Don’t Call it a Creative Download

I had a creative breakthrough the other week! In a few minutes, I wrote a poem that got out The Thing I had been trying and intending to say for months. Then I sat around blinking at it, wondering where it came from–much the way my dog seems to blink after letting out a long howl. 

I know that some people call this kind of experience a “creative download”, but I don’t and won’t. I’m deeply skeptical about metaphors that reduce our minds to machines. I think there’s a temptation to confuse ourselves with computers when we do this, to get overly focused on productivity at the expense of play, to cling to logic, to ignore our bodies and our ability to make associative leaps. “Download” worries me particularly because it suggests that writers and artists are passive automatons waiting to be brought up to date by some higher standardized authority. But creative inspiration, at least in my experience, is never a simple one-way process. 

Indeed, when I paged back through my commonplace book and journal and calendar the next day, I saw that the poem had long roots: weeks of watching crows gather in the buckeye tree near my window, months of conversation with friends (and in my own head, responding to a podcast), hundreds of walks in the woods, months of reading about spies and then months of not reading about spies and wondering why I’d lost interest in espionage, dictionary definitions I’d copied out and played with, images I’d written and cut out of previous poems because they didn’t fit, and etc. 

The poem I’d written didn’t suddenly upload, it grew and evolved through weeks of being alive and permeable to the world around me, doing other work, paying attention and forgetting, daydreaming and thinking, walking, resting, running, breathing (what is inspiration if not breath?), taking notes, and trying again. The moment of actually writing the poem felt much more like the delight of suddenly being able to coordinate my way into an arm balance or backbend (after months of building muscle memory and strength) than it felt like logging into an updated version of Word. 

I think human creativity is way messier and more interesting than a download. And I want the language I use to describe my process to reflect the messy embodied joy of it.