Mysterious Flame

When you’re creating things, you can’t rely on inspiration alone, only painting, writing, sculpting, whatever, when the mood strikes. You have to show up on a regular basis, day in and day out. Creative efforts require a lot of commitment and professionalism. When you do this, you will be “favored by the Muse(s),” if you follow a more mystical viewpoint a la Stephen Pressfield or Julia Cameron. I like how Chuck Close puts it:

“I always say that inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

In an interview with NPR, Chuck Close talks about how his modular marks (I think of them as hot dogs) wind up becoming massive nine-foot self-portraits just through hard work and dedication.

Put this practice into action by setting specific times to work, then stick to it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be 8:00 am to 5:00 PM, but it does need to be consistent and regular. (I know one artist who goes to bed at 8 or 9 PM and gets up at 3 AM to paint, and he does some pretty amazing stuff.) Personally, I try to set aside Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons to paint, since that’s what works best with my schedule.

Morning Pages are another form of showing up. (In fact, I think Julia Cameron uses the phrase “showing up at the page” in her book The Artist’s Way.) You show up and you write, dumping out everything that’s in your mind and on your chest, stream-of-conscious style. Showing up like this also gives you the benefit of figuring out what you really need to be doing.

So if you really want to bust creative block and “turn professional,” you have to show up on a regular basis.

I’ve talked about gumption traps a lot recently: gumption traps in general and in specific for artists and graphic designers. Gumption traps, or creative blocks as they’re more commonly called when applied to creative disciplines, are common to all, but they appear to crop up most often for beginners. The seasoned artist experiences blocks, too. Perhaps as often if not more often than the beginner. The thing is, the pro isn’t set back for very long, while the beginner may get stuck on something for a long time.

How the Professional Confronts Creative Blocks

When faced with a trap or a block, the seasoned professional:

• Recognizes traps for what they are
  They’re setbacks that can get you stuck if you let them, but nothing that can’t be overcome.
• Has dealt with them before
  He or she knows from experience what to do in those tricky situations that stump beginners. Not to imply that every problem has a ready-made solution out there, but an artist will encounter a lot of similar problems in his lifetime.

Does an experienced artist whine, gripe, and complain about a particular piece? You betcha. But he moves on and keeps doing his work, not letting a little setback keep him down. It’s part of “turning pro” as it’s explained in The War of Art. It’s all about attitude.

I’m not dead yet!

The bottom line is this: the dedicated professional knows he’ll survive no matter what blocks come his way. He’s lived through them before. So why get worked up over one little setback now, if the setbacks in the past were overcome at some point?

Not enough to qualify for me to use to write complete posts (although one or two have the potential for me to expand upon at some future date), here are some links I’ve come across recently that you might find useful in your creative efforts.

• 19 Online Destinations for Boosting Creativity | LifeDev
  What the title says. Not all of these are favorites of mine, but they may help you.
• TED Talks: Do schools kill creativity?
  Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
• Designing Through the Storm | A List Apart
  “We’ve all experienced low points, and whether they’re caused by tight timelines, hostile clients, infighting, personal disasters, or something else entirely, we have to find a way to work through them.”
• 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity
  Lifehack.org talks about some tips to get your creativity rolling.
• 12 Ways to Tap Into an Endless Well of Creativity
  Photoshop-centric tutorial site PSDTuts runs a list that is very similar to my Ten Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity
• On Creativity | A List Apart
  Andy Rutlege talks about the benefits of constraints on design projects. “Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant.”

A few months ago I picked up the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, who also wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance. It’s an excellent book that deals with getting yourself off your rear end and doing whatever it is you were meant to do, whether it’s writing The Great American Novel or starting a business.

Summary

Pressfield begins by taking a good, hard look at what he calls “Resistance,” that thing that keeps us from doing anything difficult or end up with a good long-term result. Book One, “Defining the Enemy” talks about the many forms Resistance takes, many of which you will recognize right away. In Book Two, he quickly moves on to the idea of “Turning Pro” — resisting Resistance by not procrastinating and treating your art as a job. Just plug away at it, even if it’s crap. It’s the old “quantity over quality” idea that says if you work hard enough and long enough and make enough, the quality will happen on it’s own. Finally, he conludes this short book with third section about his fervent belief in angels and muses, who inspire him. He even cites Homer’s Invocation of the Muse (it’s his prayer before he begins writing) and touches on Jungian psychology.

My take: no nonsense (or very little, anyway)

I really appreciate Pressfield’s no-nonsense, tell-it-straight writing style that mixes in humor and an uplifting moment or two along with the career successes and failures he shares. The former Marine has an in-the-trenches attitude that says: “Cut the crap and get the art done.” I will say that the last section of the book, “Beyond Resistance: Higher Realm” gets a bit weird with all the talk about angels and muses. Then it takes a weird turn where he starts swearing at the first novel he ever finished. Nonetheless it’s a great book, and I enjoyed the tidbits of Greek history and philosophy.

It’s written in an almost devotional sort of format, with each “chapter” rarely going more than one or two pages. The chapters had a bite-sized “blog post” feel. One could read a page a day at random as they get fired up to go to their studio and do their art. I loved the lack of New-Agey fluff that’s so common to art/self-help books like The Artist’s Way. It’s a great book that will inspire you to get off your butt and get moving. There are great tidbits of advice and pep-talk without any sugar-coating at all. I highly recommend it to any creative person, whether they’re stuck or not.

On the wall of our copywriter’s office, I saw something on her whiteboard that made me take notice. “Nice spider-web,” I said. She explained to me what it was: a sort of modified mind-map called UNO, short for UNiversal Organizer, developed by Paul Borzo, a teacher and writing tutor at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis/St. Paul. My co-worker found out about it from a writing newsletter she recieves.

The idea is to start off with a primary concept and break it down into finer concepts and more granular points or supporting ideas. It’s a nice twist on a classic idea.