Alchemy for Creative Transformation
Journaling prompts and creative dares inspired by 5 alchemical processes
Even though it doesn’t mark the start of a season, May is the time of year that always feels to me like a new beginning. It’s a time filled with the potential for transformation as the world becomes verdant once again and the days grow longer and brighter.
For me, the middle of May tends to mark major milestones. May is the month I’ve graduated (twice — undergrad and master’s), started new jobs, and bought a home. This May marked three such anniversaries: 17 years since my husband and I graduated from college, nine years since swapping academia for a marketing career, and eight years since we bought a house together.
A lot has changed in that time. I’ve lost count of the projects I’ve completed: books, zines, art projects. I look around every day at the paintings and other pieces I’ve made over the past few years, hanging up in our living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and respective home offices. (My ultimate goal: make art to hang everywhere in our house!)
I also think about the things I let go of: stale careers, too-small living situations, and outmoded ways of thinking. I left behind jobs that paid too little while demanding too much. One May, back in a cramped old apartment, I wrote final papers for my master’s courses while construction workers hammered a new roof onto our building, and was all too happy to move out years later. I’ve also let go of mindsets that kept me too shy, too ashamed to speak up, and too afraid of standing out. (That one is more of an ongoing process.)
None of that is easy. Change never is. The old has to burn away, dissolve, or otherwise break down to allow something new to take its place.
As I developed the concept for this blog, I considered the ways that the alchemical processes relate to creativity. The changes we experience — shedding the old and bringing in the new — resemble the transformations that common substances like water, salt, and oxygen undergo all around us. We can take inspiration from these scientific processes to track the beginnings and endings that occur in our own lives.
Sources vary for how many different stages are involved in alchemy; there are more than what’s listed here. Here are a few alchemical processes and their very basic definitions to get us started, plus prompts for journaling and your own creative practice.
Calcination
Sometimes considered a process of purification, calcination heats a substance to a high temperature in order to remove impurities. It’s not about destroying something but about what rises from the ashes. There’s something freeing in “letting it all burn,” figuratively or literally.
Journaling prompt: What needs to burn away to create something better? (Bonus: Write it all in a list, read it aloud, and then burn it when you’re done.)
Creative dare: Edit your latest writing project. Find all the unnecessary words, phrases, and sentences. What are you left with?
Dissolution
This is a process you probably know from your everyday life — for example, dissolving sugar into your morning coffee. Sometimes this dissolution can be to make something become better, or more intense. Other times, we use this process to dilute, so that something that was too concentrated has room to spread out.
Journaling prompt: What do you need to dissolve? Will it dilute anything or make it come alive?
Creative dare: Leave plenty of white space — around a sketch, between stanzas in a poem, in rests between the measures in the music. Slow it down, spread it out.
Conjunction
Not just a part of speech or something out of The Dark Crystal, conjunction is the process of putting two or more things together to create something new. Often, this involves placing together the things that are in opposition of one another. Sometimes it’s the strangest combinations that work out for the best.
Journaling prompt: What do you need to bring together to create harmony in your life?
Creative prompt: Mix two different types of media that you wouldn’t normally put together — collage your junk mail, write song lyrics in the form of a sestina, create a short film based on a classic novel. Get weird.
Sublimation
Sublimation is the process of changing a substance’s form without changing its essence. In science, this is seen when a solid becomes a vapor without passing through the liquid stage in between. We may undergo a similar process at times. Our forms may change as we evolve our style, adorn our bodies, or age gracefully. But who we are at our cores is not so mutable. Even the most challenging experiences can never take away the best parts of our true selves.
Journaling prompt: How have you changed form in the past? What is the form you have taken today? Where do you think you’ll end up next?
Creative dare: Reformat your work. Paint the sketch. Sing the poem. Record the essay for a podcast episode. Reimagine what’s possible.
Crystallization
Also known as congelation (which sounds kind of gross, tbh), this is the process where a liquid becomes a solid. Crystals take thousands of years to form underground. The creative process can be slow, too. But it’s worth it to make something unique.
Journaling prompt: What do you know, without a doubt, to be absolutely true?
Creative dare: Use a medium that changes form. Paint with watercolors; mix new colors and see how they go from solid on the palette to liquid on the brush and back to solid as they dry on the page. Sculpt with clay or create pottery. Print your poems or stories and bind them into tiny books. Recognize the power you have to mold an intangible idea into a tangible object with your bare hands.
You are constantly changing. Honor your transformations, at whatever time of year they occur. There is no such thing as stagnation. Living a creative life is to be an alchemist.
This is very interesting Jen. Your use of alchemical metaphors for personal emotional challenges is really compelling.