The Creative Identity

Inspired Procrastination

I like to indulge myself on here, but why write something myself that has already been written by someone else? Enjoy the following from Creating a Life Worth Living. *** When you are really pushing yourself to accomplish your ambitions, you will sometimes be struck by ideas of divine procrastination. While it would be a mistake to welcome all of these ideas, some you should act on with impunity. If you are plagued by procrastinitis, you may as well follow your inspiration to action – even if you know it's a kind of detour. Since these little acts are done in a moment of spontaneous abandon [...], they can allow you to be much more courageous than if you tried to do the same task from a place of method and will. Anna, a conceptual artist, was stalking around her apartment, drinking coffee, and worrying about an installation she was stuck on. In a fit of procrastinatory zeal she sat down and wrote a letter to a world-famous conceptual artist who she had always considered a kindred spirit. In the letter she explained how the conceptual artist's work had touched her and how it had dovetailed with her own ideas about art. The famous artist was moved by the letter and wrote her back immediately. This became the foundation of a correspondence between the two women which lasted years and developed into a friendship. Had the young woman never been possessed by this inspired procrastination, she might have never had... Read more →

On Doing Nothing

Single-line flowers It’s been three weeks since I last wrote anything on here, and even though this hiatus was unplanned, it’s evident that I decided, if only subcosciously, to walk the talk. I didn’t unplug myself from everything I do online (although I did avoid the news), and I didn’t steer clear of my favourite blogs (although I merely skim-looked at the pics). But while I would love to tell you that I knocked out a killer proposal during this time and that I was right, a-bloody-ha, wasn’t I, I wrote reams and reams of papers and edited story after essay after novel, I , in fact, did none of these things. I’ll tell you more, I did very little editing and one super-tiny piece of writing. That was that. It felt great. I do realise that saying such a thing on a site dedicated to the wonderfulness of creativity and writing may be on a par with admitting that, actually, I really like it when we leave the kids with the baby sitter, let’s get rid of them. Yet, I am not proposing that we scrap all of our writing endeavours (why?!), but merely that we step away from the noise I referred to last time and also from our self-inflicted creative committments for a second. Where can that take us? In my case doing so has been part-response to other committments, part-reaction to a vague feeling of unfocus-ness (can I say that? Let me) that has afflicted me... Read more →

Writing in Vacuums

For a long, long, long time, I was one of those constantly connected, constantly informed, constantly abreast people. I never looked like one of the plugged-in girls from the Apple ads, with white strings sprouting out of their ears (not least because they are models while I shall always be a little bit fat), but, conceptually speaking... yeah, nearly. Then I started this site and eventually I realised that less noise makes for better creative output. Note that I am not saying greater, even though I concede that in some cases one works more if unplugged. In my instance, it's the quality of what I write that has improved, not the quantity. Not only that, my concentration has improved as well. What I speak of is not new. Over the years, many writers and creative types have referred to the media-fast as a strategy to focus and improve productivity. Even though Julia Cameron wrote the first Artist's Way in 1997, before we got snowed under by blogs, sites, social media, online journals, podcasts and so on, she already had an inkling that lots of information was not that helpful to the tender artistic mind. Later, both Danny Gregory and Twyla Tharp spoke of a media withdrawal and these days I find versions of it everywhere I turn, be this blogs or books (I hope you get the irony in this talk about a media-fast in every medium out there, by the way. It's a bit like watching exercise videos while... Read more →