How to Judge the Value of Your Creative Work

How do you know if your work is any good?

This post is also a podcast episode!

When I was just starting up my blog and podcast, I’d have cold sweats and heart palpitations every time I hit the publish button. Okay, not gonna lie I still do sometimes. The question that looms large in your mind when you’re putting your work out in the world, regardless of whether you’re new at it or not, is, “How do I know if this is any good?” And while we’re asking, how do you know it’s good enough to dedicate time to producing it in the first place? Creative work requires a lot of time, time that in all likelihood you’ve taken away from something else. How do you justify that, unless you’re actually producing something of value?

Most creatives and artists cycle through extremes when it comes to their feelings about their work. One day they’re imagining all the accolades they’ll receive, the next they’re questioning all their life choices as they stare despondently at the crap they’ve just brought into the world. It’s notoriously difficult to accurately judge your own work. Nonetheless, it is possible to come to a stable assessment of it. I’m going to give you some realistic parameters of evaluation that are anchored in the nature of the creative process itself.

Why is it important to use the creative process as your basis of evaluation? Because if you try to judge your work based on either your own feelings about it or other people’s opinions, you will continue to be stuck in that cycle of extremes. While I do think it’s important to find value in your own work that’s rooted in your enjoyment of doing it, that’s not a good way to judge its value to the world. And relying on other people’s judgements is pure folly: a good review puts you on top of the world, a bad one sends you crashing down. It’s exhausting to live that way.

A much better way to judge your creative output is by your capacity to actually do the work. Producing creative work takes persistence and patience. That’s it. Your relative talent isn’t very important, because if you continue to do the work, your skills will increase as a byproduct of that process. You won’t even have to try that hard to improve: the human brain is wired to seek challenge and learning. As long as you continue to feel motivated by your work (learn how to maintain motivation in this post), improvement will happen.

The relative excellence of your work is a moving target. Because creative work is about process, the value of your output is found in its improvement over time, not how good it is in any given moment. You must have a long view when it comes to judging your work. It doesn’t matter how “good” any particular piece of it is; it’s in the regular accumulation of your work that its value is found.

Take for example Seth Godin, a well-known thought leader in matters of entrepreneurship and creativity. His work is of high value, at least based on traditional measures: he’s popular and he makes money. But Seth Godin isn’t saying anything other people couldn’t say. In fact, many other people are saying similar things. What Seth Godin does is put a lot of work out into the world without worrying too much about whether it’s “good”: currently he writes a blog post a day. He has ideas, and he writes about them and puts his words out there. He keeps doing (and shipping) his work.

I’m not saying that value equals fame and fortune. Most of us will never have either. Seth Godin is simply a well-known example of the value of process. In fact, on the very day I’m writing this his blog post is about the incremental improvement comprising process. I’m willing to bet that Seth Godin judges his own work primarily based on the fact that he did it yesterday, is doing it today, and will do it again tomorrow, and that it will evolve over time in accordance with what inspires him.

That’s creative process.

When you begin to see your work as an evolving body rather than discrete outputs, you’ll begin to find value in the creative process itself and your dedication to it. Your attachment to specific outcomes will lesson, and you’ll worry less about what other people think. Everything is experimentation, a work in progress. Don’t be too precious about your work. Just keep doing it.

The Truth Is That the Creative Life Isn’t Very Exciting

It is a life defined by the act of fully inhabiting yourself.

It only took 20 years of adult life to work it out, but I can now say that I am living the creative life. What do I mean by that? I think it’s probably different for everyone, but for me, this is what that looks like: I dedicate a portion of each day to my creative work, and I try to the extent that I’m able to pass the rest of my time in ways that are conducive to fostering creative flow.

I didn’t always know there was such a thing as the creative life. As a writer, I saw life in terms of the dichotomy between successful writer vs. still trying to be one. And I was very much on the side of still trying, because I visualized success as having achieved publication. The life of a writer, I imagined, would feel more real and alive than my sad life as a wannabe. There would be events, inspiring friends, possibly travel and interviews involved! 

And possibly there would be, and certainly are for some writers. But I’ve jettisoned my old ideas of what success looks like; I now think being happy and creatively fulfilled is success. And now that I’ve found my happiness and fulfillment in the creative life, I have to laugh at such imaginings. Because the truth of the creative life is that at its heart it really is rather boring, at least viewed from the outside.

Here’s the main of it: I sit down and write today, then I do that same thing tomorrow, then I do that same thing the next day after, then I do that same thing the day after that…. And that’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Some days I come away from writing feeling awesome, but most days I just feel satisfied, not particularly excited. For every day I do feel on top of the world about my project(s), there are more days that I do not.

The creative life is about doing the same thing day after day with patience and persistence. It’s about iterated effort over time, and about understanding and accepting that that’s the sum total of the foundation of a creative life. Regardless of any successes you experience or don’t experience along the way, the creative life is constituted by the quiet act of dedicating yourself once again today to your work. 

There is absolutely no glamour about it.  

That, in fact, is what I love about it. The creative life is a humble thing, and therein lies its beauty. It is a life defined by the act of fully inhabiting yourself. It is what happens when your focus shifts from trying to fulfill external expectations, real or imagined, to the task of expressing your internal, lived experiences into the world in the way that suits your nature. This is what creative practice is about. Not the goals or singular achievements, but the iterated act of being yourself in the best way you know how.  

Interlude: What I Do When I'm Just Not Feeling It

Instead of pushing through, pivot.

You know those weeks that are an almost-comical series of awful and exhausting things? I’ve just had one of them. The blog post I was trying to write, well, it’s just not done. I could push through, put it up, but I wouldn’t feel good about it. I haven’t said all the things I want to say in it yet. It needs more time to develop.

This desire to give it more time clashes with my equally strong desire to be consistent about putting up a new blog post here every Friday. And for all the time I’ve been writing this blog, this is the first week I’ve ever felt this conflict. I’m sure it won’t be the last, though!

The usual response to this type of thing is to push through, right? I’ve made a commitment to putting up a weekly blog post. And while there will undoubtedly be weeks when I do have a good excuse for not following through, this doesn’t feel like one of them. But I’m equally committed to not forcing myself when I feel resistance turn into that particular brand of anxiety known as dread. And I’ve been feeling that this week.

I’ve written about how I believe creativity should be enjoyable. Not all the time, but most of the time. There are two reasons for this. One, if it’s not enjoyable, eventually you’ll be forcing yourself through it every time, and that’s neither sustainable nor conducive to doing your best work. Two, if it’s not enjoyable, what’s the point? Creativity is what makes my life feel like it’s worth living. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning. For me, it has to be enjoyable.

You can see my conundrum. Do I fail at my deeply held belief that creativity should not be forced, and finish that blog post even if it feels awful? Or should I fail at following through on my commitment to my readers to have a weekly blog post up on Friday?

I finally realized that this perspective was too either/or. It was so constrictive and uninspiring that it was depressing me. What was the third option here? I thought about what is exciting me right now. My fiction. This summer I’m trying to finish the third draft of my novel, The Gentle History. This is a big deal, because it will be the first finished draft of a novel I’ve been able to complete in 15 years. And I’m loving the process, which is itself also a big deal (my attempts to finish novels in the past only led to misery because I was - you guessed it - forcing things).

So I decided that this week in lieu of my typical blog post, I would post some excerpts of my novel. Will people want to read them? Maybe, maybe not. That’s not the point. The point is, I feel excited about it, and it has allowed me to continue to be in touch with my creative flow of inspiration even in an impossible week. It gives me a way of honoring my goal of putting up a weekly post, and it’s a way of sharing my process, which is also something I’m committed to. So many boxes ticked!

Sharing excerpts from a novel is challenging, because novels are longform, and excerpts are short. So these are really more vignettes, in no particular order, that give a feel for the novel.

The Gentle History a novel about a woman who discovers she drowned as a child. It best fits into the genres of literary slipstream, dark psychological, and mystery/thriller.

Draft 3; excerpts.

Sometimes I get flashes in my mind of geometric shapes sliding together, gone so fast that what I sense are afterglows, more a feeling of something visual; apparition. I wonder if they are brief revelations of the inner workings of my mind. Not its organic workings, but the way it perceives how the world fits together. Angles and planes, points and ledges, moving across and over each other, merging, folding, subsuming.

The way yesterday slides under today. Then today bends and buckles at its own horizon, and yesterday emerges again. Yesterday contracts, lengthening into a line that arrows forward in a loop that comes back around to pierce the center of a disc that is another day.

I am a single point that sometimes becomes a line and sometimes a spiral. I spin under the water, a whirlpool, I come up as a wave. I can’t remember what I remember. So I start back at the beginning.

It was dark, and I was alone.

*

When I struggle up through layers of hangover-laced sleep and open my eyes to the pitch black of my basement apartment, I can believe that this is some strange afterlife or purgatory. The house phone’s ringing upstairs. It rings and rings, stops, then begins again and seemingly again and again. Or maybe this happened over the space of days. Or all at once, just one everlasting ringing. I close my eyes on it all.

Later, I pad to the bathroom, the glow of my laptop on my bed my guiding light, keeping the door open so I can pee without turning on the overhead bulb. Then I turn on my coffee maker, which I miraculously stocked at some point so it’s ready. Coffee, a bit of milk from a fridge with the inside bulb screwed out - I find the milk by feel - and I’m back on my bed, leaning on a stack of pillows propped up against the wall, laptop on my thighs. I go straight to the Bandits & Bureaucrats webpage to see if there are any new pictures from the weekend gig.

Paige has a kickass life, she somehow made it and I didn’t. The thing is, I was always ok with that, or I think I was. She was the one who couldn’t handle things. She acted like I was jealous of her success with music and all her cool music friends, but I wasn’t. Things just started getting dark for me. I was less and less of a real person, and she took it personally. At least I think that’s what happened. But I’m not sure, sometimes I’m so utterly confused by it all.

Bandits & Bureaucrats have gotten pretty big in Philadelphia. Paige plays the cello, which makes the band stand out. I’ve never been much into music, but I liked going to Paige’s gigs. Cello is definitely my favorite instrument. I can’t stand violin, it’s too high-pitched, but cello is in the right vibrational zone for me.

Tonight there are some new pictures of their Saturday night gig. Paige sits in a purple-pink haze at the left of the stage, wrapped around her cello. Her expression is what it always is when she’s playing, serious and lost-in-it, eyes gazing at things the rest of us can’t see. In one photo she holds her bow at the ready, head cocked to one side. Her brown hair is pulled back, her face sheened with rose from the lights. She’s beautiful. I mean, really.

No, I was never jealous of her when we were still friends. I’m jealous of her now, though. All the photos of her and the band, her husband, other friends who show up here and there, all people I know but not on my own, outside of Paige…it makes me feel sick. But still I look. I want to see.

*

Minutes pass, or don’t pass. The river moves. A light in an apartment across the way comes on and is extinguished almost immediately. Another light, this time left on for an indeterminate time. I don’t notice when it goes off, only that it is no longer on. The river moves some more. I have another mini vodka, and then one more. It’s the hour of nothing, the empty hour between three and four in the morning. The space between the end and the beginning. My time. It just feels so good to sit here alone in the dark office, drinking, watching the river and the apartments across the way.

Then, there’s something in the water. It floats along near to the shore and catches in some debris. It’s large and lengthy, and it takes my brain some time to catch up with what my eyes are telling it. It looks like a person, possibly face down, what seems like its head bobbing against the debris it’s caught up in. The leg end floats wide, circles, dislodges the head, and it continues its slow float past the office. I stand, peering at it until it disappears under the bridge a few hundred feet down the river.

In this empty hour, I’m not sure I’ve seen what I think I have. Across the way, the condos are all dark now except for one, where there’s a blue flickering from a tv. I stare at it, idly trying to discern a pattern to its intermittent flash, and wondering what I should do. Was it really a body? It could have been a log, it could have been a long cushion or piece of foam – hell, it could have been just a bunch of trash traveling en masse down the watery avenue. Why had I assumed it was a person, a dead person? Now, in retrospect, it seems quite obvious that it wasn’t. I sit again and scoot the chair up to the desk, eyeing the phone. I could call it in, but if it was a dead body, does it matter if I do? There’s no one to save here. I quail at the thought of speaking to a 911 dispatcher. I’ve never called 911 before, and assume they will want me to stay here to speak with the police about what I saw. I clearly can’t do that, they might smell alcohol on me. I really can’t be sure, after all, that I really saw a dead body. It was dark, the lights along the river are not strong enough to illuminate details. More and more I am convinced what I saw was nothing more than trash, an illusion of a body.

“Dammit,” I whisper. I turn on the computer and log on. Can I send an email about it? I do a quick online search. Doesn’t look like it. There is a phone tip line. I could probably call it in anonymously.

But even doing that, for something that is increasingly vague in my mind, feels like too much. I’d be wasting their time, calling. Now I don’t even know if I saw anything at all. I could just be having flashbacks of a dream from last night, or something that came from my subconscious. It’s already gone, a phantom, another lost memory.

Creativity Isn’t Right-Brained (So You Can Stop Feeling Bad if You Are Left-Brained)

What neuroscience says about creativity.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve associated creativity with the right hemisphere of the brain. And this was always a problem for me because I’m language-oriented, and language is apparently left-brained. Whenever I struggled creatively, I secretly feared it’s because I’m not right-brained enough. Maybe you’ve worried about the same, particularly if you see yourself as being a logic-driven person. The idea that the left brain is somehow the logical, straight-laced side and the right is the free-flowing, creative side, while not entirely inaccurate, has become ingrained in popular understandings of where creativity comes from, and what kind of person gets to be called creative.

In the last decade or so neuroscience has evolved in how it views the brain. It has shifted from seeing brain functions as domain-specific, and now understands that it is the connectivity between brain areas that determine our functionalities. Cognitive processes are complex (shocked, I am!), with multiple regions working together to create different effects. It turns out creativity is both-sided. It relies on two types of cognition that must be used in an iterative sequence, and that use networks that span the brain: the central executive network (CEN) and the default mode network (DMN).*

The CEN is the cognitive process that gets activated when you are involved in an external goal-oriented task, whereas the DMN gets triggered when you are not involved in anything that requires that kind of focused attention in the outside world. The DMN is the “daydreaming” mode of the brain. The thing to understand about these two processes is that they are mutually exclusive. They do not operate at the same time. What this means is that if you are always or even predominantly goal-oriented, you are not giving your DMN enough time to process, and thus dampening or blocking your creativity. If there ever were evidence that compulsive goal setting is toxic to creativity, this is it.

For those of us who live in a task- and goal-oriented societies, such as the US, our CEN is usually well-developed and highly active. Hyperactive, even. We spend relatively little time intentionally encouraging our DMN. It does get activated regardless – any time you find yourself zoning out, thinking about the past or future, about other people’s emotions and motivations or your own, you are in DMN-land. But we don’t know how to use our DMN to our advantage, largely because we tend to view its associated thought process, i.e. daydreaming, meandering thoughts, and rumination, negatively. But they are essential to the creativity, in combination with the task-directed thought processes associated with CEN.

In order to be useful to creativity, the mental wandering of the DMN state must be somewhat directed. A free-for-all going on in there may be useful for other purposes (general relaxation, or just for fun), but for creativity, you must begin in the CEN and create a goal. However – and this is very important – the goal needs to be vague and broad, i.e. diffuse. So for example, lets say I want to write a novel. You’d be tempted to say the goal is “finish novel.” This is too specific. A diffuse set of related goals is better: write regularly, get to know characters better, have fun, learn stuff, etc. The reason diffuse goals are better is that one, they give you more targets to hit, and two, they give your brain more to work with. This is where the DMN shines.

Once you have your diffuse goal(s), creativity is divided into two parts that iteratively follow on each other. The first is CEN-related: you sit down and do your creative work. You write, or brainstorm, or play your music, whatever. The next part is DMN-related: you involve yourself in other activities that do not require you to explicitly focus on completing tasks. Passive enjoyment of something aesthetic is a great way to do this, like music, art, or TV shows that give you space to let your mind wander (ever feel compelled to zone out by binge watching mindless TV after arduous cognitive tasks? Yep, that’s your DMN making its needs known!). Other activities that are somewhat rote, like walking, gardening, or cleaning could also work. What you’re looking for is semi-boredom. You don’t want to be totally zonked, just relaxed. Importantly, don’t try to actively think about your creative project. Just let things percolate.

Guess what comes next? Yes! More CEN, task-oriented creative work. And so on and so forth. As you get better at going back and forth and learn to trust the DMN time more, you may find that you have more flashes of inspiration during your down time. At the very least, you’ll start to feel more creatively fulfilled once you realize that your creative work is part of a larger experience of life, and that your whole life, including your zone-out time, can be part of your creative process. You will begin to feel the benefits of this back-and-forth practice once you understand how it works and intentionally incorporate it into your life, because it naturally facilitates creativity. So give it a try!

* Information for this post comes from Elkhonon Goldberg, Creativity, Oxford University Press: 2018.

Give Boredom a Chance if You're Creatively Blocked

Why we should relearn how to be bored, and techniques for facilitating boredom.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I can remember often being bored as a child. I was of that generation that was largely left alone to raise itself – I had the freedom to run the neighborhood as I pleased, wasn’t overscheduled with extracurriculars, and I was a latchkey kid. I had lots of time to be bored. And I didn’t like the feeling! Being bored is usually an unpleasant sensation, and it’s particularly difficult for children to handle. We learn how to be bored as we mature, but not in a positive sense. We discipline ourselves into being able to sit still and not fiddle when we’re, say, listening to a boring lecture. We inure ourselves to boredom.  

Then when I was sixteen I spent a year with in Italy, where I lived with a family whose mother was from a Swiss Calvinist background. Boredom was not acceptable in that family. This was the first time I came across the belief that being bored is morally suspect. My host sister told me that when she complained about being bored as a child, she got yelled at. She was expected to fill her time with worthy tasks, be they play or work. Being bored was a sign of sloth and mental indolence.

Boredom, suffice it to say, does not have a good reputation. It’s either something to avoid at all costs, or it indicates something is wrong with us. But it may be key to creativity. There is a theory that creative people are more likely to get bored. But what if it’s the opposite?  What if people who are more likely to get bored have the capacity to be more creative? What if boredom is somehow necessary for creativity? If this is the case, it means that those of us trying to access our creative potential need to relearn how to be bored, and unlearn all the negative connotations we’ve internalized around boredom.  

Boredom is a “paradoxical emotion,” i.e. one that creates one emotional state in order to bring about its opposite. When we are bored, our immediate instinctual reaction is to move through it as soon as we can. We’ll pick up our phones, take a look at our to-do list, turn on the TV, anything to stop feeling bored. And that’s good! That shows that our minds are actively seeking engagement. This process contains the seeds of creativity – we just need to learn how to cultivate and enhance that. And the first step is to let ourselves be bored more often and for longer periods of time instead of immediately jumping into the first knee-jerk activity at hand.

One way to do this could be something similar to my intentional practice of wasting time. Whenever I find myself getting time anxiety, when I’m overwhelmed by all the things I feel I have to do, I sit down and breathe, and purposefully “waste” time until my mind has lighted on something I actually want to do. It is easy enough to repurpose this into a creativity practice, with a focus on letting the mind wander instead of settling on an activity. I call this type of thing “staring at a wall.” Give it a try. Just have a seat somewhere comfortable and stare at something. Maybe the scene out your window, or a cozy fire, or a fake fire on TV, or whatever. Sit through the antsy-ness. Don’t give in to your desire to get up and do something. Let your mind wander, and when it settles on something, gently push it to wander some more. The bored mind will naturally try to creatively solve its state of boredom. Let it cycle through a number of ideas and solutions. The important thing is to not see any of them as necessarily requiring action. The purpose of this exercise is to train your brain to work creatively.

Once you’ve loosened up your brain a bit by getting it used to boredom, you can step things up by using tasks that have a meditative quality to them, such as washing dishes by hand, as part of your creative practice. One of the most effective is walking. Writers in particular seem to find a regular walking habit conducive to creativity. Studies have shown that it’s the act of walking itself that enhances creative thought, so it can take place on a treadmill if that’s what’s available to you, but it must be somewhat leisurely. If you are walking explicitly for exercise, i.e. at a fast clip, it doesn’t work. When I was experiencing burnout and couldn’t write, I started walking daily through my neighborhood. I didn’t think of it as a creativity practice per se, but I eventually walked myself straight out of my creative block.

Two final activities that have been shown to enhance creativity are writing or reading something boring. And by boring, I mean very boring. One study actually gave participants pages from a phone book (lol so old-fashioned) to copy down by hand or read, and then tested them on creative tasks. Morning pages, where you write three handwritten pages in stream-of-consciousness style as soon as you wake up, may rely on the same mechanism. Another trick many writers use is to copy passages from other people’s work. While this is meant to help with learning writing style and technique, it is an inherently boring task (trust me, I’ve tried it).

Maybe you already have things in your own life you find deeply boring that you could repurpose as a creativity practice. Something that pops into mind for me is when I have to wait for something, like for other people to arrive, or in a medical office. See what you can come up with! Sometimes those “wasted” minutes and hours can be our most valuable.

Creativity Is the Antidote to Burnout: A Creative’s Manifesto for 2021

We don’t need anyone’s permission to be creative.

I coach clients who can’t seem to connect with their creative potential, often because of burnout. They know they’re creative people, or think they could be, or maybe they were one in their past life, but for some reason their creativity engine is broken. They feel called to create, but can’t make it happen. And it feels awful. It’s like having a terrible itch under your skin you can’t scratch – or worse. Creativity is an essential need of every human being, whether we recognize it or not, and without it our lives cease to be as meaningful. And for some of us, creativity is one of our primary needs. Burnout is an emergency for creatives, because when we lose our ability to be creative, our purpose in this world is gone. Life becomes like a living death.    

But when we try to seek out help, we run into a big problem. Most of the info out there on burnout is useless for creatives. It’s surface-level and it’s mostly saying the same thing. We live in a world of copious information that is all essentially a copy of itself, replicated over and over in the digital dimension through articles, blog posts, videos… Our info reservoir is cluttered with crap. This was my problem when I started looking for help with my own burnout. None of the available information resonated with me. It was all just more of the same. Please just stop with the four things I can do to cure my burnout! That stuff doesn’t work, at least it didn’t for me. The reason is that we don’t understand what burnout is. Not really.       

In its most severe form, burnout is the death of our creative capacities. And for creatives, it is often the result of years of living out of touch with our creative center – as we are required to do in order to “succeed” in conventional ways. So burnout, in creatives, is both caused by, and causes, this loss of ability to be creative. Note that I am not talking about what is typically labeled “creative burnout” here. Creative burnout is a type of fatigue that results from overwork in the creative realm, and taking a break to recharge can help. The kind of burnout I’m talking about results from a disconnection from the creative self; it happens when we have not allowed ourselves to live creativity-centered lives.

This kind of burnout is a whole-life phenomenon, and that’s why it can’t be solved in the way advised in all those burnout resources. You can’t just take up watercoloring and hope that it will fix your existential problem. Before you develop a specific creative practice, you have to open your life up to creativity – fit a creativity lens over your perspective, if you will. A solution to whole-life burnout is a whole-life creativity. What creativity is, at its core, is a type of problem solving. It’s figuring out how to do the stuff of your life in a way that suits you and inspires you. At an intellectual level, it’s figuring out answers to what puzzles you and arouses your curiosity. Creativity as a lifestyle is adaptive, responsive, and open-ended. It’s a way of being in the world.

You can’t develop a satisfying creative practice from the outside in. Without a connection to your creative source, that creative engine at the center of your existence, you will only ever be playing in the shallows of your creative potential. I wrote for years this way, and I turned out some good stuff I’m proud of, but it wasn’t a fulfilling practice. It wasn’t until I developed a sense of myself as a creative being, rather than just someone who does creative stuff sometimes, that I began to feel like I was tapping into my potential. I went from struggling to come up with a single creative idea to finding creative possibility everywhere, all the time, as if creativity is part of the very fabric of the universe. And it is – at the quantum level, our universe is one of infinite potentiality.

So let’s make this new year, 2021, one of tapping that creative potential. We can start by accepting that we have a right to be creative, not just in some things, but in all things. And by acknowledging that we aren’t just people who do creative things – we’re creative beings from the inside out. And finally, by respecting our own creative natures through internalizing the fundamental truth that we don’t need the permission of anyone outside of ourselves to be creative. We already have permission. We just need to open our eyes to it. We are creatives if we decide we are.

So go do it!

Why It Matters to Claim Your Identity as a Creative

Imposed identities can constrain us, but chosen identities can free us.

Nothing has helped me find fulfillment as a creative person more than deciding to view myself as a creative. Being a creative means more than just being involved in creative activities. It’s a particular way of experiencing and perceiving the world. I’ve always been a creative, but claiming that identity for myself felt, well, pretentious. Who am I to decide that I’m “a” creative? Isn’t that like saying I’m different and special in some way? Yes, it is. And that feels uncomfortable to me. But there’s no denying that I do experience and perceive the world differently. Not differently from everyone else, because there are a lot of creatives out there like me, but differently from the dominant culture. No one is going to bequeath me with this identity – it’s my responsibility to claim it for myself. And it’s my right. Everyone has that right. You have it. So try it on for size.    

Identities can give us permission to fully express ourselves, and this is what claiming the identity of a creative did for me. It provided me with an avenue for interpreting and describing my particular way of being in the world. No longer were my peculiarities and challenges signs of personal failure. No, they’re part of what it means to be a creative. And I’m not alone. There are other creatives out there! Hi, other creatives! You’re not alone, either.  

I want to explicate what being a creative means to me. Maybe it means something similar to you, or maybe not. Remember, you get to decide the contents of your own identity. Only you have sovereignty over the meaning of your own experience of being in the world. But I hope that what I have to say about my experience will resonate in a way that helps if you are struggling with direction and figuring out your place in the world as a creative person.

Here’s what I think. Creativity isn’t something any of us have to reach for. All human beings are naturally creative. But some people need creativity to be an explicit and pervasive part of their lives in order to feel fulfilled and happy. Often these people are the artists of society, but not always. Many creative people do not consider themselves artists, either because the term connotes creating at an elite level that they don’t feel they measure up to, or they don’t express their creativity through a “proper” art. While I think creative people of all kinds absolutely can and should claim the identity of artist, I personally prefer calling myself a creative.

My primary avenue of creative expression in the world is writing, and I do consider myself to be a writer. But my identity as a writer is fairly mundane: to me it simply indicates that I write. I write a lot. It’s part of my business, but I also journal, write fiction, and narrate experiences in my head (a common writer trait). Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but I also narrate out loud when I’m home alone (this is one of the reasons I decided to try podcasting haha). Being a writer means that I enjoy writing, do it as much as I can, and that I strive to be good at it. My identity as a creative serves a different purpose. It is less implicated with what I do, and more with what I am. Writing is what I do, but the way I experience and perceive the world is mediated through being a creative.

What that means to me is that my entire life in all its aspects is my ultimate creative project. Creativity isn’t just something I do in my leisure time. I approach everything I do – well, I try, at least – from the center of my creative being. I live from the inside of my creative capacity, and it lends its light and color to my experience of being in the world. I call this whole-life creativity. What you’ve probably picked up on by now is that I don’t define being a creative by specific personality traits. While I do think creatives tend to have certain characteristics, like sensitivity, introversion, and artistic sensibilities, I see being a creative as a combination of a need to experience the world and express the self through creativity, a preference for the use of generative, rather than productive, energy, and a sense of purpose that involves meaning-making.

What claiming the identity of a creative has done for me is given me permission to live my life as a creative without apology. Whereas before I struggled to feel that my life had meaning, I now have a strong sense that my purpose is to create meaning and put it out into the world. And that’s what I do, every day. I do it through my words, sure, but also through how I experience being myself in the world. For me, that’s the fullest expression of my creative potential, regardless of my productive output as a creative person.

Like all identities, my identity as a creative is an evolving thing. I prefer it to be that way. Your identity should be something you define, not the other way around. An identity will begin to constrain and limit you if you freeze it. But if you develop and open and accepting relationship with your identity, it will free you.

Getting Lost Is a Creative Apprenticeship If You Tell the Story Right

Learn to interpret your experiences in a way that points you toward your purpose.

Growing up, I always felt like I had my eyes on a target beyond the horizon. I knew there was something out there for me, but it seemed forever just out of reach. I kept trying for it even when it took me far from home and I felt utterly lost. I’m a seeker, as I think many creatives are. Having no roadmap for your life is exhilarating, but you will get lost. While it feels awful to go through, these times are your creative apprenticeship. Learning how to interpret your lost times can help you build a life that feels more meaningful and purpose-driven. The key is in how you tell your own story.

I’ll give you some examples from my own life of how this works. There have been two times that I’ve felt desperately lost. The first was when I returned from living overseas in my mid-twenties. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I ended up taking any job that came my way. One was at a young internet startup, with all the office culture you’d associate with such a place, and another was at a retirement home that included a dementia ward. I had a master’s degree at the time; none of this work required one. A conventional perspective would be that I was wasting my education or taking work beneath me, but those jobs remain among the most valuable experiences of my life. In retrospect, they comprised my creative apprenticeship in the spectrum of the human struggle of becoming, from youth work culture to the experience of getting old. This period of my life informs my fiction more than any other.

Think of this as constructing your creative resume, except the stuff that goes on it is everything that would look bad on a conventional resume. Take experiences that make you feel like a failure in the conventional realm and reinterpret them from the perspective of the creative realm. Unlike formal apprenticeships, you often don’t know what a creative apprenticeship is training you for until after you’re done. It takes form in the way that you tell your own story in retrospect. No one is going to do this for you, give you a stamp of approval that says “Real Artist.” It is up to you to legitimize your own experiences. And let me be clear: your life experiences do qualify you to be an artist, and you can adopt that identity right now. 

The second time I got lost on my journey was when I was trying to finish my dissertation. I only had the mental and emotional energy to write twenty minutes a day. I’d spend the morning working up to my twenty minutes, drag myself from bed to do them, and that was it for me, day over. It was awful, but I knew not finishing would feel worse, so I kept going. I recovered from the writing by reading advice columns. All of them. Dear Sugar, Captain Awkward, Ask Polly, Carolyn Hax, Dear Prudence, Ask a Manager…. I even read Care and Feeding and I don’t have kids. I read the daily questions, I read the archives, and then I googled “advice columns” to find more.

How pitiful was I? So depressed I spent most of my days in bed refreshing websites in hopes they’d put up another question about problems I didn’t even have. Needless to say, my self-esteem was in the gutter. But something was happening. I started practicing answering each question myself before I read the response. Not for any purpose, just because it was another way to distract myself and pass the time. I began having opinions about the quality of the responses, disagreeing with some, learning from others. And around this time my acquaintances were coming to me more and more about problems they were struggling with…because I gave good advice. After I’d finished my dissertation, I began to see that dark time in my life more constructively. What if it wasn’t wasted time but part of my training for my purpose in the world? There was a lot more that happened along the way, but long story short, I’m now a creativity coach. I didn’t set out with this goal in mind, but reframing my experiences from the perspective of creative apprenticeship helped me get here.

Learning how to tell your own story can help you realize that you are legitimately qualified to express who you are in the world in the way that you choose, and viewing your experiences as training – apprenticeship – can help you tell that story. If you want to live a fully liberated creative life without apologies, it’s essential that you believe from the depths of your being that you have a right to do so. And you do. You’ve earned that right. You’ve got this. You’ve trained for it.

So take a look at your own experiences, and in particular the stuff that conventional mores tell you isn’t valuable. How do you spend your down time, when you aren’t involved in stuff you have to do? What we gravitate toward when we are depleted by life responsibilities shows us what sustains and inspires us. You may be thinking something like, “I spend that time scrolling through IG/binging on Netflix/staring at a wall.” Look deeper. What feeds do you follow, what catches your eye? What do you obsess over? What are you fantasizing about? What do you love learning about? What opens the door to that realm where time disappears and you are fully absorbed by what you are doing/thinking/seeing? This is the creative realm, and the more you learn how to work with the creative energy that permeates it, the more meaningful and purpose-driven your life will feel to you. And you might just discover your life purpose. 

The One Thing I Got Wrong About "Follow Your Bliss"

Figuring this one thing out changed everything for me.

This post is now a podcast episode!

Let’s be real: after enough living it’s easy to come to the conclusion that directives like “follow your bliss” are bullshit. The simple equation of do what you love = successful and happy life seems to only work out for a vaunted few. The rest of us mere mortals are just trying to survive each day with our sanity intact. We’re lucky if we have any energy left over to follow our bliss – if we even know what our bliss is. I used to think I knew. For me, it’s writing. But somewhere along the way it stopped being my bliss. After years of struggling to make something of my writing, my joy in it had evaporated. All meaning I’d found in it was gone; I no longer knew why I was bothering to do it at all. Eventually my burnout became so extreme I was unable to write. But I’m stubborn, and I still believed that I was meant to be a writer. That’s when I realized I had a fundamental misunderstanding of “follow your bliss.” It’s not bullshit after all – I’d just been doing it wrong.

The one thing I’d failed to understand about “follow your bliss” is that my bliss is incompatible with success and happiness as those are defined within our capitalist system. I know what you’re thinking. Sure, some people do succeed within that system by following their passion. A friend of mine built a lucrative party catering business from one hotdog cart. So what’s his secret? Nothing more than this: his bliss already fit the system. He’s an extraverted natural salesman. Me? I’m an introverted creative. Creative work by its very nature does not fit the system: it’s generative rather than productive, emerges on a slower schedule than what is profitable, and creative products don’t have a large market. It’s rare for creatives to make a living from their work – not impossible, but very, very difficult. And in order to do so, it often involves a sacrifice that kills their creative capacities.

The incommensurability between creative work and conventional work may seem obvious, but for creatives who are struggling to fit both in, or better yet find paying work that allows for at least some creativity, things get muddied. The problem is that creative work gets relegated to the leftover time and spaces, after the productive, money-earning work is done. And this never ends well for creatives, because it means that who they are is diminished and confined to the leftovers. When I finally understood that this two-track life would never lead to anywhere but burnout for me, everything changed. I realized I needed to shift the lens through which I experienced life. I will always have to earn money somehow, but I wanted to find a way to live from my creative center in everything I did, because that’s the only way my spirit could regenerate and thrive. I call this whole-life creativity, and it showed me what “follow your bliss” really means.

It should be called “living your bliss,” because that’s what it is, and I believe that’s how Joseph Campbell, the originator of the saying, meant it. He saw it as a state of being in which you have fully committed to manifesting an expression of your true self in the world. This is similar to what Brené Brown terms “wholehearted living,” but Campbell, a scholar of world mythologies, saw it as having an esoteric and spiritual dimension. He conceptualized the experience of following your bliss as being on your destined track, where your life is harmonized with what the universe wants for you. He alternatively called this state of being “refreshment” or “rapture,” that feeling of being truly alive. So following your bliss isn’t really about doing what you love – it’s about experiencing the act of living from that creative well of life itself, the place where wonder, astonishment, and joy come from. We can access that place through doing what we love, that is, doing the thing that allows us to speak the language of our soul into the world.

I used to think that following your bliss was hard, something only a lucky few got to do, but that was because I was forcing myself to accept and pursue the values of the conventional capitalist system while simultaneously attempting to keep the flame of my creative spirit alive – and I failed at both. But it was only when my creative flame finally burned out that I became truly capable of following my bliss, because I had nothing else to lose at that point. I committed myself fully to living from my creative center. This involves a tremendous amount of trust, both in myself and the universe, because it’s risky in every way: financially, emotionally, relationally, reputationally. Full commitment means entering a territory of total and uncharted uncertainty. You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy steps off the cliff? That’s what it feels like. It’s petrifying. But I still find it easier than splitting myself between my creative soul and my false conventional self. It took descending into that dark place of being confronted with my own failures and despair to gain the perspective I needed to start living my bliss.

We all have our own journeys and no one’s individual path looks like anyone else’s. But creatives come across similar obstacles on their way, and the biggest is trying to live their bliss in a society undergirded by a system that does not support the creative life. It’s an obstacle that reappears again and again, but we can diminish its power to block and divert us by claiming, and committing to, our identities as creatives. It’s okay if this happens in stages – in fact the daily devotional act of living from your creative center is, in large part, what it means to be a creative. Simply making the decision to try that today and the next day and onward is how you can begin to follow your bliss.

How Creatives Can Use Crisis to Overcome Blocks

We are designed to thrive in the liminality.

These days it feels like the world is experiencing a lumbering, unending crisis. The pandemic, political and social turmoil, and the looming threat of climate change…the emotional weight of all this is profound. For creatives, times such as these can be overwhelming because they feel everything intensely. Creatives often find themselves blocked during crises because the process of creativity requires openness and receptivity, and painful times cause people to shut down. But I’ll let you in on a secret: creatives are actually meant to thrive in crises. Crisis signals that big changes are occurring. This space of transition, between what came before and what will come after, is called the liminality. It is a time when old rules and traditions are breaking down, and it holds infinite creative possibility for new ways of being. Creatives are optimized for the liminality because they are able to sense and take advantage of this creative possibility. So how can creatives work through their blocks and access their creative potential?   

If you are a creative and find yourself blocked during tumultuous and unstable times, consider that the reason may not be the crisis state itself. Creatives are generally empaths, meaning they feel and absorb the emotions of those around them, including those of the wider population they live among. During times of crisis, people feel stressed, frightened, confused, grief-stricken, and angry. Creatives pick up on that; nor are they immune to these emotional reactions themselves. The difference is, creatives also have a deep intuitive sense of the potentialities of crisis, and they have access to the full range of emotions that crisis provokes – including excitement and inspiration. If you are experiencing a creative block, it may be because you are tuning in more strongly with your empathic nature than your intuitive one.

There are some steps you can take to reroute your perception through your intuitive, creative nature. The first is to accept that you are energized by things that others may experience as wholly negative. Crisis times are scary and depressing, no doubt, but you don’t have to experience them that way just because other people do. You can acknowledge the challenges of living in times of great uncertainty while also seeing that such times are full of possibility because of their uncertain nature. Things are changing in interesting ways. The old reality is falling away; we don’t yet know the contours of the new reality. As a creative, it’s natural for you to feel energized in unsure situations that cause many to react with caution or fear – embrace that without guilt.

Another step you can take to access your intuitive, creative capacities is to trust your own perceptions. While it’s good to stay informed, no viewpoint presented on media platforms has a claim on truth. We create our realities through how we perceive the world, and you possess sole sovereignty over your own reality. Pay attention to what you are seeing and feeling. Make note of those little sparks of interest and excitement that flare up, the ones that don’t jive with what anyone else seems to be experiencing or talking about. Explore your thoughts and feelings that seem out of sync. That’s your intuition working for you. Believe what your intuition is telling you. 

I’m going to get esoteric with this last step. Creatives experience reality as circular or spiraled, rather than linear. We live in a linear, rational society, but internally creatives reside in multiple and intersecting realities. Consequently, their feelings and thoughts are complex and multifaceted, and they can struggle with identifying which are “real” or “true.” Here’s the thing: they’re all real and true. Especially the ones that contradict each other. The ambiguity of liminality opens up creatives’ sensitivity to paradox, where multiple seemingly opposing things are simultaneously true. This is a very uncomfortable place to dwell in, but being able to sit with paradox is essential to the generation of creative work because it is where pure creative energy resides. As a creative, you are a channel for this energy – you manifest it in the world. Pure creativity energy imbues everything you think, feel, and do; it is your calling to recognize that and embody it. 

The era we are living in right now is one of liminality. It’s an extraordinary time in the literal sense of that word: we are outside of ordinary times, refugees from the familiar. But crises can also occur on a purely personal scale. It took me a long time to realize that throughout my life I’ve actually sought out and generated personal crises because I’m a creative – I just thought I was neurotic and unstable! But no, it’s because I require crisis in order to grow as a creative. Learning to deal with crisis, whether it be imposed or self-generated, in a constructive rather than destructive way is key to creative thriving. The in-betweenness of liminality is a threshold, a space where nothing is sure, and everything is possible.* So step on up: wonders await you. 

*Based on a quote by Margaret Drabble

Fall Into Your Flourishing

How to find your natural flourish points.

The other day a friend told me to lean into my flourishing, and my immediate thought was no, I want to fall into it like it’s marshmallow fluff, I want it to envelope me. This sums up my approach to life over the last year or so, since I’ve recovered from burnout. I don’t want things to be hard. Instead of fighting with life, I want to allow it to happen. I’m ready for a gentler experience. Leaning into something, as originally used by Sheryl Sandberg, meant to be assertive and take the lead. This is not my style. But even the softer way the phrase is often used, to indicate embracing something wholeheartedly, can seem like too much of a struggle sometimes. Right now, I want to flourish effortlessly.

Is such a thing possible? Aren’t we supposed to work hard for what we want? In fact, flourishing should be especially hard to achieve, right? Someone who is flourishing has really made it, they’re living their best life. It’s a decadent, indulgent state of being. Many of us have a deep-seated conviction that we don’t deserve to flourish. Or that we haven’t earned it yet. Or that it would be wrong to flourish when there is so much suffering and injustice in the world. Flourishing, it seems, is a condition that is conditional. Adding to its mysterious nature, it is often unachievable no matter how much effort we expend.

And therein lies the contradiction, this idea that we have to work hard to flourish. Flourishing actually implies effortlessness: it’s a condition that naturally arises when we are in our element. Maybe flourishing isn’t something we have to work toward, but something we already have available to us. Maybe it’s as simple as closing our eyes, opening up our arms, and falling backward into its enveloping.

In fact, we can look backward into our past to discover how we can flourish. Think about what brought you joy and comfort as a child. Before all the “shoulds” entered your life, what activities did you gravitate toward without thought, simply because you loved doing them? These are your natural flourish points. Chances are, these same activities have resurfaced in your life over and over as you matured, but in different forms. Here’s an example of what I mean. After school every day when the weather was good, I’d plunge into the large wooded property owned by my neighbors, two elderly sisters who were very kind about allowing me to play there. I loved spending time in nature; I had a special grove with a fallen tree I’d sit on for hours, lost in dreams, just enjoying being myself. When I was older I gravitated toward activities such as camping and hiking. Now, even older, I am learning how to care for a vegetable garden. Being in nature is one of my flourish points.

Here’s another. My hobby as a child was reading. But it was more like an obsession than a hobby. I spent nearly every free moment reading. I would have read at the dinner table had it been allowed. I also noticed early on that I am a mental narrator – I have a habit of putting my experiences and thoughts into words in my head, full sentences and paragraphs, throughout the day. I have full-on conversations with myself in there. When I grew up I became a writer and a scholar. I still spend most of my free hours reading everything I can on all kinds of topics. Over the years I’ve written fiction, policy articles, and scholarly works. Now I’m blogging. Reading, thinking, and writing are my flourish points.

Recognizing your flourish points can help you gain a sense of self. There may be some that you haven’t developed throughout your life that you can pick up again, and you may find additional ways to express those you have kept up with. This is how we flourish, but doing more of the things that come naturally to us and make us feel good. It seems obvious, yet it’s not, because we are used to judging flourishing by outside markers of achievement, such as career and family. But if we switch our evaluation to internal markers, how we feel about things, we gain clarity. What makes you feel joy, comfort, excitement? Understanding this will lead you to your natural flourish points.

Are You Still Searching for a Job That’s the Right Fit?

Maybe trying to find the “right” job is the wrong approach.

I’m one of the many creatives who decided early on that I would pursue “regular” jobs rather than attempt a creative career. As a writer of fiction, I was realistic about my chances of ever making a living off of it. So I tried to find jobs that were “parallel” to my writing, jobs that involved writing and that would allow me to be a novelist in my spare time. This failed on two fronts. I didn’t end up writing many novels, let alone publishing any, and I found myself severely burned out by the time I was in my mid-thirties. I’d always believed that there was a “right” job out there for me, but I never found it. I tried one thing and then another, and failed to capitalize on my experiences and build a career of note. 

I never could get the hang of the linear, progressive career trajectory, and this made me feel that something was wrong with me. What I realize now is that my story is typical for creatives. The problem isn’t us. It’s that we are part of a system that tries to assimilate those who would live by a different set of values. Creatives just aren’t that good for the economy. We want to do what we want to do, and when a job ceases to inspire us, we cannot stay in it and remain sane. On top of this, we have very limited reserves for dealing with bullshit. So our work histories often look patchy, and we get questions about why we haven’t made anything of ourselves, given our talents.

This perspective is built on faulty assumptions about what we should want or pursue in our working lives. Let’s tear some of those assumptions down.  

Career trajectory is a lie

The idea of a career trajectory is just that: an idea. It’s an idealized model of what a “successful” career looks like that has emerged from a system that values the productive capacity of workers. A successful worker is someone who is consistently productive up to the point of no longer being able to contribute, i.e. retirement. The problem is that fulfilling work and a successful career are usually at odds, because they operate on opposing tracks. A traditional career trajectory is meant to benefit the organization you work for, and through that the larger economy. People who stay in one industry and move up the promotion ladder are efficient cogs in a smoothly running machine. A fulfilling career, on the other hand, is for the benefit of the worker. It may sometimes happily coincide with the ideal career trajectory, but mostly not. It may have starts and stops, an industry switch, retraining, or any number of inefficient moves. The system, while paying lip service to the idea of a fulfilling career, will punish you in numerous ways for trying to have one. Anything like a spotty work history or one that seems to lack focus will be a detriment in job hunting. And thus the truth is revealed: the system does not actually want you to be fulfilled by your work, unless it is a side effect of your productive capacity.

Creatives are particularly disadvantaged in this system. It’s not because we cannot find fulfilling work. It’s that in order to continue to be fulfilled, we need to feel inspired – and generally working in the same career for our whole lives isn’t going to do it. What feels like the right path can quickly become the wrong one once we have reaped all the inspiration we can from it. Our system likes to frame this experience as that job not having been the right one to begin with. This puts the responsibility squarely on the worker to find the job that will be “the one,” in which they can finally fulfill the capitalist requirement of sustained productivity. But creatives are not linear people, nor do we function well within rationalized systems that constrain creativity. We usually end up blaming ourselves for being “unfocused,” “lazy,” “selfish,” or any other negative character trait the system likes to assign to people who fail at traditional career trajectory. In this environment, creatives can often begin to distrust their instincts.

No. Trust your instincts. In a system designed around precepts that are fundamentally at odds with how you need to live your life, your choices will inevitably look bad or wrong, or perhaps even like failures. They’re not. 

Career trajectories don’t exist anymore, anyway

In high school I can remember being told that kids in my generation were the first who could not expect to do as well as their parents. I imagine this is even more true for youth today. I came up during the era of bankrupt pension funds and a loss of trust in big companies. Now we are transitioning to a gig economy in which long-term, secure jobs with good benefits are increasingly scarce. It’s a painful time to be alive – but some of this is actually good news for creatives. Why? Because we are built for times such as these. We understand job insecurity because we’ve always dealt with being unable to settle down. Many of us already have the experience of patching together a living that allows us to continue our art. And we have a head start on dealing with the feelings of inadequacy that come from not being able to build a traditional career. So keep on doing your thing, creatives! 

You will never “figure things out” (hopefully)

The other day I was listening to a podcast by a woman about a decade younger than me who was talking about how it took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, and that she’d finally done it. I remember feeling exactly that way at her age. And I couldn’t help but smile at her confidence and enthusiasm. It’s likely she’ll need to reinvent herself a few more times before her allotted life is over.

Make no mistake: there is no such thing as figuring it out, at least not for all time. You may find something that works now, and it may feel like it’s The Thing, but I can promise you that you will grow to a point where you’ll need something new. This is a good thing! Follow those instincts. Life is long (well, hopefully), so don’t fall for the lie that it should look like education/preparation → marriage/kids → career/savings → retirement/“fun” → decline/death. Instead of feeling inadequate if your life veers around and seems to fold back on itself, be proud of it. “You have to live spherically, in many different directions,” as Federico Fellini said. “Never lose your childish enthusiasm, and things will come your way.” Words to live by for creatives!

You Are a Real Artist Already

Don’t think you’re a “real” artist? Here I tell you why that’s bullshit.

I’ve always secretly doubted I’m a true creative. Sure, I was always doing art or writing stories as a kid, but I knew there were more talented kids out there. My best friend in high school was so obviously more artistically talented than me that I wasn’t sure if I admired her or was deeply jealous. Both! When I started writing seriously I remember saying to her that I know I’m no Milan Kundera – who was apparently the writer I thought at that time was one of the “real” artists. I thought I was just being realistic about my talents. But actually, how I saw myself was based purely on my own insecurities. I have always undersold myself and set the bar low.

Even while I dedicated myself to writing, I felt like I was pretending. So I sought out opportunities in life that I thought would help me develop a fulfilling (and money-making) career, and I kept my art on the back burner. I never stopped writing, but I didn’t prioritize it or fully commit to it. And predictably, I didn’t find success with it. That is to say, I didn’t get anything published. I came close a number of times, but the process of submissions and rejections was so demoralizing I eventually gave it up. And then one day I found I couldn’t write. I began to believe that maybe I wasn’t a writer anymore. Maybe I had never truly been one.

You’re reading this because I eventually came out of that dark place. And I learned some important lessons along the way I want to pass on to other creatives struggling with life choices and where their art fits in to it all. All these lessons fit a philosophy of creative living I call whole-life creativity. It’s what it sounds like: creativity that is the generative source of all you do, not an activity confined to the extra minutes left over. Creativity should be how you live every moment of your life. Let me explain.

Do Art to Live

I used to think my real life was the money-making work I did, and that my art, as sacred as it was to me, was something that I would have to do on my own time. Like a hobby. I knew I’d never make money off my fiction – I don’t write best-seller material – so I found jobs that included writing, thinking they would be the closest I’d come to supporting myself doing what I love. And I wasn’t wrong about that. What I was wrong about was how I valued my writing and prioritized it. 

See, I believed I would only qualify as real writer if I was “successful” at it – that is, I earned money from it. And I knew this would never happen with my fiction. Therefore, my fiction did not deserve to be what I prioritized in my life. Real life was the work-a-day life, and my fiction was like my shadow life. Real in my own heart, perhaps, but not in the eyes of the world. None of this made me a happy person. 

A couple pivots had to happen in my perspective for my misery living this way to lift. One, I had to completely divorce art from money. In fact, I had to outright reject the idea of earning any money at all with my writing. Once this link was decoupled, I was able to begin valuing my fiction for what it brought into my life. The joy of a dedicated practice of an art. Knowing I’m a real writer because and only because I sit down and write. Writing whatever the hell I want because probably no one’s going to read it anyway.

This first pivot naturally led to the second: Writing quickly became what feeds my life. I realized that before I had simply been doing art, and that now I was living art. My approach to writing became an embodiment of a new approach to life, one that was focused on experiencing it rather than milking all my time and effort for quantifiable results. The unexpected irony of this was that I ended up writing far more than I ever had before. In developing my whole life into a practice of creativity, something in me bloomed, and the words started coming back.

Once I realized that I needed to do art to live - and not the other way around, living to do my art - everything became clear. Writing is one way I choose to express my creativity, but it is just one part of a greater art: my life. The way I live my life day in and day out, from moment to moment, is my true art. My writing isn’t just something I do during a time I set apart. It is woven through all aspects of my day. A walk I take in the morning may inspire an afternoon writing fiction; that writing session may spark something I write here. The words are always there. I just need to be open to them and listen. The same is true of any creative endeavor. The ideas are already there - and the more you open your life up to be your greatest art, the more inspired you will feel in whatever you choose as your artistic craft.