A nuclear bomb is about to go off in the middle of all my energy and free time, so I am painfully aware of any moment I waste on stuff like grocery shopping.
“Having a baby soon?” asked the kind-eyed, older cashier at TJ’s.
I smiled as I hoisted the bag over my shoulder, making sure my jupiter-sized, 39-week-pregnant self doesn’t knock over the card reader.
Over the last several weeks, I filled a full-time-job-sized-hole in the day with writing for hours. I’ve never been this creative before1: I’ve written some scenes for a fiction book, published a few essays, read books and essays to feed the writing, experimented with whatever I find interesting; currently lots of Claude Code. From the time my 2yo is off to daycare to the time I pick him up I do just that: write, except for a midday walk, during which I’d often voice-memo through a writing knot I’d been wrestling with.
But there’s that ticking clock. So as my due day gets closer, a question has been noisily clanking inside my head:
Because I do have some damning track record: you can see in the archive of my posts that I actually started 2 years ago - about 4 weeks before my first baby. I was so sure that I’ll want to keep it up. I remember one particular late-January evening, hanging out with friends who had had a baby just a few months ahead of us. I remember almost the exact words: that I’ve been feeling creative, and that I’m hoping I’ll be able to keep it up during the maternity leave, to stay “mentally stimulated”. I remember this so vividly, because they - one of the kindest people I know - looked at me like I was insane, leaving the confession without a comment, letting the words fall into a stupified silence.
And of course they were right: I didn’t keep it up, the evidence is right there in the archive. I don’t remember if it was logistically difficult, or if it was because I had not figured out what to write about and what for, or because the recovery and hormones and lack of sleep knocked creativity off of my Maslow’s Needs Pyramid for many months. It’s now 2 years later, and the same thing has happened: I’ve been creative and fulfilled for several weeks. It clicked some new happiness into my life like a lego block that’s been missing, and I want to keep it in place.
So, with an urgency of an impending (but joyous) doom, I’m asking: what even is creativity? How does it survive? What does it need? Since there’s some science behind it, surely you can program the conditions to make it more likely to survive, or support it with some GABA-suppressing supplements? If it’s spiritual, surely you can meditate it into existence? If it’s a by-product of some specific scheduling and practice, then surely you can project-manage it? I’ve been determined to figure this out.
Among many practical but not entirely inspiring outcomes of various studies, one result stood out - stepping away from ideas, or “incubation” can lead to eureka moments. You can induce this state by doing anything that allows you to zone out into a soft-but-awake focus, which, I happily realized, is how I spent the majority of the day’s 24 hours with my first baby.
The “I’m-almost-but-not-quite-asleep” state is so creative that Thomas Edison famously slept holding a metal ball, hand hanging off the armrest. When he started dozing off, his hand would relax, the ball would clatter to the ground and wake him up just in time to capture the sleep-inspired ideas. Many years later, this exact method was used in a research study to prove that this state - called “N1 REM” - is critical in finding novel solutions.
Skimming through research quickly reached diminishing returns; logic wasn’t going to make a dent in fear.
Around the same time I realized I have about 20 pages of notes, plus some voice memos, on creativity. So I set out to Write an Essay. But each time I sat down to start pulling out the conceptual spine, I always ended up mortified. Who is this for? What does this even say? Is it a how-to, or informative, or some personal-journaling-disguised-as-an-essay? Is this rambling even essay-shaped?
So I turned to Claude - I’d done it before - asking (with more sophisticated prompting, I’m not a barbarian): here are my notes. Are there themes that I can tease out into an essay? And sure, it suggested a few framings, all of them disastrously jarring. A scroll through LinkedIn will give you an idea of what the suggestions were: they all sounded both so dead and so buffoonish that it made me doubt the essay-writing business altogether. None of those suggestions are even close to what I would say to a friend, or any real human, so why write it? Who am I to have any authority on creativity (or anything, really) to publish an essay? Who am I even speaking to - my friend? My son? Someone I’m helping (god forbid)? Me, from the time before I had whatever realization I’m writing about (another conventional writing advice)? If these are the only perspectives I can write from, then I guess I’ll just keep my drafts to myself.
“The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.” Vonnegut.
As this “creativity essay” problem sat unresolved, buried in 20 pages of disorganized notes, I started looking outside of science for answers to my “how to help creativity survive” question.
That turned out to be a sort of disciple-like exercise for two reasons: 1) because it ultimately came down to learning from The Greats, and 2) it ended up being unexpectedly spiritual and metaphysical.
Great writers and creatives and innovators seemed like the next obvious candidate for advice. I made notes on the books and autobiographies to read, bookmarked dozens of essays. But my question is urgent; I don’t have the time to indulge. So I haphazardly sift through the library-rented-ebooks2 and downloaded PDFs of essays, bouncing around to maximize my chances of stumbling onto something that hits: Didion, Wallace, Rilke, Hemingway, Gaiman, Berry.
Turns out I didn’t need to indulge, because the pattern is so obvious that even this haphazard skimming was enough:
“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? (...) ask yourself this: Must I write?”
- Letters to a young poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Above all, writing just has to be true.
When you set out, they say, you don’t set out to be interesting, or useful, or insightful, or helpful, although it’s great if you end up being some of those things. The only things you have to be when you write is true.3
It’s remarkable how this comes up, again and again, in everything I get my hands on: Dig deep. Tune in. Be curious. Search for words internally. Look at the world and wrestle with what you’ve seen, and what it means, through creativity.
The most beautiful part of true is that it’s so simple to practice. I don’t need to sit down and set out to Write an Essay for My Substack. It’s just flexing the muscle of self-expression altogether. It’s noticing, feeling, and thinking through what I experience and what I read, writing those things down, and generally executing my freedom to follow my gut at a fundamental, every-day level.
This not only answered the survival question, but solved another problem altogether: how do I write without coming off as a buffoon? Well, if a paragraph has me worried it makes me come off as a buffoon, it’s likely because it does. They stand out like elephants in a field of corn because they show the exact moments where I stop writing what’s true and Sit Down to Write a Convincing Essay.
Maybe, ironically, life with a newborn actually makes writing true easier. Sleep deprivation and lack of time and energy might actually give me clarity and let the overthought gibberish fall away.
This approach requires a lot of trust, because you’re giving up the idea that creativity can be solidly captured by output and process, and instead rely on some intangible premises about how the universe works; that the dots might connect, but you will only see that in retrospect.
And if there’s no solid foundation of science and knowledge to rely on, at the very least you need something mythical to pin this trust to.
Rick Rubin and Elizabeth Gilbert - similarly but not identically, and as far as I know independently - offer a somewhat spiritual perspective that is both incredibly believable and guides the right behaviors for a creative life. In short:
Ideas4 are invisible beings floating through time and space, always looking for a human collaborator.
First, you can’t fish them out of thin air by twirling you thumbs: you need to be by the water, ready with some fishing tools. Second, you have to be a good collaborator: active, responsive, dedicated, otherwise they’ll find someone else. You don’t have to commit to every idea that comes, you can let them go5. But if you do want to keep one, you have to prove that you’re serious; you have to show up and be curious and put in the work. Otherwise they will move on to someone who’s ready for them. You are the antenna of the universe, be tuned to it.
These collaborators are important house guests, and I can be a damn good host even if I only have 30 minutes a day. And if they come to visit, who am I to judge whether they are unique or original or interesting enough? I’m just glad they’re here.
Henry Miller’s Daily Practice
Sometimes the writing and the commitment seem so solid, like a limb I’ve grown - of course nothing will shake it off. But there are plenty of moments, in a space of a few days or even hours where it feels so thin, nearly made up, like some wisp of smoke in the air - you blow too hard and it disappears! I can look at it and sort of experience it, but there’s no way to hold onto it.
So despite my logical judgement telling me it’s not possible, here I am, committed to writing weekly from the dense and sleepy newborn days.
It does feel different this time. 2 years ago I was externally motivated. I looked for topics I thought were good for my career, what I thought was useful or in vogue. I’m not interested in doing that now. This time, I enjoy the process of wrestling with a piece just as much as I enjoy the satisfaction of publishing it. I still worry about usefulness, but I have a heuristic for it. I tell myself: this is just paving a road. I won’t find out where it’s going unless I write.
“The goal isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable” - Robert Henri