Making Metaphors

a case study in creating anyway

Go where the energy is is the advice my friend Ashlee gives, and it’s great advice.

The problem I’ve been coming up against lately is that my energy is not where I want it to be, or rather, my energy is not where I think it should be. 

When I write, I can jot down fragments of ideas, tiny snippets of scenes, glimpses. My issue is not with getting out the sh***y first draft—it’s with turning that draft into a finished piece with a beginning, a middle, and an end. My struggle is in finishing.

What I have are threads, hundreds and hundreds of threads—incomplete thoughts, unfinished scenes, essays with a message but no story; or a story, but one with no universal perspective. I do not seem to have the bandwidth to weave these disparate threads in every shade of the proverbial rainbow into a cohesive whole, a finished tapestry of words. 

I work with words, and yet, I cannot seem to knead my words into a dough that sticks. My creativity is stubborn. It takes on entirely its own shape (a thousand scattered breadcrumbs), on its own time (slow, so very slow), and it does not care to coalesce.

It’s only as I’m writing this that I realize I’m subliminally following Ashlee’s other advice, her wrote-a-whole-book-on-it advice, which is, of course, to create anyway.

We’re accidental farmers now, so pulling out all the gardening and soil-related metaphors feels fitting.

Let the soil lie fallow.
Let the ground rest.
Rotate crops to stem the depletion of soil nutrients.

And another metaphor: you can’t force the fruit.

You can irrigate, prune, fertilize perfectly, and still a wind storm can wipe out your flowering buds, ending their life span before they ever become an actual avocado.

You can put in all the inputs and still have nothing to show for it.

(Is the process worth it anyway?)

Let it marinate was Shauna’s second piece of writing advice; and in the instant gratification, speed-publishing, content-creation-on-warp-speed world we live in, how countercultural it is to live lives where we allow for rest, for marination, for fallow ground. How defiant it is to create anything slowly.

My very tiny act of rebellion against the content-generating machine of this social media age is to let my words sit while I go on creating anyway.

I go where my energy is and make tortillas from scratch (surprisingly easy—just tiny dough balls of flour, baking powder, salt, warm water, and oil). I decorate cookies with royal icing for my son’s baseball team snack boxes. I design juice labels. I make a reel for our ranch’s social media account, where the stakes are low, and I can experiment with actually showing my (unfiltered—I have strong feelings about this) face.

Incidentally, when I made tortillas today, I learned it’s important to let the dough sit after kneading. If, instead of staying rolled out thin, the dough shrinks, then the gluten hasn’t had enough time to rest. 

Sometimes, in making one thing, you learn how the other comes together.

In designing a label, you turn a phrase.
In decorating cookies, you craft a composition.
In making tortillas, you find a metaphor.
In making a life, you tell a story.

---

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Create Anyway".