction in a peaceful place while listening to beautiful music. When I’m writing, I love both the process and the result. I love the excitement of the search to find just the right word to convey what I’m imagining, but I also love seeing the end result of my labor in the finished product.

My Creative Process

Usually, the first thing I do before I begin any creative work is to engage in some type of warm-up activity as inspiration. Reading, looking at, or listening to something beautiful often puts me in a more creative frame of mind. Sometimes I will listen to music or play a song or two on the piano, especially if I’m planning to write poetry. I find that music often helps me be more attuned to the sounds and rhythms of poetry when I begin to write. If I’m planning to write fiction, I often start by reading a few pages of a novel or by reading a bit of whatever I wrote the previous day. If I’m working on a period piece, as I often do, researching historical facts and details usually helps to spark my creativity.

Different methods seem to work best for me depending on what I’m writing. If I’m writing fiction, I prefer to work on my computer, enjoying the convenience and speed of editing and revising with a word processor. If I’m writing poetry, though, I prefer to use pencil and paper, covering each sheet with scribbles of lines and phrases and endless lists of words and rhymes.

Once I have completed my initial draft of a piece of writing, I usually do a quick surface edit of minor changes that I would like to make. Then, I put the piece aside for at least a day, longer if possible. I find that the more time I allow to elapse before I re-read something I’ve written, the more objectively I’m able to read my writing and the more I am able to notice errors and sentences that are not working as well as they could work. Before I consider a piece finished, I also like to read my work aloud to myself. This process allows me to catch more mistakes and typos and helps me to evaluate the sound, rhythm, and pacing of my writing.