I suppose that many writers write for many reasons and out of many motivations. I imagine one could spend a great deal of time cataloging those reasons, and could come up with a fantastic array of vices and virtues, healthy and abnormal psychological conditions. I used to wonder what sort of mood fed my times of most intense creative writing--especially the reams and reams of ink on works of fiction (each ream having 500 or so pages, quite literally). At some point in time, I called it "joy", but I think it is more verbal than that--I think I write fiction especially when I am in times of celebration, and find it difficult to write when I lose touch with that sense of celebration.
I originally entitled my blog "sublimation" because the bits of non-fiction writing I've been most happy with lately (because they've been the most creative) have been bits of sublimation: things I have written to process that have been caught up in something a little bit better than my confusing whirl of thought and emotion about them. In the past, my fiction creative writing has been much different--it has been an almost aggressive pursuit and delight in aspects of God's creation (all of it--physical, spiritual, personal), God's own self, and God's interaction with us. There's something about writing fiction and I think fantasy/science-fiction in particular that lets one really grasp creation--createdness--by two hands and shake it in joyous enthusiasm. Tolkien and Lewis had their conception of "sub-creation" by which an artist of some kind enters into the similar (analogously so) kind of work that God does in creation. In writing a story, I get to celebrate all of God's marvelous creativity by demonstrating the creation's awesome contingency: the fact that it could be, it has been, and it will be other than it is right now, and that is a good thing! No where else is God's generosity and plenitude on display than in the vastness of the cosmos . . . and the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes and Nobles! This is a part of God's own mind and character that we get to see and imitate whenever we do art, and especially when we imagine alternate worlds and histories and species and persons. Paradoxically, we illuminate what is and call to mind what could be by celebrating what is not.
Question 44 of the Summa Theologica is the first "question" that Thomas Aquinas puts to exploring the creation and it goes like this: "The procession of creatures from God, and of the first cause of all things." (As you can see, the question isn't exactly in question form . . . this probably isn't a case of allofunctional implicature, but I will bring it up anyway.) I love this "question" and especially the grand use of the term "procession" almost as much as I love Boethius' definition of eternity. Aquinas uses the term "procession" somewhat loosely. God has both internal processions and external processions. The internal ones are nothing less than the Personal processions of Son and Spirit and the external procession is the creation as a whole. Procession simply refers to God as source, but it gives such a richness to the imagery! When I think of the creation "processing" from God (though not from his being and substance, of course), I think of everything God has made marching before his throne in humble but joyous celebration of the goodness of God and the goodness of the gift of their own creation and existence. That, perhaps, is why celebration is the key to my creative writing. When I write, I celebrate the goodness of the created order and my own creation: I celebrate everything particular to that order, it's richness, its giftedness, its contingency, its fleetingness, the fact that it must begin and end.
Which is also why I'm not always in the mood to celebrate the createdness of the creation. Oftentimes, I am more frightened than joyous at the fact that neither creation nor myself are necessary beings. Oftentimes, I want to be a determinist because I want to be able to figure out all things before hand. Or, I want to be a panentheist and be merged with God such that I am just as necessary to exist as God. In short, I often either want to make an idol of myself or of the world in order to bring false comfort to myself that all is safe and sturdy and secure. Contingency and giftedness displace us from occupying a too central role even in our own estimation because it displaces us ontologically, at the very root of our existence and our being. But all false comfort is ultimately poison, and when I try to make myself too necessary (logically, ontologically, relationally) I end up making a burden for myself that I cannot possibly bear and web myself in with anxieties. When I really trust God enough to relinquish control to him and accept my existence and my life and my being as the contingent, unneccesary, but beloved gift that I am, I can start opening my heart and hands to embrace createdness and creation again. Otherwise, I close my heart and resent everything I don't know and don't understand. I would rather have the spirit of adventure, but the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.
There's something that happens in the transition from childhood to adulthood that makes most of us have to learn how to accept again. (In many childhoods, anyway.) Both my childhood and adolescence were fairly undisturbed and thus free to be filled with wonder. But when I ran off to college I found myself confronted with crises after crises of different sorts (some personal, some epistemological, some in matters of faith) that made trusting God and myself and the basic goodness of the world quite a bit more of a challenge! I imagine some people never experience basic trust of the world in that way, and some people never have that trust shaken. But I wonder whether the majority of people have a hiccup or two at the beginning or end of adolescence and have to learn again what it means to be a child. I also imagine that many of us spend a great deal of time flubbing this lesson and having to be taken through it again and again until we really learn how to be led to Jesus like little children.
There's something childlike about joy and celebration--which makes it harder for those of us who feel the need to be sober-minded adults much of the time. I don't have anything against genuine adulthood--in fact, praise Jesus if you actually manage to become a self-respecting, contributing adult. But not if it makes you boring and self-protective and think you are the one who must be in control and in charge of your life. That pose sometimes makes me feel more secure or more adult, but it also makes me curl up in on myself and have less to give and less to celebrate.
Art is one of the closest things we have to pure gift on this side of the veil. Ultimately we engage in art for the sake of beauty and not for the sake of utility. We know that beauty makes life better, but only because it appears that human beings are made for beauty, not because of any "practical" gain or reason. The thing that refreshes us about the imagination-in-act is that it awakens us to our true nature--to our true identity as beings given an identity for no other reason that we were thought by One to be lovely, to be worthy, to be gift. In life we are receivers before we are ever givers, and what we receive is as deep as our own bodies, souls, and minds.
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