Creativity and the Body

Understanding your relationship, or lack thereof, to your body can lead to creative insights.

Denial of the Physical

In 2005, I heard a 1993 radio interview with Frank Conroy, a now-deceased fiction writer, and he described how he preferred writing in bed. He spoke with another author who did this also. Nelson’s own take on it is that he wrote best when his mind flowed without concern for his surroundings. Staying in bed was a strategy to disconnect his brain from his body to facilitate creative flow. The less he was aware of his body, the more his mind could reel and wander.

While Conroy might have had a self-destructive streak, something about this insight seemed familiar. I started to notice my own patterns and methods for staying creative and generating ideas, and realized that, indeed, the idea of disassociating the body from the mind is something that I also do.

Over the years, I’ve learned to obey these rhythms and how to use them in order to stay creative in a deadline-centered world.

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