Cross-training for Creatives OR A picture is worth a thousand words

December 31, 2024: Slow down…

Many, many years ago, a new friend asked me what I did, and I replied, I am a writer. She laughed, right to my face, and said, But you don’t write! After a second of stunned silence, I realized she was right. I did ‘do’ writing at my job but outside of work I didn’t do much of it.

Today, that exchange remains vivid in my mind for both its sharpness of tone and clarity of vision — not mine, but my friend’s. Her blunt statement shattered my self-delusion and, while it set me back, it also gave me a defined moment in time against which to respond and from which to build a different narrative. It’s taken several decades, but I am solidly there now. I no longer doubt my identity as Writer.

The other day, after creating a collage that captures my intentions (~ resolutions) for the new year (see above), I went back through all the many collages I have created over the past six or so years. Many of them include encouragement and admonitions to write. Then, in May 2020, in the early days of the Covid pandemic, I created a collage that was solely about wanting to be a writer, to see myself as Writer, to write, to work with words… (see below). The process of creating that collage gave me time to be by myself, to sit with the idea of me as WRITER; I remember choosing the words from an issue of Writer’s Digest magazine and making colour copies of the two photos of me with my Christmas-gift manual typewriter from back when I was about 10. This idea of me as Writer was — clearly — long standing. And equally clearly, I needed to catch up with it, to embody it.

May 31, 2020: I want to be a writer

Fast forward four years. A friend gave me a sticker of an old-fashioned typewriter with the words “the writer” on a sheet of paper coming out of it. I hung on to that sticker until January 11, 2024 when I decided to do something with it. I started leafing through magazines, cutting things out, glueing things down and, when I was finished, I saw myself visually represented on the page: A joyful woman, a Writer.

January 11, 2024: I am a writer

Now, what’s remarkable to me is not each collage separately, but, rather, what they show when placed side by side: This is the cross training reference in the title of today’s post. When I work to create a collage, I am often surprised by what shows up on the page, by what is so evidently present in the picture compiled of (mostly) images and (some) words. I believe my subconscious understandings rise to the fore when I lose myself in the creative process of leading with images and mixing in words to create a whole out of individual parts.

When I write, words are the only element I work with, but, when I collage, the story that ends up on the page has (not always, but most usually) been created out of images as the primary element. And this leads to stories surfacing that I was not necessarily conscious of.

Look at the “I want to be a writer” collage from May 2020. Now look at the “I am a writer” collage from January 2024. The first is so busy with intention, with doing, it is chaotic, while the second is minimalist in its clarity of focus and identity.

As a fitness focus, cross-training “involves combining exercises to work various parts of the body. Often one particular activity works certain muscle groups, but not others; cross-training aims to eliminate this imbalance.” So, cross-training for creatives involves using a secondary artistic form to stretch the creative muscle that we normally use. This offers a change of process that brings with it the potential to express (or express differently) what we might be struggling to bring to the surface with our primary pursuit.

This recent review of the collages I have created over the past years has made crystal clear to me that words are my primary tool, but images can help me tell the story that words alone have not so easily been able to.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.