Books for Creatives
For more than forty years, I have worked with writers, visual artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, and other creative people on the challenges that come with making art and trying to sustain a creative life.
Creative people face distinctive challenges. We must find the courage to begin, tolerate uncertainty, manage anxiety and self-doubt, maintain a regular creative practice, complete what we start, deal with criticism and rejection, navigate the marketplace, and continually renew our sense that our efforts matter.
Much of my work as a creativity coach, therapist, teacher, and writer has been devoted to understanding those challenges and developing practical ways to meet them. The following dozen books approach the creative life from various angles: the realities of the creative process, the anxieties that attach to each stage of that process, the importance of daily attention and practice, the special existential risks that creators face, and the challenge of building and sustaining a creative career. I hope that these books will serve you.
Fearless Creating
Fearless Creating explores the creative process from the first wish to create through choosing, beginning, working, completing, and finally showing and selling your work. At every stage, anxiety can arise and interfere. The book identifies those predictable anxieties and offers practical strategies for meeting them. Its central message is not that creative people can eliminate fear, but that they can learn to create deeply and courageously in its presence.
Creativity for Life
Creativity for Life looks broadly at what it takes to sustain a creative life over the long haul. Drawing on the experiences of writers, artists, performers, and other creators, it explores the habits, attitudes, choices, and challenges that shape a life devoted to creating. Rather than treating creativity as an occasional burst of inspiration, the book asks what it means to organize a life around making—and how to remain productive, resilient, and creatively alive through changing circumstances.
Coaching the Artist Within
What if you could become your own creativity coach? Coaching the Artist Within presents twelve essential self-coaching skills for sustaining a creative life. Through examples, exercises, and practical strategies, it addresses committing to your work, generating mental energy, managing anxiety, creating meaning, planning effectively, maintaining focus, and keeping your creative life alive over time. It is both an introduction to creativity coaching and a guide to becoming a more effective self-coach.
The Van Gogh Blues
Creative people are especially vulnerable to crises of meaning: Does my work matter? Does my life as a creator matter? What if my efforts come to nothing? The Van Gogh Blues explores the relationship between creativity, depression, and meaning and offers a meaning-centered approach to the emotional challenges of the creative life. It is a book about learning to make and maintain meaning even when creating is difficult and the answers are uncertain.
Mastering Creative Anxiety
Anxiety accompanies virtually every part of the creative process—from beginning and choosing to performing, finishing, being judged, and entering the marketplace. Mastering Creative Anxiety identifies more than twenty common sources of anxiety for writers, visual artists, musicians, actors, and other creators and provides practical strategies for handling them. The aim is not to wait until anxiety disappears, but to become sufficiently skilled at managing it that you can keep creating.
The Power of Daily Practice
Our intentions matter, but what we actually do each day matters more. The Power of Daily Practice shows how a regular practice can help creative and performing artists—and anyone pursuing an important goal—turn aspirations into action. It explores how to design a practice that fits your life, maintain it despite resistance and distraction, and return to it when you fall away. A creative life is built not only on inspiration, but on showing up.
The Creativity Book
The Creativity Book offers a year-long journey into the creative life, with practical ideas, exercises, reflections, and encouragement designed to help you create more regularly and more freely. Its 52-week structure makes creativity an ongoing practice rather than an abstract aspiration. The book addresses the inner and outer challenges that interfere with creating while helping readers strengthen the habits, confidence, self-awareness, and commitment needed to bring more creativity into everyday life.
Unleashing the Artist Within
Unleashing the Artist Within is an invitation to take your creativity seriously and to understand what it asks of you. It addresses the obstacles that prevent people from creating freely and consistently and offers practical ways to strengthen your relationship with your own creative impulses. For aspiring and established creators alike, it is about moving beyond hesitation and self-censorship and giving yourself permission to make, experiment, risk, and grow.
Making Your Creative Mark
Creating the work is only part of the creative life. Making Your Creative Mark addresses the challenge of building and sustaining a creative career. Organized around nine keys to achieving your artistic goals, it explores such matters as identity, confidence, passion, freedom, relationships, and the marketplace. It is for creative people who want not only to make meaningful work but also to become more skillful at navigating the professional realities of bringing that work into the world.
Creative Recovery
Written with Susan Raeburn, Creative Recovery addresses the particular relationship between creativity and addiction. Designed specifically for writers, artists, musicians, and other creators, it explores how the creative personality can contribute both to vulnerability and to recovery. The book offers a comprehensive approach to using creativity itself in the service of recovery, with exercises and strategies aimed at helping creative people build an addiction-free life in which their creativity can flourish.
A Writer's Paris
Creating the work is only part of the creative life. Making Your Creative Mark addresses the challenge of building and sustaining a creative career. Organized around nine keys to achieving your artistic goals, it explores such matters as identity, confidence, passion, freedom, relationships, and the marketplace. It is for creative people who want not only to make meaningful work but also to become more skillful at navigating the professional realities of bringing that work into the world.
A Writer's San Francisco
San Francisco can be not merely a place to visit but a place in which to become more observant, imaginative, and alive as a writer. A Writer’s San Francisco combines reflections on the writing life with invitations to explore the city creatively. It encourages writers to use neighborhoods, cafés, streets, landscapes, encounters, and solitude as material and inspiration—and, more broadly, to discover how deeply a sense of place can nourish a writing practice.