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Unless you are impervious to the facts of existence—and no one is—you must learn how to create in the middle of things. You must learn how to create when wars are raging and when your own hormones are raging. You must learn how to create even if you hate your country’s policies or your own painting style. You must learn how to create even if you are embroiled in a bad marriage or living alone and lonely. You must learn how to create even if you work eight hours a day at a silly job or, sometimes worse, find yourself at home all day with time on your hands.
If you wait for a better time to create, better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your usual worries, or free of your everyday skin, forget about it. You will still be waiting tomorrow and the next day. You will be waiting for a very long time, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering how you did such an excellent job of disappointing yourself. Nothing is less useful to a creator than the romantic idea that inspiration is necessary, that a visit from the muse is required. Such visitations are splendid but the muse only comes if you are already making an effort to create in the middle of things.
How do most people meet this profound challenge, that life never presents them with the ideal time to create? They don’t. They don’t create. A thousand things defeat them. One day it’s that they’re very busy. The next day it’s that they aren’t in the mood. The day after it’s that they have to recover from a spat or from a piece of criticism. Always it is something. Most people aren’t as creative as they wish they were because they haven’t mastered strategies for creating in the middle of things. That is one sort of bad answer: not knowing what to do and not making the effort to find out.
A second bad answer is to violently withdraw from life. In order to reduce the number of things in which they are in the middle—like relationships—some creators and would-be creators slam the door shut on life. They manage to create in their hiding place but at the very high cost of alienation, loneliness and unhappiness. Whereas solitude is both necessary and beautiful in a creator’s life, a violent withdrawal from life is a terrible response to this real predicament. Nor, of course, have they escaped, for they are still squarely in the middle of their personality, their thoughts, and a psychological place—because they are hiding and at war with life—that they experience as dark and difficult.
A third bad answer is to sporadically and accidentally create, that is, to only create when some fortuitous alignment of the spheres causes a creative impulse to course through you. You paint, then paint again two years or a decade later. You write eleven poems in your lifetime. You are always wanting to create but you actually create only a tiny percentage of the time. This is as unacceptable an answer as the first two. You do not actualize your potential this way and you disappoint yourself during those long stretches of time while you wait for your next flash of inspiration.
Not bothering to create, violently withdrawing from life so as to create, and sporadically and accidentally creating are not good approaches. What are some good approaches? You get a grip on your mind. You name and then honor your life purposes. You convince yourself that meaning must be made, not sought after or waited for. You learn how to generate (and modulate) your creative fires. And you become an excellent creativity self-coach, someone who understands the rigors and contours of the creative journey.
So glad I took the time to read this well stated, well written and timely post. Thank you for sharing. I felt as if I was getting a much needed good-talking-to!
good article. I started painting less than 3 years ago. I’m now 72. I was inspired by my home schooled grand kids that are very good painters and artists in their young ages. I first started by watching Bob Ross videos and learning wet on wet. Once I got a sense of that, i moved to acrylic and found how much easier it is to handle than oils. I have done some decent work and have canned a few in the ole deep six curbside p/u. I have many that are waiting to be finished( ha) . As you said it is not about inspiration etc. I have used all of that to excuse my lack of creating . So, I have learned just to do it and if a piece I’m working on isn’t making its appearance known, I stop, brushes down. I quit forcing the composition and let the composition appear. It’s amazing how that happens. I don’t draw, sketch,or trace, I create what I see and feel. Most of what I have done comes out of my mind, not from trying to paint something that I’m looking at or that has captured my attention. I don’t worry about results, it’s the idea that I’m creating something new. 12 years ago I began writing poetry and ended up with around 300 pieces. I wrote a few short stories, essays, commentaries as well. I started writing lyrics and ran into a family member who is a musician at my MIL funeral. He was 3 songs short of completing a disc. He asked me to send him over some of my poetry and we put together 3 songs where I wrote the words and he wrote the melodies and they are on that disc. That was the beginning of more creativity in that area with a few more songs completed, recorded. the ability to create is within all of us, just gotta let it flow.
AWE!SOME