Charlotte Wood is the prizewinning author of six novels and two books of non-fiction. Her latest book is The Luminous Solution, a book about nurturing creativity and resilience to feed the inner life.
Today, Charlotte Wood is on the blog to answer a few questions about her new book. Read on …
Charlotte Wood (Photo by Chris Chen).
Please tell us about your book, The Luminous Solution!
CW: The Luminous Solution is about the role and texture of the creative impulse in my own life, and my observations of how it works in some other artists’ lives too. The book draws on my twenty or so years of writing, and most recently highlights the way that cross-fertilising my work with insights from other artists — or other professional fields altogether — can bring an excitement and joy to my own creativity. Some of the chapters are about my experience of writing particular books, and others are about what I’ve learned from the visual or other arts. It delves into different aspects of creativity — such as allowing the dreamy, unconscious mind to hold sway, for example, or the role of anger or laughter as creative fuel. Or the interplay between intuition and rationality needed to bring a project to fruition; and the profound effect of nature upon the creative mind.
Why was it important to you to write this book?
CW: I wrote this book because I feel that radical, cross-pollinating creativity is the only thing that is going to save us now, in approaching the huge problems that we have – like climate change and the pandemic for starters. From my time at Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre, where I had a residency as a novelist working alongside scientists for a year, I began to see how much excitement and energy and hope can arise from the ‘new logics’ formed in unlikely connections, not just between ideas but between people of different fields of expertise.
I would love to live in a society where creative thinking is really encouraged, rather than the one we do live in where it’s barely tolerated and in fact most of the time vigorously opposed. We’re so narrow and dreary in the way we approach most problems, from health to industry to politics, and even many things in the arts. We stick to the same old narrow plodding path no matter what field we work in, we work hard to keep others out of our turf instead of welcoming them in, we privilege the strictly rational over intuitive forms of thinking, and we obsessively guard against failure. All of this is the opposite of creativity. It means we run the risk of producing a lot of mediocre work, not really solving problems, and it sometimes feels to me that for lack of creativity we are slowly boring ourselves to death as a society.
So I guess this book is a call to just be a bit braver and wilder in our own lives and work, and open up to a sense of un-knowing, of discomfort and mystery and curiosity — and failure and the fruits of failure — because there are so many rewards available to us as individuals, and communities, when we do.
You wrote your essay, ‘Fertile Ground: Cultivating a rich inner life’, over a year ago. Do you think that the things you observed in that essay about our minds and our aversion to stillness still ring true?
CW: Yes, definitely. In that chapter of the book I maintain that contemporary society is almost perfectly designed to destroy the quiet inner life that so many of us crave, often without knowing we are craving it. Stillness, when you’re not used to it, can be frightening – it’s why we often find something like meditation so difficult. It feels like ‘wasting time’, or it feels like looking into some kind of abyss or void. But I also know, from being a writer, that turning to silence and stillness is the only way for art to emerge. Stillness is not a void, it’s a well, and if you let it, it will fill itself. But if we keep cramming stuff from the external world into it, it is too blocked up to let that filling happen. Stillness is a creative space, but emptying the mind of clutter is a skill that has to be learned and practised. And if you have all the extra pressures that so many face – like discrimination or poverty or illness and so on – then it’s even harder.
‘I would love to live in a society where creative thinking is really encouraged, rather than the one we do live in where it’s barely tolerated and in fact most of the time vigorously opposed.’
You write about fear as being a point of reversion from which artists must try and find their way back. Do you think that fear is always a negative force for creativity or can it inspire greater things?
CW: I think fear can inspire greater things, but in the moment of intense fear itself, it’s hard to create. Fear can teach us really important things, show us crucial aspects of our culture and ourselves, but for artists it can also be absolutely paralysing. So I do think it’s essential to push past that fear in some way in order to continue to make work. Many artists find a kind of anxiety, a troubled feeling, a discomfort, to be the very starting point of a work of art — and I do too. It’s something that needs to be carefully calibrated and managed in order to make work. And after a certain point, one can get very, very tired of being afraid, as I did, and it can turn the artist’s life into a really miserable one. So I never want to fetishize fear as essential to the creative process, even though its presence and its force is undeniable.
Did any of your fundamental beliefs about the creative process change at all while you were writing this collection? If so, how?
CW: I guess the whole book is an examination of my beliefs about the creative process, and how they have changed over time. One important realisation I had is that the horrible feeling of unease and discomfort, of always feeling between states of certainty, is actually the state of being an artist. It doesn’t mean things are going badly or that a work isn’t going to amount to anything. As Philip Roth said, ‘fluency is often a sign that nothing is happening … while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.’
Who did you write this book for? Who do you wish would read it?
CW: I would like everyone to read it, of course – because of what I said at the start. I feel that a flourishing inner life and a sense of creative purpose is the birthright of everyone on this earth. You don’t have to ‘make art’ to have this sense of purpose. You might get it from cooking or making your bedroom a calm and beautiful space, or gardening or farming or starting a business. I define ‘creativity’ as bringing into being anything that wasn’t there before you made it, and it’s incredibly satisfying. If we attend to our inner life in tiny, conscious ways, rather than relying on Netflix or Twitter to constantly fill up our minds with noise and motion, I think life can be much richer and more interesting. And I do think we need to widen our ideas of how to approach problems and solve them, by being as open and imaginative as possible.
Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming a writer?
CW: I always loved reading as a kid, like all writers. I dabbled in writing at university but I didn’t commit properly until I was past thirty, after my second parent had died. That’s when I realised, ‘Life is short. If this is important to you, it’s time to commit, to work hard, to give yourself over to this and do everything you can to put it at the centre of your life’. So I put my head down and went to classes and worked hard, and wrote and wrote and wrote. My first novel was published just before I turned 35, and I’ve worked steadily from that point onwards for the past 20 years, learning as I go. And still learning all the time.
What is the last book you read and loved?
CW: At present I’m quite obsessed with the Deborah Levy trilogy of ‘living autobiographies’, particularly The Cost of Living. But I’ve also been re-reading Helen Garner’s One Day I’ll Remember This, and I absolutely cannot wait for the next instalment of her diaries which is out soon. I’m very interested in the diary form, particularly for something I’m writing now.
What do you hope readers will discover in The Luminous Solution?
CW: That a sense of rich creative purpose is within their reach.
And finally, what’s up next for you?
CW: I’m returning to my much-interrupted novel, on which I feel I’ve had about five false starts because of all the dramas of Covid. Time for me to go back into the quiet, private, interior world of mystery and unknowing. I’ve missed it.
Thanks Charlotte!
—The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
The Luminous Solution
Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life
When Spectrum published Charlotte Wood's essay 'The Inner Life' in mid-2020, it struck a chord with readers all over the country. Appearances on The Drum and an interview was quickly programmed as part of the events season at the Opera House.
Charlotte received many personal and public messages asking for more on the inner life and her creative process, and she realised that these are topics that have obsessed her for years and which had already widely addressed in her writing. In short, she had unwittingly written many chapters of the kind of book that people are searching for right now...
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