when being creative is like herding cats
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Creativity expert Julia Cameron, writing in her creativity manual “The Artist’s Way”, notes that blocked creative types resort to an addictive cocktail of blocks: obsessions with work, food, alcohol, sex or love and more, in whatever form is handy to soothe us. These feel-good-for-the-moment behaviors are essentially creative U-turns made to alleviate fear.
Many Different [...]
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Winding up Week 9 of The Artist’s Way creativity program, we look again at how to break through artistic or creative blocks, now from the perspective of how we convince or trick ourselves into thinking that staying blocked — by anger/resentment or fear/resistance — can pay off.
Name your Blocks
For creative people, there are many reasons [...]
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Each time I’ve come through The Artist’s Way Chapter 8, I find myself on the verge of precisely what author Julia Cameron addresses in Chapter 9: making a dastardly Creative U-Turn. It’s likely you’ll find yourself in the same risky situation because it’s not unusual!
The Artist’s Way Process
The ninth chapter of this powerful creativity manual [...]
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Estee Lauder said, “First comes the shy wish. Then you must have
the heart to have the dream. Then, you work. And work.”
A similar thing could be said about the creative process. You might have an initial inspiration, a spark, an idea, a feeling. But to bring that creativity to life, you must take action. [...]
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According to Julia Cameron, many creative people spend years mislabeling themselves. When we do not create the way we think we should, we label ourselves lazy when in fact we are blocked by fear. The way past fear, asserts Cameron, is through love for your inner artist. Your inner artist is like a child in [...]
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“Filling the form” means to respect the creative process by making the commitment each day to take the next required step, and then the next step after that. We simply make small changes and take small actions right now where we are, with what we have available, to ultimately shift the trajectory of our creative [...]
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In Chapter 8 of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron labels the belief “I’m too old to create” excuse a “Great Block Lie” and considers it on a par with that other old saw, “I don’t have money for it.” Using the “too old” excuse is so convenient. And the longer you wait to begin, [...]
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According to Julia Cameron, we need to take the pain of artistic losses or failures and ask: “How does this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?” What if you could turn that pain into creative energy to recover and keep moving forward? What if you could use a painful creative loss [...]
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Week 8 of the Artist’s Way program discusses how to nurture hope and the courage to create despite the pain and loss of failure. I’d say, “Non illegitimi te carborundum*” pretty much sums it up; the chapter title is “Recovering a Sense of Strength.”
Many Kinds of Artistic Loss
Julia Cameron considers artistic survival to be the [...]
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Being creative and creating new work involve taking risks and “moving out of the head and into action” as Julia Cameron succinctly describes it in The Artist’s Way. But most of us are very careful not to take risks. We’d rather be safe, but safety keeps us blocked, and so we are stuck. Is this [...]
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