joshua chamberlain

Category: creativity

  • a really good bucket

    In the process of listening to interviews with Jennifer Egan and Elizabeth Strout, I’ve been pondering the roll of the unconscious in writing and art making. Both Strout and Egan talk about how writing flows from someplace beyond the conscious mind. Speaking about her 2019 novel, Olive, Again, Strout says…

  • let your unconscious do the work

    I’ve been trying to take a page from Jennifer Egan’s book lately and allow my unconscious do the work. This means writing by hand, following characters where they want to go. I wrote a scene this morning I thought was going to end with a character forcing their way onstage…

  • somewhere to be terrible

    I’ve been dabbling with collages for a few years now. It helps me clear my head and express what I can’t with words. But somewhere down the line, I got stuck. The process of cutting and pasting became too important. I’d wind up crushing a finished collage under the weight…

  • swapping good habits for bad ones

    My Dad told me a story once about going for a run every day. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend, moved to a new town, and started a job he couldn’t stand. To get out of his head, he’d go for a run. He managed to run something like…

  • get bored

    I’ve had problems working on one thing at a time for my entire life. Call it a kind of creative ADHD. I’ll sit down to write a story, get bored or confused or frustrated, then decide to work on something else. With as many ideas as I have, this happens…

  • why we want mirrors

    I’ve written several times about Fran Liebowitz’s discussion of books from the Netflix series, Pretend It’s a City. The most striking of her comments, being of course, the moment when she says, “a book isn’t supposed to be a mirror, it’s supposed to be a door!” Jennifer Egan expands upon…

  • building a house of cards

    Yesterday, I inadvertently broke a 150-day streak of writing on this blog. It was a busy day, filled with work and getting coffee with friends and conversations about storytelling and faith and Lil Nas X’s music videos. It wasn’t until the middle of the night, in the fits of a…

  • morning pages

    Some days you’re just stuck. There’s no blood flowing. It’s hard to come up with anything to say. That’s what the morning pages are for. You show up and write three pages long hand. It’s not art, it’s not even really writing. It’s thinking on that page. It’s allowing your…

  • write it anyway

    This morning, I committed to working on a project that scares me. It’s a story that isn’t mine to tell. It delves into a topic I’m by no means an expert in. It makes me nervous. It would probably get me “cancelled.” I’m writing it anyway. Bad things happen when…

  • one thing at a time

    For a long time, I’ve suffered from a kind of creative ADHD. I think it’s caused by a variety of things: promiscuity of interest, a broad range of influences, having too many ideas all at once, and the unconscious fear of bringing something to completion. Currently, I’m tinkering with an…