Pat Dobie: Exploding with Creativity

What did you use to do during recess?

Run away from the Frankl twins, mostly. They were big, fast, and mean. They used to chase me and my sister and around, not in an admiring way but in a “you’re gonna get hurt” way.

I was excruciatingly shy at first in school—like, who are these people and why do I have to talk to them? But having 3 siblings, I got used to playing with other kids fairly soon, and made a couple of good friends that I’m still in touch with today.

Did you think of yourself as a creative kid? What does creativity look like for you these days?

I didn’t at the time but I look back and think, “yeah, what an adorable weirdo.” I used to lie in the woods near our house, hidden in the underbrush, and basically fantasize about having green eyes and no freckles. (I was your quintessential freckle-faced kid—see photo.) I got a diary when I was maybe 7 or 8 and I loved writing in it. I’d reread my stuff and think it was hilarious. I drew pictures of things like my new shoes. I just really loved explaining my world to myself.

When I remember my life as a kid, I think of books. We had this “Book Bus” come to our neighborhood every 2^nd Saturday because we didn’t have a local library branch at that point, and I read every book in that bus over time, even the adult nonfiction ones, though my jam was fiction. I’d take away a stack of books bigger than my torso and be done 2 of them by nightfall.

But my biggest creative projects were with my sister, who’s 14 months older. We made up games like “the lady and the robber,” where one of us (the lady) would lie in bed with the lights off, pretending to sleep. The other one (the robber) would sneak in with a pillowcase and steal small objects off the dresser and so on, very stealthy, working her way closer and closer to the bed. The culmination of the game was when the robber launched a tickle attack on the lady. The screaming that came out of that room!

My sister and I look alike and my mom used to dress us alike. My childhood is just filled with memories of us roaming around the neighborhood together. We rode bikes with our friends and sometimes with our 2 brothers. I grew up in the days of almost no overt supervision. Parents would yell out the back door at dinner time. Some would ring bells. In summers, the whole block full of kids would play freeze tag after dinner until it got dark. My parents were relatively strict about chores and stuff-we kids made dinner one night a week each starting when I was maybe nine. But I had a lot of personal freedom in my head.

Today, creativity looks like a way of being more than an actual way of working. Like back then, I just find life so interesting and challenging. I go through periods where I’m rushing around, but they get shorter and shorter as the years go by. I’m quicker to remember that life doesn’t have to be a grind. I try to look at the trees, look up at the sky when I’m outside, entertain my ideas, make myself laugh, that kind of thing. I write when I can.

Writing is one of those things that doesn’t really show until you’re in the end stages—until you publish it, it’s on the laptop or in a notebook. So I started taking pottery classes last year. It’s the thing I was missing—working with my hands on something that isn’t a keyboard, and having something tangible to show for it within a few days or weeks.

I think how you organize your projects can also be creative. I find deadlines motivating, so I enter this contest every year where you write a novel in 3 days. It’s been around since the 70s and is an insane test of fortitude. So I know that I’ll have at least one novella a year to my name.

Exploring your inner landscape is more of a ‘listening to yourself’ thing, and I get some good insight into where to focus my attention from that.

Maybe that’s the key—creativity is paying focused attention to something that exists only in your head until you bring it into reality. When I’m writing something, it’s just as real in my head as it is in reality, though it’s different because in my head it’s always very cool. The actual thing in reality can be disappointing. But I’d rather write something disappointing than not write anything at all.

I also find cooking creative. I like not having all the stuff a recipe calls for, so I can substitute what I have and see what happens. I like moving furniture around, having ideas that I know will go nowhere, having ideas for other people, which is part of my work as an editor…all that stuff.

Update: I won the 3-day novel contest for 2022! [Editor’s note: Way to bury the lead, Pat! Amazing!!!] Sadly they don’t update their website! First prize is publication, so it’ll be published by Anvil Press, hopefully in 2024.

How much time do you get to work on creative projects?

I feel like running a business is a creative project, so…50 hours a week? LOL. But seriously, folks…on my own writing, I work in varying intensities depending on what stage it’s at.

The beginnings are slow. I count thinking as creative work, so I think about my novel when I’m reading other novels and I see how they did something. I’m a compulsive reader outside of work, so that’s probably 10 hours a week. If it’s historical fiction I do research, maybe 2 hours a week.

The actual writing varies wildly, from 0 to 10 hours a week. For the last few months I’ve been in a Silent Zoom Writing Group that meets from 6:50 to 8:50 am (Pacific time) M-F. Sometimes I do paid work in that timeframe, but if things are under control I can do the novel for 2-3 of those sessions a week.

Last November I did a NaNoWriMo project, not a novel but a guided journal, that I enjoyed so much I was doing it a couple of hours a day, though I didn’t really have the time.

I have a hobby website where I blog, I have a biweekly newsletter, and I have a tiny publishing imprint that publishes only books I write, that I see no point in pitching to traditional publishers. I teach developmental editing, which is creative as well. I really love connecting the students with each other as much as possible during the course, so they can form support groups afterward. This next bit is extremely silly: I have a club for people named Pat Dobie.

How did motherhood change your creative practice?

Having my first daughter was an eye opener. Despite having tried to get pregnant for a while in my 30s and having read What to Expect When You’re Expecting and a couple of other books, I was somehow still unaware that having an infant means centering all your time around them.

My waking time went from being fairly fluid outside of work hours to 100% in use, having to strategize how to do non-baby-care things like taking a shower and eating. At the time I co-owned a business managing trade show & conference logistics. Our clients were mostly federal government departments. My daughter was born a couple of weeks early so I worked right up to her birth. Then I took a couple of weeks off after my daughter was born. But the proposals still needed written so I did that when she slept. For the first five months of her life I didn’t go onsite—just stuck to just writing proposals and doing critical paths and project plans.

Your sleeping time gets fragmented, so I felt like a zombie. But I fell in love with the baby so it never felt like a chore. I’ll always be grateful to my father-in-law Don Boothe, who said very early on that we were lucky not to be in and out of the hospital, like some parents are. That snapped things into perspective.

My creative practice went from having fairly organized time management and dedicated periods for writing to zero writing for about two years. But when my daughter was a toddler I started writing 45 minutes every morning, 4-5 x / week, before my husband left for school. I would just dive bomb the laptop and try to write a few hundred words on this historical novel. I found out that I could write up to 700 words in 45 minutes. If I made it to 700 I’d stop early. I was writing this adventure novel with zero plot outlining, so I wrote a lot of words just following the characters around, hoping a story would emerge. Which I don’t recommend, but whatever, it did get me there eventually.

With my second daughter, 4 ½ years later, I stopped writing for a few months after her birth, then signed up for a 10-week night school writing workshop. My mom offered to babysit one night a week. She loaned me her car and looked after both kids while I went to Emily Carr for this class. There I met other writers, one of whom had a writing group and invited me and another person to join. From then on we met once a week and I experimented with writing different stuff. This group is where I learned to write better—it, and my MFA program at Pacific University, which I did when my kids were 4 and 8.

What’s inspiring you outside of your own genre?

Visual art. Sculpture, ceramics, textiles. I’m into making ceramics now but my skills are rock bottom so I’m going to focus on hand building useful stuff like coasters and napkin rings at first. Any made object is cool. I like work by Patricia Kelly, who’s a textile artist and Bea Cortez, who’s a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist AND MY BELOVED POTTERY TEACHER!!!

I’m inspired by my friend Brandi Katherine Herrera, who’s an astonishingly good poet (her book, Mother is a Body, is mind blowing — Really recommend listening to the audio clips on that website. Brandi has started this amazing project called A Lively Manner, which is a color consulting business. I’m working with her on my home as we speak. Brandi says, “color changes everything.” Heidi, I know you will relate to that!

My IG feed is just full of potters and artists and other creatives--including you! I see stuff when I’m out and about, too, and sometimes it stops me in my tracks, the way someone has done their garden or their home or the way they dress.

What do you do when you feel burnt out or filled with doubt?

Read a book 😊

Listen to a guided meditation. I like Michael Sealey, Shai Tubali, binaural beats—so many free resources on YouTube!

How can we support and encourage each other more?

You’re doing this, Heidi. I’ve been inspired by you since we first met when I took your course.

It takes guts to be creative. I also think that everyone is creative.

So I think we can do exactly what you do—share each other’s work, post about it on social media, tell other people about it, teach it if you’re a teacher and you have the flexibility to direct your students toward people doing cool things…normalize art. We can normalize creativity as an essential part of life. I think that river of creativity can dry up if you don’t tend to it.

You have to put your inner life right up there on the list of priorities, and that is something women are socialized not to do.

Anyone woman, whether or not she’s a mom, needs to believe in her right to be creative, to explore every aspect of her existence as much as she damn well wants to and maybe more than she feels she “should.” Obeying only our ‘shoulds’ can breed resentment or depression.

My personal experience is that kids are better served by the example of seeing their mom—or any woman they’re close to—exploring their talents, learning new things, and doing what they find interesting.

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Pat Dobie (she/her/they) writes fiction and nonfiction. She’s the author of Fiction Editing: A Writer’s Roadmap, the novella Pawn to Queen, and the guided Pleasure Journal. She’s a two-time winner of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, a past finalist for the Historical Novel Society’s New Novel Award, and recipient of the June Dodge Fellowship at Mineral School writing residency. Pat has an MFA in writing, teaches writing and developmental editing, and edits fiction and nonfiction at lucidedit.com. She blogs about writing at awritersroadmap.com. Pat lives and works in the traditional unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ / sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Coast Salish peoples.

You can find her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Hi! I’m Heidi. Writer. Editor. Mother. I’m interviewing 100 creative mothers, because I believe the more we see other mothers making beauty and meaning in small moments, the more we will be inspired to make our own kind of art, whatever that may look like during this intense season of life. Support the project by sharing with a friend.