a narrative arts space

Week 3 Book Club

The Buddha says, “If we’re facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep walking.”

 

    • Journal

    • Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments

    • Take one small step in service to your creative project.

    • Peruse the full list of “Choose Your Own Adventure” prompts from class. Consider choosing another one and trying it out!

  • Mary Oliver’s The Journey

    Elizabeth Gilbert’s Your Elusive Creative Genius

    David Whyte on the Conversational Nature of Reality

  • Project Mapping: Break down your project into tiny steps, jotting down quick and achievable tasks to make progress every day, and plot onto a map that outlines the journey of your project, with milestones and celebrations along the way.

    For now, allow the trajectory of the project to be untethered by time. Combine your goals/intentions and group these bullet points into handful of small tasks and milestones to outline the project’s journey. Consider benchmarks, milestones to celebrate along the way, steps you need to take, things you still want to learn, how you want to put it out in the world. Can you include room to breathe and to be non-linear and to welcome intuition and breaks and shift gears if that’s what ends up being needed? What extrinsic motivations might you include?

    Begin — task — task— milestone — task — task — milestone — task— task — finish

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    Blackout Poem: Use a discarded magazine or newspaper to select key words and phrases for a blackout poem, discovering hidden messages about your creative project.

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    Symbol Exploration: Identify key symbols or objects in your project, then delve into their metaphorical meanings and how they enhance your creative piece.

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    Vision Board: Gather images, words, and textures to build a visual board that reflects the themes, tone, or essence of your project.

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    Creative Ritual: Create a ritual or routine to help you begin working on your project every day. What actions or items help you get into the zone?

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    Shitty First Draft: Embrace the messy beginnings and as quickly as possible, create a “Shitty First Draft” letting your ideas flow without judgment.

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    Sensory Exploration: Describe your creative project through all six senses (sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, intuition) to explore its full sensory impact.

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    Metaphor Mapping: Pick a card (from a tarot deck, perhaps) and explore how its metaphor or image relates to your project or creative process.

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    Companion Piece: Imagine a companion piece to your project—something small that complements or contrasts with your main idea.

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    Object Storytelling: Choose a meaningful object in your possession and craft a narrative that connects it to your creative project. What role does it play in your project’s universe, and how does it symbolize or influence the themes or characters involved? Explore its significance as a metaphor or tool within your creative work.

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    Random Word Association: Select random words or phrases from a book and connect them to your project—allow the unexpected to inspire new angles.

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    SoulCollage: Cut out images, words, and textures that explore what this project may reveal to you about yourself in the process of making it.

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    Backstory Creation: Develop a backstory or lore for a small, often overlooked detail of your creative project.

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    Unexpected Collage: Select a few random images from magazines, newspapers, or scraps and create a collage that visually represents a new direction for your project. Let the images guide you into unexpected territory.

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    Acrostic Poem Puzzle: Write a short title for your project vertically and use the letters to create a poem, offering a unique perspective on your idea.


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    Symbol Expansion: Choose a symbol that represents the soul of your project and draw it on a piece of paper, then add layers, textures, or visual elements that expand or transform its meaning. How can you build upon this symbol to explore and express the core of your project? Consider how these additions might reflect your project's themes, emotions, or story.

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    Treasure Mapping: Create a treasure map of the journey to complete your project, including potential discoveries and treasures that might be discovered (about you or the piece) along the way! What terrain will you have to navigate?

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    Tarot Inspiration: Draw a tarot card and let it serve as a guiding force for your project. Interpret its symbolism and apply it to your creative work. How does this card’s message inform the direction of your project? Create a visual or written response to this revelation.

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    Medium Swap: Imagine how your project would transform if it were created in a different medium (e.g., painting, dance, music). Explore the possibilities.

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    Past/Present/Future: Lay out a three-card tarot spread to explore your project’s past, present, and future. Reflect on how the cards’ meanings relate to the stages of your creative work, and use these insights to guide your next steps.

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    Time Travel: Transport your project to different time periods—how would it evolve in the past, present, or future? Explore different eras and their impact.

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    Story Boarding: Create a story board for either your creative piece, as you envision it now, or what your ideal creative process would look like in the act of creating it.

    • What sensations arise when you feel your intuition guiding you? How do you listen to it?

    • What does “trusting the process” mean to you in your creative life?

    • Can chaos feel comforting or inspiring? How might you reframe its presence in your creative journey?

    • When you have multiple ideas, how do you sense which one is ready to bloom?

    • Reflect on a moment when your creativity felt effortless. What conditions made it possible?

    • How do you tend to respond when inspiration feels fleeting or intangible?

    • What patterns or themes emerge in the ideas you’re drawn to? What might these say about you?

    • How do you balance spontaneity and structure in your creative process?

    • Imagine your intuition as a collaborator in your work. How would you describe its personality?

    • What rituals or practices help you capture and nurture new ideas?

    • Reflect on a time when an unexpected twist or accident made your work stronger. What does that teach you about adaptability?

    • What metaphors resonate with how you approach creativity (e.g., a garden, a storm, a puzzle)?

    • What role does mystery play in your art? How can you lean into the unknown?

    • Where do you feel most “in flow” creatively? What about that space or moment makes it special?

    • What are the "seeds" of ideas currently waiting for you to plant them? What’s stopping you?

    • How do you discern whether an idea is worth pursuing?

    • What does it feel like when an idea "chooses you" rather than the other way around?

    • What’s a creative question or problem you’re wrestling with right now? How can you approach it intuitively?

    • Who or what inspires you to think more expansively about your potential?

    • How can you deepen your connection to the sources of energy and inspiration in your life?

Recommend Readings

  • Excerpt from The Artist’s Way  
    By Julia Cameron  

    What do I mean by filling the form? I mean taking the next small step instead of skipping  ahead to a large one for which you may not yet be prepared. To be very specific, in order to  sell a screenplay, you must first write one. In order to write one, you must come up with an  idea and then commit it to paper, a page at a time until you have about 120 pages of script.  Filling the form means that you write your daily pages. It means that when obsession strikes —as it will —about how the damn thing is not any good, you tell yourself that this is a  question for later and turn back to doing what is the next right thing. And that means you  write the pages of the day.  

    If you break a screenplay down into daily increments, that small smattering of writing can  get done quickly and promptly—before the dirty laundry. And it can carry you through the  rest of your day guilt-free and less anxious.  

    Most of the time, the next right thing is something small: washing out your paintbrushes,  stopping by the art supply store and getting your clay, checking the local paper for a list of  acting classes... As a rule of thumb, it is best to just admit that there is always one action you  can take for your creativity daily. This daily-action commitment fills the form.  

    All too often, when people look to having a more creative life, they hold an unspoken and  often unacknowledged expectation, or fear, that they will be abandoning life as they know it.  

    “I can’t be a writer and stay in this marriage.”  

    “I can’t pursue my painting and stay at this dull job.”  

    “I can’t commit to acting and stay in Chicago... or Seattle or Atlanta...”  

    Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop.  This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing. By setting the jumps too high and  making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. Who can  concentrate on a first drawing class when he is obsessing about having to divorce his wife  and leave town? Who can turn toe out in modern jazz form when she is busy reading the ads  for a new apartment since she will have to break up with her lover to concentrate on her art?  

    Instead of clearing out the little room off the kitchen so that we will have a place to work on  our pottery, we complain about needing a studio—a complaint that we ourselves cannot take  seriously since we do not have any work to argue our case.  

    Indulging ourselves in frantic fantasy of what our life would look like if we were real artists,  we fail to see the many small creative changes that we could make at this very moment. This  kind of look-at-the-big-picture thinking ignores the fact that a creative life is grounded on  many, many small steps and very, very few large leaps. 

    Rather than taking a scary baby step toward our dreams, we rush to the edge of the cliff and  then stand there, quaking, saying, “I can’t leap. I can’t. I can’t....”  

    No one is asking you to leap. That’s just drama, and, for the purposes of creative recovery,  drama belongs on the page or on the canvas or in the clay or in the acting class or in the act  of creativity, however small.  

    Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible,  and we tend to hate that. You mean I have to do something in order to feel better?  

    Yes. And most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead.  One of our favorite things to do—instead of our art—is to contemplate the odds.  

    In a creative career, thinking about the odds is a drink of emotional poison. It robs us of the  dignity of art-as-process and puts us at the mercy of imagined powers out there.Taking this  drink quickly leads to a severe and toxic emotional bender. It leads us to ask, “What’s the  use?” instead of “What next?”  

    As a rule of thumb, the odds are what we use to procrastinate about doing what comes next.  This is our addiction to anxiety in lieu of action. Once you catch on to this, the jig is up.  Watch yourself for a week and notice the way you will pick up an anxious thought, almost  like a joint, to blow off—or at least delay—your next creative action.  

    You’ve cleared a morning to write or paint but then you realize the clothes are dirty. “I’ll just  think about what I want to paint and fine-tune it while I fold the clothes,” you tell yourself.  What you really mean is, “Instead of painting anything, I will worry about it some more.”  Somehow, the laundry takes over your whole morning.  

    Most blocked creatives have an active addiction to anxiety. We prefer the low-grade pain  and occasional heart- stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps  in the right direction.  

    Filling the form means that we must work with what we have rather than languish in  complaints over what we have not.  

    ...Take one small daily action instead of indulging in the big questions. When we allow  ourselves to wallow in the big questions, we fail to find the small answers. What we are  talking about here is a concept of change grounded in respect —respect for where we are as  well as where we wish to go. We are looking not to grand strokes of change— although they  may come—but instead to the act of creatively husbanding all that is in the present: this job,  this house, this relationship.  

    Recovering creatives commonly undergo bouts of fierce rage and grief over their lost years.  When these creative kriyas occur, we desperately want to kick over the traces and get the  hell out of life as it is currently constituted. Instead, make changes, small changes, right  where you are. Fill this form with creative care until it overflows into a newer, larger form— organically. 

    As the poet Theodore Roethke phrases it, “We learn by going/Where we have to go.” We  have found that when we fill the form, we do not often need to make large changes. Large  changes occur in tiny increments. It is useful to think in terms of a space flight: by altering  the launch trajectory very slightly, a great difference can be made over time.  

    [pp 138-144]  

  • Excerpt from One Small Step Can Change Your Life 
    By Robert Mauer 

    If you’ve ever tackled a big creative project such as writing a speech, you know how daunting  the task is. You stock your printer with fresh paper, pour a steaming cup of coffee, call up  your word processing program, and ask yourself: What kind of opening would leave my  audience spellbound? or How can I persuade one hundred dubious employees to accept the  new plan I’m presenting? And then you stare at the blank screen. You fidget. Your mouth  goes dry. Your insides begin to buzz.  

    Even if you’re not aware of it, your fight-or-flight response is kicking in; that feeling you  might call “writer’s block” is actually fear. The question you’ve asked yourself is too large  and frightening. You’ve awakened your amygdala, and your cortex has simply shut down.  

    Michale Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, uses small questions when he sits down to  write his novels. “I don’t have any grand themes in my head,” he says (a statement you’ll  hear echoed by other great writers). Nor does he start with an impossibly large question,  such as “What kind of chapter would be fascinating to readers?” Instead he takes a few  incidents—“like [a] plane crash or the idea of a patient and a nurse at night talking”—and  asks himself a few very small questions, such as “Who is the man in the plan? Why is he  there? Why does he crash? What year is this?” Of the answers to small questions, he says,  “Those little fragments, fragments of mosaics, they add up and you start finding out the past  of these characters and trying to invent a past for these characters.” The answers to his small  questions eventually lead him to remarkably round, realistic characters and prize-wining  novels.  

    Even if you’re not an aspiring novelist, small questions can help calm the fears that squelch  creativity in other realms of life. Consider how the microwave was invented, for example.  Perry Spencer didn’t sit around the house, drumming his fingers and pounding his  forehead, thinking, “How, how, how can I invent a device that will revolutionize kitchens  around the world?” Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, was at work one day when he left his  candy bar too close to some radar equipment. The snack melted, and he asked himself,  “Why would radar have this effect on food?” This small question led to answers that led him  to other small questions whose answers eventually changed how you and I make dinner. 

    You want to do something creative: write a story or a song, paint a picture, dream up your  perfect career, or come up with a zinger of a solution to an office problem. But you have no  idea where to start. Your mind keeps coming up empty.  

    During times like this, kaizen can help you summon your powers of inspiration. Although  you can’t force your brain to cough up creative ideas on demand, you can program it to  launch the imaginative process simply by asking yourself a small question. Here are some of  the most popular small questions my clients use for creativity. …Whatever question you use,  your challenge is to ask it with a gentle and patient spirit. When you use a harsh or urgent  tone with yourself, fear will clog the creative process.  

    • What’s one thing I wish to contribute to the world with my book, poem, song, or painting?  • Whom could I ask for help or inspiration?  

    • What is special about my creative process/talents/business team?  

    • What type of work would excite and fulfill me?  

    Remember: if you repeat the question over the course of several days or weeks—or for  however long it takes—the hippocampus (the part of the brain that stores information) will  have no choice but to address it. And in its own way, on its own timetable, the brain will  begin giving you answers.  

    [pp. 67-71]  

  • Excerpt from Bird by Bird  
    By Anne Lamott  

    You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your  unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten  every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and  bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a  little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock,  yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you  squint at an image that is forming in your mind—a scene, a locale, a character, whatever— and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say  above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys.  They are the voices of anxiety, judgement, doom, and guilt. Also, severe hypochondria. They  may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods  that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that  must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the  desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have  meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every 

    ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of  irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.  

    Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at  the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words  together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain,  

    to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events  come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and  hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.  

    I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a  whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land  flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller. But I don’t. All I know is that the  process is pretty much the same for everyone I know. The good news is that some days it  feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants  to be written can you use to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to  discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will  come if only you show up and make a stab at it. And often the right words do come and you  —well—“write” for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper.  

    But the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written  and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can  completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn  how bad your first drafts are.  

    The obsessing may keep you awake, or the self-loathing may cause you to fall into a  narcoleptic coma before dinner. But let’s just say that you do fall asleep at a normal hour.  Then the odds are that you will wake up at four in the morning, having dreamed that you  have died. Death turns out to feel much more frantic than you had imagined. Typically you’ll  try to comfort yourself by thinking about the day’s work—the day’s excrementitious work.  You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaningless  of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you; you may find yourself consumed  with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you  will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not  be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with  cancer.  

    And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do you morning  things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the  desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph  with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of  dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.” You look up and stare  out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you  don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write  to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind  when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the  story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning 

    what you aren’t writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision,  beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite  pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what  his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is.  

    And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. And it  really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run: “his heels hitting  heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic  growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”  

    I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit  there long enough, something will happen.  

    [pp 6-10]  

  • Excerpt from Big Magic  
    By Elizabeth Gilbert  

    Through the mere act of creating something— anything—you might inadvertently produce  work that is magnificent, eternal, or important. You might not, on the other hand. But if  your calling is to make things, then you still have to make things in order to live out your  highest creative potential—and also in order to remain sane. Possessing a creative mind,  after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs work, or else it will cause  you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to  do and you might not like the job it invents (eating the couch, digging a hole through the  living room floor, biting the mailman, etc.). It has taken me years to learn this, but it does  seem to be the case that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively  destroying something (myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind).  

    I firmly believe that we all need to find something to do in our lives that stops us from eating  the couch. Whether we make a profession out of it or not, we all need an activity that is  beyond the mundane and takes us out of our established and limiting roles in society  (mother, employee, neighbor, brother, boss, etc.). We all need something that helps us  forget ourselves for awhile—to momentarily forget our age, our gender, our socioeconomic  background, our duties, our failures, and all that we have lost and screwed up. We need  something that takes us so far out of ourselves that we forget to eat, forget to pee, forget to  mow the lawn, forget to resent our enemies, forget to brood over our insecurities. Prayer can  do that for us, community service can do it, sex can do it, exercise can do it, and substance  abuse can certainly do it (albeit with god-awful consequences)—but creative living can do it,  too. Perhaps creativity’s greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a  short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who  we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir—something 

    that you made, something to remind you of your brief but transformative encounter with  inspiration.  

    An abiding stereotype of creativity is that it turns people crazy. I disagree: Not expressing  creativity turns people crazy. (“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth  with save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth with  destroy you.” – Gospel of Thomas.) Bring forth what is within you, then, whether it succeeds  

    or fails. Do it whether the final product (your souvenir) is crap or gold. Do it whether the  critics love you or hate you—or whether the critics have never heard of you and perhaps will  never hear of you. Do it whether people get it or don’t get it.  

    It doesn’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be Plato. It’s just all an instinct and an  experiment and a mystery, so begin.  

    Begin anywhere. Preferably right now. And if the greatness should ever accidentally stumble  upon you, let it catch you hard at work.  

    Hard at work, and sane.  

    [pp 171-173]  

  • Excerpt from Happier  
    By Tal Ben-Shahar  

    In Aristotle’s words, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a  habit.”  

    People are sometimes resistant to the idea of introducing rituals because they believe that  ritualistic behavior may detract from spontaneity or creativity—especially when it comes to  interpersonal rituals such as a regular date with one’s spouse, or artistic rituals, like  painting. However, if we do not ritualize activities—whether working out in the gym,  spending time with our family, or reading for pleasure—we often don’t get to them, and  rather than being spontaneous, we become reactive (to other’s demands on our time and  energy). In an overall structured, ritualized life, we certainly don’t need to have each hour of  the day accounted for and can thus leave time for spontaneous behavior; more importantly,  we can integrate spontaneity into a ritual as, for example, deciding spontaneously where we  go on the ritualized date. The most creative individuals—whether artists, businesspeople, or  parents—have rituals they follow. Paradoxically, the routine frees them up to be creative and  spontaneous.  

    [pp 10]  

  • Excerpt from The Creative Habit  
    By Twyla Tharp  

    The only bad thing about having a good creative day is that it ends, and there’s no guarantee  we can repeat it tomorrow. One good day does not necessarily beget another. But there are  ways to increase the chances of successive successes. Ernest Hemingway had the nifty trick  of always calling it a day at a point when he knew what came next. He built himself a bridge  to the next day. I cannot think of a better creative organizational tool. The Hemingway  bridge is how you extend a mini-groove...  

    A savvy stand-up comedian always knows to leave the audience begging for more. You  should do the same with your work. Don’t drive yourself to the point of being totally spent.  Try to stop while you have a few drops left in the tank, and use that fuel to build a bridge to  the next day.  

    Some people, if only for sanity and the maintenance of human routine, give themselves a  creative quota. Painters stop when they fill up a measurable section of the canvas,  playwrights when they draft out a complete scene, writers when they hit one thousand  words or the clock chimes 5:00PM. They stop no matter where they are on the canvas or  page. I know one writer who gives himself both options: He stops at a set time or when he  hits his word quota, whichever comes first. He is religious about this routine. But he  connects to the next day with a fixed nighttime routine as well: Just before he falls asleep, he  reads the last few sentences he wrote. Without fail, he wakes up the next morning brimming  with ideas, sentences, whole paragraphs, for the next portion of his story. He claims he flies  out of bed sometimes so he can get all the words down before they disappear. Apparently,  filled up with words and ideas before sleep gives his tired brain some useful work to do as it  regroups and refreshes itself overnight. What his conscious brain can’t handle, his  subconscious can.  

    He may be one of those blessed individuals who can compartmentalize his thoughts and  turn his creativity on and off at will. But he’s on to something useful. In effect, he’s letting  his subconscious build his bridge for him. That just might work for you, too.  

    In every situation, at the beginning or end of a workday, you have a choice. You can look  back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day.  Don’t go into the studio thinking: “Hmmm, let’s see, what was I doing yesterday?” It takes  more energy to twist yourself around and look back than it does to face forward.  

    [pp 205-206]  

  • Excerpt from Free Play 
    By Stephen Nachmanovitch  

    Anyone who studies an instrument, sport, or other art form must deal with practice,  experience, and training. We learn only by doing. There is a gigantic difference between the  projects we imagine doing or plan to do and the ones we actually do. It is like the difference  between a fantasized romance and one in which we really encounter another human being  with all his or her complexities. Everyone knows this, yet we are inevitably taken aback by  the effort and patience needed in the realization. A person may have great creative  proclivities, glorious inspirations, and exalted feelings, but there is no creativity unless  creations actually come into existence.  

    Conservatories and music departments have long corridors lined with rows of tiny practice  rooms, each containing a piano and a music stand, with walls more or less soundproofed.  Once I was walking down such a corridor into an office. A sign was taped on the door: THIS  IS NO LONGER A PRACTICE ROOM. Some trickster had come along later and scribbled  underneath: NOW IT’S PERFECT!  

    Our stereotypical formula, “practice makes perfect,” carries with it some subtle and serious  problems. We think of practice as an activity done in a special context to prepare for  performance or the “real thing.” But if we split practice from the real thing, neither one of  them will be very real. Through this split, many children have been irrevocably taught to  hate the piano or violin or music itself by the pedantic drill of oppressively boring exercises.  Many others have been taught to hate literature, mathematics, or the very idea of productive  work.  

    The most frustrating, agonizing part of creative work, and the one we grapple with every day  in practice, is our encounter with the gap between what we feel and what we can express.  Often, we look at ourselves and feel  

    that everything is lacking! It is in this gap, the zone of the unknown, where we feel most  deeply—but are most inarticulate.  

    Technique can bridge this gap. It also can widen it. When we see technique or skill as  “something” to be attained, we again fall into the dichotomy between “practice” and  “perfect,” which leads us into any number of vicious circles. If we improvise with an  instrument, tool, or idea that we know well, we have the solid technique for expressing  ourselves. But the technique can get too solid—we can become so used to knowing how it  should be done that we become distanced from the freshness of today’s situation. This is the  danger that inheres in the very competence that we acquire in practice. Competence that  loses a sense of its root in the playful spirit becomes ensconced in rigid forms of  professionalism.  

    The Western idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to our work ethic,  which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The  Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or 

    reveal the complete person who is already there. This is not practice for something, but  complete practice, which suffices unto itself. In Zen training they speak of sweeping the  floor, or eating, as practice. Walking as practice.  

    When we explode the artificial categories of exercise and real music, each tone we play is at  once an exploration of technique and a full expression of spirit. No matter how expert we  may become, we need to continually relearn how to play with the beginner’s bow, beginner’s  breath, beginner’s body. Thus we recover the innocence, the curiosity, the desire that  impelled us to play in the first place. Thus we discover the necessary unity of practice and  performance. It was this tasty sense of process that first clued me in to the practical  relevance of Zen to music.  

    Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.  

    You don’t have to practice boring exercises, but you do have to practice something. If you  find the practice boring, don’t run away from it, but don’t tolerate it either. Transform it into  something that suits you. If you are bored playing a scale, play the same eight tones but  change the order. Then change the rhythm. Then change the tone color. Presto, you have  just improvised. If you don’t think the result is very good, you have the power to change it— now there is both a supply of raw material and some judgment to feed back into the process.  This is especially effective with classically trained musicians who think they can’t play  without a score, or can’t develop technique without exact repetition of some exercise in a  book. But it also applies to the scales of dance, drawing, theater. In any art we can take the  most basic and simple technique, shift it around and personalize it until it becomes  something that engages you.  

    Exercise of technique is not boring or interesting in and of itself; it is we who manufacture  the boredom. “Boredom,” “fascination,” “play,” “drudgery,” “high drama,” “seduction,”—all  are names of contexts we place on what we do and how we perceive it.  

    …Practice gives the creative processes a steady momentum, so that when imaginative  surprises occur (whether they be thrown toward us by accident or brought up from within  the unconscious), they can be incorporated into the growing, breathing organism of our  imagination. Here we perform the most essential synthesis—stretching out the moments of  inspiration into a continuous flow of doing. Inspirations are no longer mere flashes of  insight that come and go at the whim of the gods.  

    [pp 66-72]

Sources

Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Penguin Random House, 2002 
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books, 2016.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1995.
London, Peter. No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within. Shambhala Publications, 1989.
Maurer, Robert. One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. Workman Publishing Company, 2004. 
Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Erin Hallagan Clare9 Comments