They're back. It's a creativity flood.

It’s time. So many blank pages are flooding onto campus. Most students, if they left at all, moved back into student housing over the weekend and classes start in a few days. The laziness of campus that I adore over the summer is completely gone. And with it, extra tidbits of time I would weasel out of my day for getting down new words and editing old ones. Out the window.

Of course, I love working with students. I absolutely do. I think I’d enjoy working with any students, but I particularly love working with students in design.

Remember when I compared writing and architecture in my very first blog post? Check it out, because this is a perfect example.

You know that feeling you get when you have a niggling idea for a story before you even put eyes on the first blank page? When ideas are floating hither and thither in your head, and the sparkles of excitement are bouncing around, infecting your whole body?

You know that, right?

That's what's happening with these students. Especially now, at the beginning of the year, but pretty much all of the time. And it's amazing. Their enthusiasm is contagious, pumping up our own excitement about what we do, both on our own and for them. I’m teaching two classes this semester, both intended to be smaller seminars. I’ll have about forty-five of those bouncing balls of creativity and excitement in front of me every week. They’ll be asking about sustainable design strategies, metrics for measurement, and how to answer the research questions that have been boiling in their gut for years, urging them to come back for another degree.

The majority of these bright-eyed creatures feel that creative spark that we know oh-so well, whether they desperately want to design the next best cross-trainer, a new book layout, an anime game, or maybe a county library. For most of them, like most of us that are somehow driven to write, the creativity spark will fluctuate between simmering and raging throughout their life, hopefully as they enjoy a life of creativity. What I really want to do is hand out Elizabeth Gilbert's latest book, Big Magic. I reviewed it a few months ago and adored it. I just told another faculty member about it today. I'm suggesting it to everyone, design fields or not. The handful of engineers that I will have in class will undoubtedly look at me like I'm crazy, but that's fine. Maybe some of them will pick it up, and my being crazy for two minutes will be worth it.

There will be times, of course, when they aren't as excited and are just plain tired. It’s exactly how I feel about halfway through my first round of editing. My drive is still in there, it's still burning, but good heavens is it hard. They’ll hit that a few times throughout the semester, and I’ll hit it with them, trying to give them the feedback that they need, both thorough and on time. As all of their crazy creative energy flows onto campus and into my life, it will slowly begin to suck up my time and energy. The intense inquisitiveness and creativity that the students bring will undoubtedly exhaust me. All of my efforts to be proactive in my daily word counts, editing, and critiquing will certainly steamroll over my own energy. If I’m lucky, this will take more than three or four weeks.

So this year I have a new plan. I'm going to try as hard as I can to view the students as a source of energy, rather than a drain. I will try as much as I can to funnel their enthusiasm and creativity through their papers and questions, into my brain, and out my fingertips, transforming it into my own version of creative output. My typical response to them is assessment, guidance, and questioning. I deliver potential roadmaps for research and resources for creating health in the built environment. This fall, however, I’m going to try to change that.

But I don't know how. I don't know how to manipulate my deliverables to them, which can be downright exhausting, into energy that I can use for my own creative writing endeavors.

But that will be my challenge.

I am *this* close to finishing my first novel, and even have a great start on a prequel that I want to release first as a teaser. Tess and Gran and their world have grown so much over the last few months that I can barely contain my excitement to share that with you. But I don't want to jump the gun, and I know that the start of the semester will set me back. But I'm hoping to bring at least one, if not both, of these works to completion before the end of the calendar year. And I'm going to try and use my students' creativity to make that happen. I'm going to ride their waves of enthusiasm, and hope I don't wipe out, finding myself crawling breathless through the sand and wrenching myself up to safety in the holiday break. That’s the likely result, but I’m going to give it another whirl.

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