On my Creative Processes, How I Create:

Second day of this year’s edition of the Winter Blogging Challenge and albeit late, I’ve managed to chip in once again so am super pumped for this.

Before I begin I would like to mention that today’s the annual day reserved to celebrate my brother’s birthday so on the side of this grande blogging fete, allow me wish James, my older sibling a life time filled with more happiness than he can use, lots of growth and I also wanted to add that he’s loved🥰

Now back to blogging, One of the more difficult questions of my time has always been what my creative process is,
Infact it’s possibly the one question that gets me circling around the bush the most, because often when I commune with fellow creatives and the it’s asked there’s always a process, one that is often way cooler than whatever process my searching mind could ever come up with.

And in these conversations I’ve heard stuff like “I plug my headphones in, play my creation playlist then em words just start flowing, an artist friend of mine on the other squeezed her creative juices from being in a quiet place, away from everyone and intimate with herself  while casually sipping on a glass of Nile Special beer and however absurd it always seemed to me, I never made the fatal mistake to interfere when she was doing her thing.

Infact I came to admire her process of creation (I mean there’s beer involved) and I might have tried emulating it, while changing the variable and replacing Nile Special with gin, but I probably over did it and ended up creating a new dance instead of the story I was supposed to write, ultimately learning that the problems may often be similar but the answers differ according to the context.

I don’t know if you’ve read any of the weird stuff I write but my blog is like 75% made of these life experiences and lessons camouflaged as short stories that I often struggle to cartegorize as either fiction or Non Fiction because 1- I still haven’t figured out just the right amount of opening up to do and 2- I often distort a few facts to knock off people that might have been there while I went through whatever am describing and 3- I can be really self- aggrandizing and often I’d rather be the hero of my stories.

But If I may transit back to my own creative process, when I’ve written opinion pieces it has always started from a  point of caring or as my Kid sis would call it, nosiness and not minding the business that feeds me, so naturally it’s always an issue close to my heart.

This however hasn’t always been the case, at the very start of my blogging journey I wrote because as a journalism student I was convinced that through expressing myself on different topics I would ultimately get recognized and maybe employed through the work I showcased so process or not I did my research and formed an opinion and wrote then hit the publish button.

As I grew as a creative though, I started to realize that Instead of articles I could respond to certain issues close to me through stories and at the time I had been writing these really short stories and posting them on my WhatsApp status, so I figured instead of say responding to mob violence  through an article that would prolly not be read for being too academic, I opted for short stories, tried to humanize these issues I cared about and to my credit I figured out how I wanted to express myself.

So ideally the recently renamed Lord’s Anxieties is a catalogue for all these life experiences, some mine, others heard, together they make up my space….My process?? Well I could never find the words to elaborate it enough, I write about whatever I care about, whatever gets to me, where? Anywhere literally, On a three legged stool in a bar, in a taxi exhausted from the day’s hustles and tonight. at a dinning table pretending to be listening to my Mum’s rant about how un serious COVID-19 is being taken

Thank you as always for stepping into my conscience, have a good night fam…