Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Scarcity Fuels Creativity

Strange how often I've heard that artists best be poor, for it would fuel their creativity.

When I got children, I quit my job. Such it was in those days.
Now we only had my husbands income to live from. My husband being an artist, this meant his income was unsure. It was always uncertain when money would come and how much it would be, or if there would be any at all. It was certain however that bills would keep coming and needed to be paid. And when the money came there often was a feast of abundance after a year of living on a shoestring. How quick it dwindled. Paying the bills, paying off debts and shopping for the many necessities we had not been able to buy for sometimes an entire year. The money lasted a week, or two, or three and then the funds were gone and the waiting game started again.
Dit it fuel creativity?
It sure fueled resourcefulness. I became an expert in endless variations on carrots, onions and kale for dinner, for those were cheapest vegetables. Clothes and birthday presents were nearly always hand made, for most times there still was some fabric stashed away for a birthday dress, or some yarn and scraps for a teddy bear.
It sure fueled productivity too. For the more sculptures, the more chance of one of them got sold. But there was more hard work in it than pure creativity.
Creativity always needed silence, an empty space to emerge from. Perhaps this too was a scarcity, but of another kind.

In a crowded place
there is no space
no room for something new

In silence
and a empty mind
most of my poems grew

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