I will not Reason & Compare, my business is to Create!
William Blake
Better than on-demand entertainment is on-demand creativity. Your creativity. For yourself. Your friends. Your 1000 true fans.
Creativity on demand
Creativity on demand means that whenever you sit down to write, it feels true to you in the moment.
Whenvever you want to feel the force of flow, you know what to do.
No uncertainty. No waffling. Just the act of sitting down to write freely.
What you produce doesn’t need to be miraculous. The very act of creation is miraculous.
Instead of expecting perfection, what if you simply pour your whole self into each moment that you write?
Better than perfect
Hollywood scares us into thinking that our stuff needs to be as high-stakes, loud, explosive and glossy as a big-budget film.
It doesn’t. Does it?
Not for me.
What matters for me is the lived experience, not whether it’s polished. What matters is what I actually experience.
I don’t wan’t to have to depend on netflix for my fulfillment. I want to have my own relationship with the creative impulse.
I can get that through something as simple and direct as writing.
I go around my daily life as a writer in search of material. Not only to produce something but also to simply feel it. To feel myself present in the world. This one. The actual world. The unreal physical world. The mysterious world of the imagination.
I do it to be receptive. To receive what the world offers me.
I write to offer my writing to the world. But, really, it’s not about the material or what comes from my labors. I wrote twenty books one year and didn’t publish most of them. Someday I may. But the real point for me was in the experience of doing it.
I suspect that for many writers the same is true.
So what stops writers from the ability to be free-flowing?
Know your obstacles
Are you intimidated by the greats?
You know the feeling of visiting an art museum, being surrounded by the most impressive artworks of civilization? This can inspire you to go home and create. It can also intimidate you.
After all, are your scrawls and doodles ever going to be in the MOMA?
Probably not.
Do you care?
Instead: when you are surrounded by great works, don’t focus on how impressive they are. Simply be receptive to the techniques of different artists. What can you do to connect with them through their work as actual artists? Looking at their brushstrokes, their evolution as a creator and a person? What’s the feeling that the art gives you? And don’t worry about the grandiosity for the moment.
Humans have this tendency to put on a pedestal that which we celebrate. To insinuate that what is truly good is also inapproachable.
Are you discouraged from sharing your writing due to the overabundance of good work already filling the marketplace? Do you feel invisible?
So much can be accomplished by knowing one’s true audience, your real niche. Your 1000 devoted fans.
The rest can remain noise.
Go deep with what you love most and be willing to be totally vulnerable and bold.
Of the things in the marketplace that are “good,” which do you really love?
Regarding the fear of invisibility, what can you do to put yourself out there with some real oomph?
Consistently sharing your practice? Holding live events? Making bold true statements? Embracing your uniqueness? Video? Interviews? A series of related works? Partnerships and collaboration? Reaching out to some of the greats and having a conversation?
Practice
My suggestion is to take some of these questions into a 20 minute freewriting session and see what emerges.