Tag Archives: creativity

Barbara Sher on Raising Horses in the Basement

Barbara Sher changed my life. I mean, I changed my life, really. But Barbara Sher helped me figure out how. I was between jobs, lost and aimless, and making lists of business ideas, story ideas, project ideas, ideas ideas ideas. I felt crappy about having so many ideas. Why couldn’t I pick a single project? Why couldn’t I focus? No wonder I was unemployed. Again. Clearly, I was a loser who would never fulfill her potential because she couldn’t pick something and stick with it from beginning to end.

So there I was, moping around my local bookstore feeling like a total loser, when I glanced at one of the shelves and felt my heart give a hopeful little thrill. There facing out at me was Babara Sher’s amazing handbook for the omni-directionally interested: Refuse to Choose. I read the first two chapters standing up in the store, then took it home and devoured it in a night. I even did every exercise. Which is how the Fairy Tale Factory was born while I simultaneously completed a photo-essay, renovated my garden, and found the best day job I ever had.

If you’ll pardon my French, Barbara Sher is the shit. But don’t take my word for it. See for yourself:

Creativity on Demand

You know the hardest part about doing creative work for a living? You guessed it: making good work even when your heart protests that it’s all dried up and wrung out, and your mind feels like an empty warehouse with a few bits of trash blowing through it. It’s a terrible feeling, and if you give it too much attention, you can sideline yourself for days, weeks, even years.

The poison usually lies in our expectations. “Oh, no! I have to do good work now. I can’t do good work. This sucks. Everything I write sucks. My best work is behind me and there’s nothing left but a long, demoralizing limp into the sunset, blahblahblah etc.” This is especially true for me when someone is paying me for my so-called sucky output. It’s bad enough that I don’t feel clever. Now I’m potentially a rip-off artist and a fraud, and the house of cards is about to come down. My parents will be so disappointed.

However, I have discovered a secret cure-all for this paralyzing anxiety: just do the work anyway. Or, as my sainted father likes to say, “Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.” Our minds are much like children. All it takes is a simple redirect into honest, no-expectations work and it’s shocking how quickly that nervous whining and fussing disappears. Just focus on the assignment (if you don’t have a formal assignment, give yourself one – write 500 words, write about something blue, whatever) and start doing the work. You are a rotten judge of whether your output is any good while you’re in the middle of writing, so stop worrying about it and concentrate instead on writing every silly thing that’s in your head about the color blue (or whatever).

This can be hard when people are watching you. One of my most uncomfortable client experiences was a brainstorming session with the principal of an agency who rolled his eyes, sighed in disappointment, and checked his email through the whole session. (He was a data guy, not a creative!) I wanted to run to the bathroom and cry, or quit the gig on the spot, but I didn’t. I took a deep breath (several deep breaths) and kept on brain dumping, even though this guy almost had me convinced that I was dumb as a sack of rocks and should just go home.

I’d like to say the story ended with hugs and congratulations all around. What really happened is that I delivered a site’s worth of solid, compelling copy to not much fanfare, collected my fee, and politely referred him to another writer for updates and future copy needs. I was ashamed to look at their site for months after it went live because I was sure my work was stinky. But the other day curiosity got the best of me, and I read through their entire (huge) site. And you know what? My copy rocks! I did really good work for that agency.

One of my favorite writing assignments to give is to tell my students to write the worst stories they can imagine. “Go home and write crap! Write the most cliched, garbage-y, terrible fairy tales you can imagine. Then bring your God forsaken, lumpen, monstrously dull creations to class next week and we’ll do something fun with them.”

Inevitably, they come back with hilarious, refreshing, totally wild stories. By the end of class, they’re energized, inspired, and fearless because they faced their worst fears and found that they were, like Rilke’s dragon, really princesses only waiting to see them once beautiful and brave.

The moral of the story: Just write. Stop worrying so much and write. Put one word after the other, trust in your native faculty for language and story, and write. You can judge it later, I promise.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

–Teddy Roosevelt

Women, Creativity, Stories

Delicious video of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, Judith Weir on the Charlie Rose Show talking about a collaboration they did called Woman.Life.Song. Interesting, funny, intelligent conversation about creativity, femininity, and more.

Marvel Comics version of the Wizard of Oz

The insanely talented Skottie Young and Eric Shanower are collaborating on a comic book version of the L. Frank Baum classic, The Wizard of Oz.

Read what Skottie Young has to say about translating this lovely old chestnut into the medium of comics.

Courtesy of Super Punch.

Your creativity does not have to kill you, or even hurt you

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, talks brilliantly about creativity and our cultural relationship to it.

Brought to you courtesty of noise to signal.

Duplex Planet

My friend and site illustrator, Jeremy Eaton, sent me a link this morning to a site called Duplex Planet. On the surface, it’s about old people. This is a good thing in itself. But Duplex Planet, like all good creations, is about so much more than its obvious subject matter. It’s about seeing what is, instead of what you expect to see. It’s about giving people the gift of listening to what they’re saying, instead of what you think they should be saying.

Here’s a quote from David Greenberger, the founder of Duplex Planet:

“In 1979 I took a job as activities director at a nursing home in Boston. I had just completed a degree in fine arts as a painter. On the day that I first met the residents of the nursing home, I abandoned painting. That is to say, I discarded the brushes and canvas, not the underlying desire to see something in the world around me and then communicate it to others. In this unexpected setting I found my medium. I wanted others to know these people as I did.

From the start I felt that oral history was unsuitable to my needs. When newcomers hear that I have regular conversations and interviews with elderly people, they assume I collect oral history. What that assumption implies is that when one grows old we become solely a repository of our past. This notion is so entrenched that we seem to willingly grow old, talking only of our past. From the start, my mission has been to offer a range of characters who are already old, so that we can get to know them as they are in the present, without celebrating or mourning who they were before. Since the elderly are already thought of by what they have in common – that they’re all old – I try to recast them as individuals. I quote and write about them in order to address the larger world. The audience/reader meets them and comes to feel the characters are familiar, people they might want to spend time with. The men and women whose individualities expose the myths of aging are not extraordinary. They are typical in their unique humanness.”

So what does this have to do with fairy tales? Everything and nothing, I suppose. I think the hardest thing about creating is learning to be still enough inside to catch at the threads of passion that make engaging work. To see what’s interesting to us, instead of what we think will interest other people. It takes a lot of courage to highlight your raw, tender places and publicly explore them (which is one of the things we do when we make art).

So when I look at Duplex Planet, I see several things. I see someone bravely celebrating the inhabitants of one of the shadow lands of our culture. And I see someone who is tuned in to his own radio station. Think of your heart as a radio station. Now think about whether you’re getting good reception. David Greenberger is getting awesome reception, and he’s broadcasting his station out to the rest of us. This is, to me, the foundation of all creative expression. Technical skill is great. God knows the world needs it. But even more important than technical proficiency is the ability to get good reception for the radio stations of our hearts.

The 6 Ws

I have a delightful day job. If you go here, and you look carefully, you will find four ghostly white boxes that glow when the image first loads and then again when you mouse over any one of them. The boxes are little trivia Easter eggs that take you on innernets adventures when you click on them. My job is to decide where the links will take you, and to write the copy that pops up when you mouse over the boxes.

The point here is not so much to brag about my job or to pimp the site, as it is to set the stage for the six Ws. My boss, in describing our editorial philosophy, came up with this, “We tell a story about the image. We have the Who, What, When, Where, and Why, and then we add the Wacky.” Wacky is the sixth W!

So what does this have to do with fairy tales? Not much, when you look at it head on. But it has a lot to do with good writing and the creative process. No matter what your experience level, it’s really easy to lock yourself down in a tangle of shoulds, oughts, and unreasonable expectations when you’re working on a piece. The first five Ws are vitally important, it’s true. But it’s the sixth W, the wacky, that can infuse a dry, dusty, technically flawless creation with the juicy passion that brings it to life.

Don’t be afraid of your wacky ideas. Try to set your creative compass so that true North is passion and delight. Life is too short to edit out the things that truly engage us, no matter how silly or uncomfortable or weird they might seem at first blush.