Blog

How to Crush Your Creativity: Shut Down

I could describe this with other words: apathy, indifference, or resignation. I used the phrase, “shut down” because it’s an action that illustrates the above emotions. What you shut down are the sensory, emotional, and caring mechanisms.

No one likes your idea? Who cares?

You just got another rejection for a creative project? So what?
You haven’t had an original idea in three months? Big deal.

You’re starting to feel dull, slightly rancid, and claustrophobic? It’s better than getting hurt or having your hopes raised, only to have them crash once more to the ground.

A brief interval of being shut down probably does no harm. When the heart aches beyond endurance and the nerve endings are beyond frayed, a period of retreat provides a vacation for the overwrought. “Brief,” however, is the defining adjective.

Beneath the layer of anesthesia that numbs the pain, your imagination, hopes, and dreams still live. If you continually suppress them, you could end up feeling far unhappier than you did when you were suffering defeat. There’s a good reason for this: the only one responsible for this pain is you, and you know it.

Solution

If you’ve reached the point where you can’t conjure up any enthusiasm for either continuing a current project or starting a new one, allow yourself a vacation, but, if you can, skip the Novocaine.

Spend your checking-out time enjoying yourself. Be with friends. Express your creativity by enjoying that of others. Listen to music you love, read, watch movies. Be kind to yourself and look for ways to make yourself happy.

Get back to where you once belonged. Ask yourself why you express your creativity? Is it for the approval of others? Or is it because it gives you pleasure to do so? If you can remember that you do it for the love of it, you’re on the road to reliving that feeling. Once the feeling is renewed, the creative spark that gives you life will re-ignite, and its fire will warm you once again.

How to Crush Your Creativity: Be Self-Critical

To get clear on this, we need to distinguish between “criticize” and “critique” and throw in the word “evaluate.”

We need to evaluate the work we’re doing. If I’m writing something (as I am now), I want to stop and see if the words make sense and if they will communicate what I mean.

However, even with the supposedly neutral process of evaluation, timing is everything. If I stop to check every word, my creative motion gets stalled. In the beginning stages of a creative process, it’s often more effective to let it have its way and evaluate it once the burst of energy has slowed down or stopped.

Evaluation that says, “I think this word/idea would be better than the original” and goes on to make the replacement can enhance the creative process. Criticism is a different species.

Criticism says, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. I really have no talent. I should give up before it’s too late.” Too late, to use an architectural analogy, can mean that if you continue building your idea/project, it’s going to crumble. It also means “Quit before someone else finds out how stupid you are and laughs at you or punishes you.”

In psychological terms, criticism is the voice of a parent speaking to a child, a voice you’ve internalized. You learned to summon and hear its voice because you didn’t want to get punished, whether that punishment was physical or humiliation. The critical voice punishes you in advance in order to save you from worse.

Solution

Self-criticism is deadly. Sometimes people stumble into the practice of criticizing themselves for being self-critical. Don’t.

Here’s another solution that won’t work: Give up creative expression so that you won’t hear the critical voice. That voice is on constant combat mode. If it can’t criticize you for stupid thinking, it will criticize you for forgetting something or for how you tie your shoelaces. You need to face it.

Antidotes to the poison of self-criticism can include the following.

Tell yourself that it’s okay if the first round (or the second or third) aren’t perfect.

Even better, give up on the idea of perfection. Replace that notion with one of doing the absolute best you can.

Don’t criticize. Evaluate. Instead of focusing on how bad something is, focus on what would improve it.

Don’t pound away at it. Sometimes it’s best to walk away and come back later.

If you feel really stuck, ask your inner wisdom, first trusting that you have it. You do; it’s part of the software in the package that accompanied you into this world. Say, “I ask for an answer” or whatever wording works best for you.

Finally, as much as you may want to hate this voice, bear in mind that it originated in an attempt to save you pain. Sometimes the most useful act is to thank it for its efforts and tell it you don’t need it any more.

How To Crush Your Creativity: Envy

When you want to identify a negative emotion that’s crushing creativity, it helps to be as specific as possible. That’s why envy is on this list.

Envy bridges resentment and anger. Like resentment, it has a strong charge of “it isn’t fair.” It’s more like anger in being active.
Here are some specific differences between envy, anger, and resentment.
If you and another person have both applied for a position in your company, and the other one gets it, you are more likely to be angry. You will tell people that you deserved it. Under very unfortunate circumstances, you may ever tell your boss.
If someone else gets a raise, and you didn’t, you are more likely to envy them. You probably don’t consider them undeserving of the raise (although sometimes envy can escalate to anger at the person who got what you didn’t), but you wish you had gotten one, too. You may wish you were them. You may wish you were anyone but you.

If you think the other person didn’t deserve the raise and you did, but you don’t want to make a big deal out of it (except to all your friends), and you would never think of complaining about your boss, you will most likely feel resentful.

You don’t need to know a person to envy them. Maybe you read about an author who sells several thousand books a month. Why doesn’t that happen for you? This can apply to any area of creativity.
Solution
The basic error that leads to envy is the belief that there isn’t enough to go around, i.e., a belief in scarcity. If someone else gets what you want, you won’t.

Believing in scarcity is totally normal. This is probably the predominant belief in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s correct. If you consider it more deeply, you’ll see that this belief tends to keep people at each other’s throats.

Do we really know that scarcity is real? There used to be a belief in the publishing world that people would only buy so many books, and that number was dropping steadily. Then the ebook revolution was launched, and everything changed. Senior citizens who had been reading less found that they could increase the type size of their books on an ereading device. Books by independent authors sold at a lower price than traditional books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The best way to free oneself of envy is to find a creative way to get your share of resources that are unlimited, once you find a way to attract them to your door.

My Latest Book is Published


Gone to Flowers, available at http://www.amazon.com/Gone-to-Flowers-ebook/dp/B00714A7Z6

In Gone to Flowers, young people leave New York City in 1968 to live together on a rural commune.

Eli, hoping to conquer his fear of intimacy by moving in with seven other people, finds peace in the communal garden but can’t make love blossom.

Mary casts off casual sex and avoids the potential prison of marriage and motherhood until her feelings for a bisexual man make vows of celibacy look like the worst idea since Selective Service.

Though Amethyst’s parents tell her she can only be safe among Jewish people, she is determined to free herself of their fears. A master chef, she discovers some dangerous ingredients in her recipe for romance when her parents disown her.

Michael, a former junkie, envisions communal life as a permanent party with himself as host. He shakes his addiction to control others, but when he loses control of his libido, he risks his marriage.

Against the background of Vietnam, the Chicago Democratic Convention, Woodstock, My Lai, and Kent State, they pursue their visions. The snake in this fragile Eden, a seductive and disturbed teenager, brings their individual and collective vulnerabilities to the surface and thwarts their efforts to be true to themselves and each other.

Gone to Flowers will be free at Amazon on Wednesday, February 1.

How to Crush Your Creativity: Anger

Anger is somewhat different from other emotions categorized as negative because sometimes the biggest problem we have with it is that we don’t want to feel it. Many people have been raised to believe that anger is destructive, uncivilized, and overall, not very nice.

Attitudes are quite different in the world of animals. I have seen tiny kittens hiss and shriek with all their might when a big dog approaches them. Sometimes it’s not the biggest but the loudest that wins or prevents a battle.

When we hold anger inside ourselves, we become candidates for high blood pressure, ulcers, and a number of other conditions. Anger, when used constructively, can relieve stress. When repressed, it creates stress.

Unexpressed anger also has a strong tendency to turn into the sour bile of resentment. (See previous post, no, not the cat. I understand he has no trouble expressing anger. It’s the one before that.)

Solution
Give yourself an outlet for expressing your anger. For years I’ve recommended to my clients that they write down everything they’d like to say to someone with whom they’re angry. Don’t hold back. Say every terrible, vicious, and vindictive thing that you’re feeling.

If you happen to be living with that person, put the file somewhere that it won’t be found. Why not delete it? I would highly recommend and even urge that you do this eventually. However, I often find it helpful to cool down and read the letter a while after I’ve written it.

Once the heat has been dissipated, you may discover that some of the things you wrote range from ridiculous to hilarious. You may wonder why you were so upset about some of the subjects you covered.

These realizations help to train your awareness. The next time you feel anger coming on, you may have the mental acuteness to ask yourself if this is really such a big deal. That needn’t stop you from writing about it. However, you might melt a few less keys as you do so.

Let me reemphasize: The release of anger is healthy, but the degree of healthiness depends on how it’s released.

Oh, and don’t forget to delete that document.

Hypnocat (Master of Melissa Smith) Speaks


Many writers have cat companions. Notable authors include T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain, who wrote, “Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

Today, I speak with Sammie, aka Hypnocat, who shares his expertise in managing his writer companion, Melissa Smith.

Would you tell us something about your history and how you ended up with Melissa?

Well as a newborn kitten, my mother had died and as a result, I hadnt been weaned yet. I ended up in an animal shelter with five of my brothers and sistes where Melissa and her family found me.

(Melissa says: We found Sam when he was about 4 weeks old and brought him home.)

I’m going to assume you chose them, since that’s what any self-respecting cat would do.

Of course I did. Inside the cage I was sharing, I jumped up to the top shelf and stuck my paw out, reaching for some attention. It was love at first sight

I imagine that you have special responsibilities, living with a writer. How do you encourage her to keep on writing, and what other disciplines do you find necessary?

Well, she has to take time for me of course. And when i want some love, I have to intervene. My favorite way to get her undivided attentions is to simply lay on her computer. And of course, she’s taken pictures. you can find them on her FB thingie under mobile uploads

Does Melissa have cats as characters in her books? If not, do you have any plans to change this?

Well, naturally I managed to convince her I had to be in her last work. I even pawed at her until she used my real name and even some of the things I usually do to get attention. I like getting my way

Of course, you do, you’re a cat. Would you describe Melissa’s books from a cat’s-eye point of view?

Well, since I cant really read, I just like the way the words move across the screen. I really like it when she bounces the the pointy thing across the bright window she’s forever pawing at.

I have heard her talk about her book though, and I guess it sounds interesting…to a human. But its about these things called gods and these other things called evils that these hulking men in her book have to capture.

Not quite as easy as catching a mouse. Do you think it benefits a writer to live with a cat? More importantly, does it benefit a cat to live with a writer?

Well, every writer needs a cat companion. We provide the necessary diversions they need when they start grumbling under their breaths about something not going to plan. I like being her diversion. I like being able to play for a bit then laying down to a nice long nap.

You may know that you have many fans on IWU (Indie Writers Unite!). Would you like to give a message to your devotees?

GIVE ME SALMON FLAVORED TREATS!

Wait! theres a bird at the window! BRB!

Thank you, Hypnocat. Would you like to add anything to conclude this interview, either about Melissa’s books or about yourself?

My most favored human would love it if you checked out all of her books, but I would highly recommend Jealousy’s Rage, since I’m in it of course.

I’ll do that, Hypnocat. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Of course you liked chatting with me. Everyone does.

Learn more about Melissa Smith’s books.

Melissa’s Amazon Author’s page.
The Sony store.
ITunes
Barnes & Noble
FB Authors Page
Blog

How to Crush Your Creativity: Resentment

The first entry in this series, How to Crush Your Creativity: Worry, appeared on Nov. 17.

(Note: For purposes of clarity, I exaggerate. Many people have milder forms of resentment than what’s described below. However, if any of the attitudes and actions ring even somewhat true, it’s time to detox.)

People often lack clarity on the difference between resentment and anger. Anger, to be explored in a future post, has an active, expressive quality as well as a feeling of relief once it’s been expressed. (Note: this relief may only last until the next occasion for anger.) Resentment is more like a smoldering fire that doesn’t achieve release or relief.

It’s been called the act of taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Another aspect of resentment, worthy of highlighting, is that often people who don’t want to feel anger believe that resentment, because it’s less aggressively expressed, is an acceptable, even a polite, emotion.

To crush your creativity through resentment, do the following:

Notice with deepening misery how others succeed and you don’t.

Frequently say, “It’s not fair.”

Look for examples of why it’s not fair.

Get specific. Observe exactly why and how some people seem to have all the luck.

Believe that there’s a small club of succeeders from which you’ve been excluded, probably deliberately.

Talk a lot to others about the various forms of unfairness you’ve noticed and experienced.

When you’re not talking about it, brood about it.

Decide that you might as well give up.

Give up. Remind yourself often that if the world had been a more fair place, you might have succeeded.
Solutions

Stop giving away your power. In the end (and also in the beginning) you’re responsible for both your creativity and its results. That doesn’t mean it’s your fault. It means you have the ability to respond to circumstances, which means you can choose how to respond.

Challenge
If other people aren’t helping you, ask yourself if you’re helping others. Develop the habit of helpfulness. At least once a day, find a way to help others on their creative journey. What goes around really does come around.

To take this a step further, believe in yourself. If you do, so will others.

Happy New Year

I didn’t exactly make resolutions this year, although I have a multitude of goals. However, I received something wonderful in my email today, called 7 lovely logics. Here they are.

1. Make peace with your past so it doesn’t spoil your present.
2. What others think of you is none of your business.
3. Time heals almost everything, give the time, some time.
4. No one is the reason of your happiness except YOU yourself.
5. Don’t compare your life with others; you have no idea what their journey is all about.
6. Stop thinking too much; it’s all right not to know all the answers.
7. Smile, you don’t own all the problems in the world.

I plan to keep this on my desktop and read it regularly.

And speaking of regular, I will be posting more frequently, now that the holidays are over.

It’s the Year of the Dragon!

Meet Sarah Woodbury, Author and Creative Dreamer


Sarah Introduces Herself

I am a homeschooling mom of four kids (ages 7 to 20), married for 21 years. I came to fiction writing 5 ½ years ago, having done the academic thing up until then, culminating with a Ph.D. in anthropology. Until I was in my thirties, I would routinely tell people “I haven’t a creative bone in my body.” I believed it! I don’t anymore. According to my extended family, I’m now so far off the map in being arty and alternative, that I’ve forgotten there even is a map.

Sarah, since my blog is about creativity, that’s a great introduction to yourself. What created the shift in your belief about your creativity, and what did you do to encourage taking action?

When I was in graduate school, I remember talking with my sister-in-law (also in grad school), about my committee’s desire for me to come up with an original research project for my dissertation. I didn’t know how they could expect that when I hadn’t had an original thought in 12 years! We laughed because it felt so true.

Undermining that certainty, however, were my children. My daughter was born after my first year of graduate school, and my son two years later. Because of them, I postponed looking for a ‘real’ job as a professor, and then decided that staying home with them and homeschooling was a real job.

My focus had been on academics. That was my identity. That was my value as a person. With academia in the rearview mirror, I was only a mom. And that’s where my creativity began to sprout. Tiny at first. Ten years ago, we bought a house that needed a complete makeover, inside and out, and we did the outside first. Which means I designed the garden and planted it. I had told myself for years that I had a black thumb and all of a sudden, the plants grew! And were beautiful.

My daughter, in particular, has always been very creative and my next foray was into quilting, entirely because I was looking for something to do with her. Was writing a logical extension of that? I don’t know if it would be for anyone else, but on April 1, 2006, I sat down at my computer and wrote the first line of my first book. And changed my life.
I love the idea that the act of gardening and resultant success helped to make inroads into the “black thumb” belief.

You discovered that you could create beauty. That’s so powerful.

Let’s move on to the flowering of your literary imagination. Tell us about that first book: why you chose the subject you did and how it played an integral part in your creative journey.

I wrote that first book in six weeks, just to see if I could. I’m thankful that I didn’t have any desire to write the great American novel, or to exorcise demons from my past because it might have made the book harder to abandon. Again, it was my children that drove my creativity and I wanted to write something that they might enjoy reading.

This book had elves and magic in it and will never see the light of day. It is locked at the bottom of the proverbial trunk. It was very bad. Unsalvageable. At the same time, it showed me that I could write a novel (bad though it was), and gave me hints as to how I might go about writing a second one.

It is my second novel that set me on my present course. I had a dream about driving my mini-van into medieval Wales. I woke up and knew I had to write the story. This book eventually became Footsteps in Time. It is a young adult novel about two teenagers who do exactly what I dreamed: drive a mini-van from our world into thirteenth century Wales.

It is Footsteps in Time that I wrestled with and that haunted me for four years. I queried hundreds of agents about it, acquiring 72 rejections before one took me on. I read it out loud to find typos. Twice. I cut 1/3 of the chapters from it three times. I rewrote it a fourth time (cutting out 15,000 more words) before I published it in 2011. I’ve sold over 7000 copies of the book this year. And every one is like a little miracle.

I’m so glad you raised the subject of dreams, because they have always been a powerful source of creativity for me. The story of your second novel also reveals a fascination with Wales. Would you like to tell us more about the source of that fascination?

Some of my ancestors were Welsh, and that tradition is one of the stories that my family has always told about itself. That we came from Wales, even if it was 400 years ago, is a source of pride, as well as curiosity as to what that means and who those people were. My daughter and I (as a homeschool project) began researching our genealogy in the late 90’s and that’s when I began to read more about Wales. I also lived in the UK for a year while in college, visited Wales, and fell in love with the country and its people. So to dream about it was natural.

The dreaming is also one of those double-edged swords. I dream vividly (and some time horribly) every night. I don’t sleep well—to wake up a dozen times in a night is normal for me—and this pattern started about the time I started writing. I think it’s clear that my dreams inform my writing, and in turn, my writing seeps into my dreams. I’m not sure now if I could have one without the other.

Getting more specifically into your novels: While I don’t have a lot of knowledge about the Arthurian era, I am aware that probably countless novels have been written on the subject. It’s obviously a story/saga that captures the human imagination.

Why does it capture your imagination? Why do you think it has so great a universal appeal?

It is my sense that the King Arthur story appeals to different people in different ways, and on many levels because it’s got a little bit of everything in it. There’s the beginning—the young boy who becomes a king. It’s the child’s story of the mythic hero; then there’s the sophisticated interplay of politics, the machinations of Merlin, magic, and treachery—the dark side, if you will; and finally, there’s the tragic downfall.

But that’s not the King Arthur story that appeals to me, actually. King Arthur, as usually written, comes off as either as a flat character, someone whom the author employs as a backdrop to explore the personalities of other characters (Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot), or as unheroic and human, tripped up in the end by the overwhelming burden of his imperfections. Arthur is either a pawn, buffeted by the winds of fate, or so flawed, one has to ask how he was remembered as a hero in the first place.

There is a simple reason for this: it is very hard to synchronize the different aspects of Arthur’s story into a complete whole because the essential, heroic element of Arthur’s story—his defeat of the Saxons for a generation—has been grafted, at both the beginning and the end, to a romantic tale told for reasons having more to do with the medieval authors who were telling the story, and the time in which they were living, than with Arthur. In so doing, his character is incomplete and inexplicable, one who reacts instead of acts, and who never has a say in his own destiny.

Instead, it is Merlin who is the active character. It is he who sets the whole plot in motion, whose behavior acts at times like a ‘get out of jail free card’ for Arthur, who manipulates everybody else, but who is powerless to stop Arthur’s downfall in the end. In the classic Norman/French tale, it is through Merlin’s actions at the beginning of the story that Arthur becomes high king, and because of Merlin’s abandonment at the end of the story that (in rapid succession), Arthur loses his wife, his best friend, his son, and his life.

In the Welsh tales, on the other hand, Arthur is nearly super-human. He may have a few flaws, yes, but he is a ‘hero’ in the classic sense. He takes his men to the Underworld and back again, he finds the 13 treasures of Britain, and he rescues his friends and relations from danger and death. It is these tales, that appeal to me and the stories upon which I base my books.

I have three books related to King Arthur. Cold my Heart, which is set in the end of his reign: By the autumn of 537 AD, the autumn of 537 AD, all who are loyal to King Arthur have retreated to a small parcel of land in north Wales. They are surrounded on all sides, heavily outnumbered, and facing near certain defeat.

But Myrddin and Nell, two of the King’s companions, have a secret that neither has ever been able to face: each has seen that on a cold and snowy day in December, Saxon soldiers sent by Modred will ambush and kill King Arthur.

And together, they must decide what they are willing to do, and to sacrifice, to avert that fate.

The Last Pendragon/The Pendragon’s Quest, two books about the heir to Arthur’s throne: He is a king, a warrior, the last hope of his people–and the chosen one of the sidhe . . .

Set in 7th century Wales, The Last Pendragon is the story of Arthur’s heir, Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon (Cade), and his love, Rhiann, the daughter of the man who killed Cade’s father and usurped his throne.

Born to rule, yet without a kingdom, Cade must grasp the reins of his own destiny to become both Christian king and pagan hero. And Rhiann must decide how much she is willing to risk to follow her heart.
My other books are a medieval mystery, The Good Knight, and a time travel fantasy series about two teenagers who travel back to medieval Wales: Footsteps in Time/Prince of Time/Daughter of Time.

Links:
My web page: http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/
My Twitter code is: http://twitter.com/#!/SarahWoodbury
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarahwoodburybooks
Links to my books:
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=woodbury%2C+sarah&x=14&y=12

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=woodbury%2C+sarah&x=0&y=0

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/woodbury-sarah?store=ALLPRODUCTS&keyword=woodbury%2C+sarah

Apple: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sarah-woodbury/id413605519?mt=11

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=woodbury%2C+sarah