THE CREATIVE PROCESS UNMASKED: Part 4, Rest Time

Hello there! I hope 2021 has been good to you so far. It’s winter time in my part of the world. To respect that, I am allowing myself a season of rest. That doesn’t mean doing nothing! But it does acknowledge the natural rhythm of the seasons. Winter is a time when energy levels are naturally a little lower, and hibernation is the theme. The winter season also reminds me of the value of rest time in the creative process.

Issues With the Freshly Written

You may remember that last year I wrote several pandemic poems. (Maybe one or more of them struck a chord with you. Maybe they help you express what you might be feeling during the isolation. I hope so.) I had the opportunity to look again at these poems in November, when The Ontario Poetry Society held a Pandemic Poetry Contest. Well, I learned anew the importance of letting something newly-created rest for awhile before proceeding.

One poem in particular stood out. I had struggled with the ending of “Reframing the View” when I first wrote it. I wanted to lead the reader to a conclusion, but not dictate that conclusion, allowing each person to look at the accompanying photo and decide for themselves what they saw. This is always a challenge for a writer. You want to respect the reader’s intelligence by not spelling everything out and giving her a figurative hit-over-the-head. Yet readers do appreciate being led towards the writer’s intent and/or what they might conclude.

My writers’ group members (the insightful Lynn and Jen) told me the poem did not lead the reader quite far enough. Neither of them were entirely sure what they “got” from looking at the photo after reading the poem. When I looked again at the poem with several months’ distance to sharpen my view, I saw they were absolutely right as usual! And more to the point, I knew what I needed to write in order to fix the problem, which I couldn’t see when the poem was freshly written.

Why Artists “Let it Rest”

This is something that seasoned writers know well: to put something aside for a period of time, especially if it’s not working. That rest period will sharpen the general sense of unease and expose the specific flaws. More importantly, that time away will often result in the writer realizing what it will take to create a much finer piece… and by that I mean one that readers can respond to more strongly. And that connection is what every artist is striving for.

“Reframing the View” now leads the reader more directly. It also has a more structured “poetic turn” at the end. This is a technical term that poet Kim Addonicio describes as: “picks the reader up in one place and drops them off somewhere else.”

I’d love to hear what you think. Do you have a preference for one version over the other? Do you like poetic turns as much as I do? Were you surprised to learn about the value of rest time in the creative process?

By the way, “Reframing the View” (the words without the photo) was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Pandemic Poetry Contest and will be published in an upcoming anthology. Further encouragement for me to remember the importance of rest!

May this season’s slower pace help refresh you.

Lee Ann