Your Daily Creative Action – Structure vs Spontaneity

As much as I believe in the power of daily creative action, I know how hard it can be to maintain over long periods of time.

Over the years the one activity I have maintained with consistency is meditation. It is my sanity, my inspiration and my resting place. I also know that if I don’t meditate first thing in the morning it doesn’t happen. So in the morning I make a cup of coffee (I know, I know but it really doesn’t impact my meditation or my sleep), feed the animals and sit down to meditate for 45-60 minutes.

Nobody said it had to be at a desk!

I also learned from writing my book that the only way to get any creative work done and out the door, is to do it every day as the first part of my working day. So I would meditate, have breakfast, and then write. These days I will take a look at my email, Facebook and Twitter while I have breakfast, do a bit of social posting (and I mean just a bit) and then settle down to write.

As creatives we don’t like to get too structured and but this little bit of discipline has huge payoffs. Once I’m done with the writing, it’s time for some off the page spontaneity. Often I’ll work on a business project. Sometimes I go for a walk. Sometimes I declare I’m done for the day.

So that’s how I structure my day to get the most out of it without having to beat myself into submission.

It’s just one way of doing it. What’s yours?

Photo Credit: Renxx Gmdr

Susan Cain on The Power of Introverts

I love this TED talk on introverts by Susan Cain. Can’t wait to read the book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. You’ve got to love that title!

Just some of the points she makes are…

• Solitude is a crucial ingredient for creativity.

• There is zero correlation between the best talkers and the best ideas.

• Introverts make great leaders because they’re better at letting others run with their own ideas.

She also talks about our cultural bias toward extroversion and how our schools and places of work need to be restructured to allow for individual work as well as group collaboration. Amen!

I’ve always thought about introversion and extroversion as being about where we each derive our primary nurturance. Do we get intellectually, emotionally and spiritually fed primarily by social contact or by solitude? To this definition she adds that it has to do with how we respond to stimulation. Good introvert that I am, I’m still contemplating the distinctions between those two definitions.

So here’s the video. I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses so please leave a comment.

Best,

P.S. In this talk Susan Cain shares how blissfully happy she was while writing the book and what a stretch it is for her to now be out speaking about it.

If you relate to that and could use some help getting your book written, published or marketed, please let me know. I can totally relate to the challenges introverts face in the world of writing, publishing and marketing, and I can help you sort it out no matter where you are in the process.

The Power of Daily Creative Action

I’ve been reflecting on the power of daily creative action.

It has come up over the years with clients who learn to define their success by whether they are working every day. The gallery shows, the novels published, the work sold are all built on that daily act of doing the work.

It comes up in every conversation with successful artists, artisans and writers in answer to…how do you do it?…where do you find the inspiration?…where do all your ideas come from?

The consistent answer is…they don’t wait for inspiration, they work daily creating a space for inspiration to emerge.

This is how I wrote How to Survive Your Grief in 60 days, a book I’d been thinking about writing for 4 years. I wrote first thing every morning. I didn’t answer e-mail, return phone calls, or anything else until I had written for at least 2 hours.

Some days were tortuous when I couldn’t find the words to communicate what I wanted while other days it simply flowed out of me. The act of writing was deeply satisfying no matter the quality and that sense of satisfaction stayed with me as I went through the rest of my day.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield quotes Somerset Maugham as saying: ’I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes everymorning at nine o’clock sharp’

Pressfield goes on to say, ‘…by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration.’

So here’s my question for you…what could you create if you consistently gave it an hour or two a day?

P.S. Feel free to share in the comments.

Photo Credit: asifthebes

Do you really want to write a book?

Everyone says they want to write a book. Ask anyone about their dreams and aspirations and more often than not “write a book” or “write the great American novel” will be on the list.

The vast majority of those folks will never, ever write a book of any kind, much less the “great American novel.”

For some they don’t write a book because in their heart of hearts they don’t really care whether they write a book or not. It sounds like a good idea but it’s in the land of fairy dust…just an interesting dream to play with.

Others are talking about it because it’s the in thing to do, everyone is doing it and it’s so easy now. All true up to a point. The mystique of ease, however, only extends as far as the publishing. Writing the damn thing still takes a fair amount of work.

If you’re not a writer or you don’t have the discipline to sit down to write, you are never going to write a book. And you know what that’s fine.

You don’t have to write a book!

If writing a book isn’t something that really gets your juices going, stop kidding yourself. Just drop it from the list and figure out what it is you really do want to do, and then go do it.

Writing a book is hard work. It means sitting down every single day and putting one word down after another, one sentence down after another, one paragraph after another. It’s hard to do. I’ve done it and it’s hard (How to Survive Your Grief).

Unless you love the process of writing, you’re not going to do it.
No amount of discipline can make up for love that isn’t there. Likewise no organizational technique is going to help if you don’t love the craft of writing.

Unless you love your subject matter, you’re not going to do it.
There are 3 ways to approach this one and they all work…write about what you know, write about what interests you or write about what you’re curious to know more about.

Underlying all 3 is a love for the subject matter. What doesn’t work is writing about something that bores you.

Unless you’re committed to writing a quality book, you’re not going to do it.
I guess I need to qualify that last one a bit. It certainly is possible to write a book without worrying much about quality. If in doubt just check out some of the Kindle books that are nothing more than rehashed Wikipedia articles. Just to be perfectly clear, that not what I’m talking about here at all.

Though possible I also know the people attracted to this site are not sleazy, narcissistic buffoons. The readers of this blog are committed to quality and integrity in the practice of their craft whether that craft is writing, painting or pottery making. This is what I’m talking about.

I am also not talking about getting caught up in some kind of perfectionist hell hole where the work never gets done. That’s like taking the idea of quality and running it through a meat grinder. It’s a distortion which needs to be addressed if you’re engaged in it, but it’s not what I’m talking about here.

So for those who are committed to quality and integrity in the practice of your craft, the necessary goal is to create work you can be proud to put out into the world. Something that adds knowledge, offers insight, provides a mirror, gives solutions or just plain entertains.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

So the very first question you need to ask yourself before you add writing a book to your bucket list or your marketing plan is this…

Do I really want to write a book?

P.S. Please share your thoughts below. We love to hear from you.

Photo Credit: Alexandre Dulaunoy

Nobody tells beginners…

Ira Glass, host of This American Life (NPR), offers this advice for anyone who is a beginner. He talks about being driven to create by good taste only to be profoundly disappointed by the results.

For beginners this can be deadly.

It’s so true and not just for beginners. I believe that for most of us there is always a disconnect between the vision we hold in our imagination and what we are actually able create.

Personally, it drives me to continually increase my skill but it no longer stops me from creating and putting what I create out into the world. It’s part of what keeps me engaged.

Coming to terms with this gap is one of the initiations we receive in our creative development and it’s essential to developing the ongoing practice of creativity. In the end, I think, we come to accept that this striving to close the gap between vision and work is an essential part of the creative process.

I would even go so far as to say that if you have so mastered your medium that you’re completely satisfied with what you produce, you either need to do some serious stretching within your medium or begin anew with another.

Ira Glass is right…without an awareness of this this gap between taste and output, beginners are often discouraged enough to give up.

It is in this phase of creative development that teachers can make or break their student’s commitment to the ongoing work of creating. Unfortunately I hear way too many stories of teachers reenforcing the beginner’s sense of inadequacy.

This is the advice teachers should be imparting to each and every one their students…

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

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