Writing and Art Matter!

At my writing group last night, one member – I’ll call her Julia – said she was recovering from the flu. Possibly the dreaded H1N1, we decided after hearing about her symptoms. On one day, when she became dehydrated and nearly delirious, she said she kept torturing herself with the thought that her writing was worthless, that she should be spending her time doing something to “help people” instead. “I still am feeling that way a little bit,” she confessed. “It won’t quite go away.”

I know so well this tricky turn of mind, this saboteur, this ambivalence toward creating art that arrives with sickness or other vulnerabilities – an uncertain income, a move to a new city. The rest of us rallied for her, trying to dispel her grey sky that wouldn’t clear. “It helps people to write something that is cathartic for them to read.” “When we’re creating, we’re more alive, and when we’re more alive, we’re more useful to the world.” “Besides, we don’t choose our art; it chooses us. We create because we must.”

Someone asked Julia, “Is the act of writing important to you?” Suddenly our friend’s face shifted from worried to peaceful, residually sick to the picture of health, dark cloud to beaming light. “Of course,” she said, smiling.

When I took Eric Maisel’s class on creativity coaching, he asked us to begin each day by writing “I matter and my writing matters.”

Art does matter. Writing does matter. Of course.

Read more!

Iowa Writing Coach: Talking Yourself into Creating

What do you do when an idea for a novel (or painting or other creative work) drops out of the sky, but after the first few flushes of loving the work, you stop believing that the work is valuable? What you do is you talk yourself into creating.

Here’s how my own talk-on-paper went this morning:

Why am I stalled after the fourth chapter of this novel? Well, first, there’s the nagging doubt that it will amount to anything. Then there’s the feeling that working on the novel is just a big excuse not to be doing the long list of things I should be doing, like prospecting for “real” writing work that pays the bills (like marketing publications).

And yet at the same time, when I think about my real desire in life, isn’t it to write books? And aren’t I lucky to have this idea for a book, the writing of which could mean joy and respite from a long cold winter – not to mention a tax deduction for dancing lessons AND a few trips to California, since both are needed for research?

At the very least, couldn’t this novel be a practice ground for future novels to come? I have one bad novel under my belt; why not two? Isn’t this idea for the novel actually a total gift?

As I talked to myself on paper, it became increasingly clear that with my drive to write the novel, I was being gifted with a classic “meaning adventure,” a phrase coined by Eric Maisel in The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path through Depression (New World Library, 2002). In this book, Maisel argues that creators tend to deal more often with existential questions about meaning because we are individualists who doubt traditional wisdom and insist on providing our own answers to questions of meaning. This quality, of course, leaves us vulnerable to meaning crises – even depression. However, because we are creative, we also have amazing opportunities for meaning adventures – such as I am experiencing as I continue to work on the novel.

Sometimes you just have to remind yourself how lucky you are to be driven to create, and to have something in mind to create. Indeed, ideas for new projects are both a gift and an adventure.

Read more!

Iowa Writing Coach: Got 15 Minutes? Make Something.

I took an online course from Eric Maisel last year. The focus of the course was coaching other writers, but I was so in need of a motivational kick in the pants as a writer/artist that I elected to coach myself while I took the course. For me, the most useful exercise during the twelve-week course was developing the practice of devoting fifteen minutes to a creative project, several times a day -- in and around the other responsibilities I had at the time.

What I learned during this exercise is that even when you're half-mad at your partner because his job means a move you don't want to make, and even when you have work to do to pay the bills that isn't all that engaging at the time, it turns out that if you can devote at least two or three fifteen-minute sessions a day to your own creative projects, you will find the energy you need to move forward.

During this time of relative chaos I was able to make amazing progress on a book proposal about the freelancing life (okay, it got shelved but I plan to reignite the project this winter) and I was able to sketch the sweet view out of our upstairs bathroom window in Ames, Iowa -- a view that I had savored for the five years we lived there. I was so pleased to be able to capture the essence of that view that I forgot to be sad about moving that day.

Fifteen minutes can do wonders. Try it: make something.

Read more!