The Creative Identity

Intermission

Courtesy of Christine Mason Miller Read more →

Try This

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. –William Hazlitt– In The Creative Habit Twyla Tharp suggests to pull the plug on reading for a week. This is supposed to be a prompt aimed at stimulating your creative output but I must tell that every time I think of it I break into a cold sweat. I could stop writing completely for a week (although... it would take some doing), but stop reading? Is she kidding? She may as well ask me to stop eating or brushing my teeth. I find those suggestions just as unfathomable and revolting to heed. But maybe you're a braver person than I am and would quite happily take a punt on that one. My version of this exercise on restraint is going to take place over Crimbo when I shall not write on here until after the Epiphany. I'm already feeling odd and worried about it, as if I were backstabbing myself (I'd love to see myself try actually), but I really do think it is a necessary step in order to focus on unfinished writing projects and this. But back to you, can you try what Twyla suggests? Don't read anything for a week, then write about it. Read more →

Stephanella Meets Gavin James Bower

The ways of the internet are unpredictable dear reader. I first came across today's writer over a year ago, as I was investigating the Zeitgeist whilst sitting in the garden, squinting at the dim screen and slurping up a pint of Pimm's through a straw. I don't recall what brought me to his online home (very unusual), but I do remember what infuriated me about it: a misplaced it's (very usual). Within seconds I had clicked off in disgust, cursing the guy as an illiterate, vulgar prick. Months later, I started noticing his messages in my Twitter feed, re-broadcast by some of my posse whom I deemed 'lacking in good judgment', scoff, snort, tsk, barf. But soon after, as is often the case online, we were talking to each other. We bonded over Jack The Ripper (which you must go and watch RIGHT NOW), over the merits of beards, over writers' egos and penises (his own, my own, my horse's... a castrating experience for a female writer if there ever was one) and so on. The leap from profound irritation to Gmail threads fifty messages long is as disconcerting as it is annoying because you really don't want to find things in common, shallow or profound, with someone you labeled illiterate and vulgar and a prick. Now we have pet names for each other; I call him Tiny. Last week I bought his book so that you don't have to. But then... maybe you should. You should because I think... Read more →

Intermission

Weekend Reading

I am developing an undesirable knack for feeling elated three seconds before the reason for my happiness disintegrates into nothingness. It seems to me that every time I sit back to admire my good work achieved against the proverbial all odds, only just slightly out of sight another part of my life falls spectacularly to pieces. And before Christmas too. I ask you, is this normal? Yes, I am sure it is. So I spent the weekend pretty much retired to my bed, reading. When I feel not right, which has happened quite a lot as of late, I take refuge in those books that have saved me before. I looked at my diary, which I had already resolved to throw away before January turns up, and I re-read that bit in The Creative License where Danny says that he realised that the purpose of his journal was to blunt his pains, not reflect them. I re-read a bit of Fearless Creating, where Eric Maisel talks of the completion of your work and of critical-mind anxiety, of appropriate and inappropriate judging and of detaching yourself from what you've completed. I'll tell you what, if there is one thing I've got absolutely zero problems doing is detaching myself from what I write. In fact, I am reaching the stage of not caring any longer, which really isn't what Eric Maisel talks about at all. Then I read Dazed & Aroused which I absolutely had to get out of the way, I... Read more →