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Gems #7 On Creativity and Solitude

August 21, 2010

Some gems on creativity and solitude…

Leo Babauta opens a great piece on creativity and solitude with this quote: “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.” ~Rollo May

Like Leo, I am endlessly fascinated with creativity. When I worked assiduously through the wondrous ‘Style Statement‘ book by Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte, I ended up with ‘Sacred Creative’ as the two key words for where my essence meets my expression. I love reading biographies of writers, looking at their workspaces and engaging with how they created their work.

Leo’s article, The No 1 Habit of Highly Creative People, comes up with solitude as the No 1 habit for creativity and reflects on the ways solitude fuels and supports creativity. He includes some thoughts around solitude as a source of strength from current creative people as well as some famous creative people from the past . His article, linked to this one, The Little But Useful Guide to Creativity, is a further reminder of ways of being grounded in a creative mindset. The ones that ring true for me: long walks on the beach, shutting out the outside world, getting things down and working in small steps.

I love May Sarton’s ‘Journal of a Solitude’  for capturing what it’s like sometimes when solitude and creativity come together and the raw, vulnerable feelings that come up when you do manage to get that space and time:

‘The ambience here is order and beauty. This is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

I think of these pages as a way of doing that. For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self. I have written every poem, every novel for the same purpose – to find out what I think, to know where I stand. I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, “won’t go,” or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.” (p12)

And I love these words from the end of the No 1 Habits piece for helping to still that maelstrom of vulnerability:

‘Lastly, being creative means living a creative life.  Expect yourself to have one.  Believe you are creative. Know that you are. Make that the most important habit of all.’

A recent Creative Penn podcast interview ‘Authenticity And Creative Expression With Robert Rabbin’ provides some excellent tips for moving through these barriers and into the authentic and creative directions of your plans and dreams. The interview provides practical advice on how to conquer your fear of being authentic. Being playful and having fun are part of the solution. There is some really great advice to think about for moving on with creative adventures like a writing life.

Image, Gold enamelled gem-set pendantby kotomigd from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

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blogging transcending writing

I contain multitudes

August 14, 2010

I have been thinking more on the issue of brevity vs the longer post this week. I wrote recently in ‘Shorter posts, smaller steps’ about the value of working in smaller chunks for blogs, other writing and for managing many things in life.

Then very shortly after, via twitter, I read a recent post of Jonathan Morrow on Copyblogger, advocating for quality, not quantity, in ‘The  Three-Step Guide to Getting More Traffic by Writing Less‘  and recommending that one strong post a week will work better, drive more traffic and be less onerous than more regular posting: ‘There’s no set number, but here’s a suggestion: start with one really good post per week, and if you have time, work your way up.’

This seemed to totally contradict what I had just read from John Sherry in his guest post, Why bite size is the right size content’ at Virgin Blogger Notes and what I’d written about. But I believe what Jonathan Morrow wrote also and I can see the sense in one well crafted post a week. They both make sense – how to reconcile?

Like all things, it’s clearly not ‘a one size fits all’ story. After I wrote my post on the value of shorter posts, I reflected on a longer post I had read and loved recently: Your Own Revolution: Poetry, Publishing and the Internet. This was more like an essay, fully developed, and I thought that there has to be a place for the longer, reflective thought piece in all this. Sometimes I love to write like that and love to read work like that and have something very deep and solid to take away. But does a post have to be long to be deep and solid? Which is better?

To help me makes sense of all this, John Sherry who wrote the original post on ‘bite size chunks’ chimes in on the comments to Jonathan Morrow’s post saying:

‘Good, sensible advice Jonathan. Slow and sure to start, building it up as you go. It’s easy to compare with top blogs and bloggers with their active presence and high subscriber numbers but best to first get a firm foundation. Get blogging at a pace that’s comfortable and then reach out a bit and connect to the wider blogging community is a wise suggestion.’

This is a lead and taking a little further the analogy of driving from E L Doctorow’s image from ‘Bird by Bird’ discussed in ‘Shorter posts, smaller steps’: We need to have the driver’s skill-set for all occasions and conditions. Sometimes, we might choose to drive in short bursts with frequent stops; other times it might be a longer haul, perhaps getting to the destination quickly or other times, meandering and enjoying the view. Having all these tools in a blog writer’s repertoire means we can write as required and as we feel for the topic, the timeframes and our focus at the time. And for maximum reader impact.

Like I wrote about in ‘Planning to be fluid,’ you need to have a strategy, a roadmap, to guide the changes in your driving and your itinerary, keeping in mind the conditions. But it’s also great to be adaptable, diverse and fluid. One of my favourite quotes is Walt Whitman’s lines from ‘A Song of Myself’:

‘ Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’

SOME people out there are posting hardly any words at all. Led by Susannah Conway, an ever-growing team of bloggers are having a rest from words and posting only photos for the month of August. Called ‘The August Break’, bloggers all over the place are joining in – you can see some of the collective photos here on flickr.

I also love Danielle LaPorte’s posts that are only a few concentrated words. A recent one, soul equation, had me thinking all week about presence demonstrating the punchy power of a purely held thought.

For me though, I need to put a little less pressure on myself and take smaller steps just now. I need to establish a rhythm and a pattern and not get overwhelmed by volume or density. I need to settle my strategy, to calibrate and fit it with my life, and keep my content clear. The long and the short of it are all tools for the repertoire, just suggestions, and it is best not to be too prescriptive either way and to just modulate as you go. As John Sherry continues in his comment to the post of Jonathon Morrow:

‘Get to know your blog and what it’s about and let it develop organically. I have taken that route and it’s been real fun and now I’m getting right into it naturally. You want it to be enjoyable not a chore.’

Yes, I think that is exactly the point: enjoy yourself, your blog and what it’s creating in the process. And that is something I am enjoying immensely and is perhaps the true heart of the matter.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ‘consistent’.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Image, Morocco, Marrkech, Pattern by Frank Douwes from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

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blogging creativity transcending writing

Gems #6 Encouragement, kindness and resilience

August 9, 2010

Some recent gems shining a whole lot of light…

If you haven’t read The Manifesto of Encouragement on Danielle LaPorte’s White Hot Truth, rush over for the best injection of inspiration and encouragement you will have felt for a long time. Danielle’s initial post is pure light and genius. Then hundreds of people have added their words from their precious angle. It’s a string of pearls you can wear around your heart to protect you and make you shine. It also opens you up to what you might be missing around you or what you might aspire to. I hope one day it becomes a book I can carry with me every day.

Recently, I wrote a post about twitter and my positive experiences connecting up with like-minded people and the kindness and reciprocity I had found. I had just finished writing and posting, to then find Jean Sarauer’s post on Virgin Blogger Notes on a related theme: How to grow your blog with kindness. Jean provides a personal story and some excellent examples of how kindess and adding value in blogging and twitter can enhance the experience and outcome for all. Jean encourages us to ‘practice shifting your focus from what you want to get to what you can give’.  This post helps you appreciate how you can contribute and how ‘As the analytics of your heart show upticks in kindness, encouragement, and support, the analytics of your blog will also improve.’  The ‘Manifesto of Encouragement’ is a great example of this.

I only caught up this week with the July 11 ‘Creative Penn’ podcast interview by Joanna Penn: ‘Inspiration For Authors On Resilience, Accepting Criticism And Being An Introvert With Clare Edwards’.  It was excellent – one of the best of Joanna’s interviews I’ve listened to – probably because it chimed in around some personal keywords: resilience, introversion and writing. I loved the way Joanna opened up in this interview about her own experiences as an introvert with doing interviews and developing a speaking career. I related so much, being at the far end of the introversion spectrum and interacting with people all day, every day, in my work role, often standing up and speaking to many people. I have learnt to manage this but this interview provided more insightful tools for balancing between the inner and outer worlds. There is also a strong focus also in the interview on tips for resilience and staying present in the moment.

Three overwhelmingly positive gems to take us all forward with encouragement, kindness and resilience!

Image, Mother of Pearl by Westcoastrobin from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

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blogging creativity writing

Shorter posts, smaller steps

August 7, 2010

My posts are too long I know. I don’t start out to write long pieces. I know what I want to say and it’s structured in my head but often ends up longer than I intend – more around 1000 words than a neat 300.

As John Sherry points in a guest post on Virgin Blogger Notes, ‘Why Bite Size is the right size content’, it’s a lot to ask of readers if we are posting 2-3 posts a week of 1,000 words. It’s also making the task bigger than it needs to be for the writer/blogger. As I have progressed here, the posts have got longer, the gap between them larger and the job of writing them has become more demanding and less likely to occur regularly.

The result is a spiky reader profile with highs and lows, naturally, as they have nothing to read between the big waves of words I carefully construct.

I’ve also been re-reading ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott and she implores in many ways to take writing in steps. She emphasises the ‘short assignment’, chunking the work into paragraphs, the ‘one inch picture frame’, an immediate focus. She provides a wonderful quote from E.L. Doctorow: ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.’

The big lessons of life – trauma, grief, hospitals, illness – teach us, force us, to take one hour, one day at a time, to be in the moment, to work step by step, to have a vision and know where you want to go, like the car with its headlights leading the way, but to focus on now so as not to be overwhelmed.

So, taking this good advice from John Sherry, from Anne Lamott, from my experiences in life, I am going to write shorter posts, keep this work moving, manageable and meaningful to others, and connect up the small steps into a journey I can measure. (Note word count = 336)

Image, Old stone steps through thick green vegetation by Horia Varlan from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

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blogging

‘Bird by bird’: learning @ twitter

August 2, 2010

Many of you will know Anne Lamott’s insightful book, ‘Bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life’ . The phrase, ‘Bird by bird’ comes from a story about Anne’s brother, overwhelmed by a study on birds he has to complete. Anne’s father tells him, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Anne uses this metaphor to talk about writing and the need to keep moving ahead one steady step at a time, with short assignments or a focus on paragraphs, perhaps, but as long as you turn up at the table and actually sit down to write.

My sojourn into twitter has been a bit like that, learning how to build one step at a time. I’d been interested in the phenomenon of twitter but didn’t really understand it. I was finally pushed, through work, to set up a twitter account for a workshop where we explored new technologies and innovation. Once I’d set up an account, I began to explore. I started by following my key blogging reads and influences – Joanna Penn, Chris Guillebeau, Danielle LaPorte, the communicatrix, Sage Cohen. Joanna especially is a big twitter aficionado and talks on her podcasts about twitter as her main social media platform along with her blog. I learnt from the  podcasts. I watched and studied my key influences and how they used twitter to connect, be useful, get to know others, share information, gather feedback, advise about their own work and convey something about themselves. All in 140 character bite sizes of information.

Miraculously, people started following me. The birds began to flock and call. It still amazes me and I treat each follower interested me in as a gift and am honoured.  The tweets initially seem all over the place as they build. I try to read them all and work out how to respond. I feel overwhelmed and wonder how these people with hundreds and thousands of followers manage all the attention and communication. I search for some clues from other more experienced twitter players and find some useful advice to move forward.

Joanna Penn is incredibly helpful as always, as a role model and through her writing and podcasts. From The Creative Penn, I learn how twitter can connect with other social media, the value of being useful and finding my own ways to add value. Joanna’s  post on ‘Social Networking for Authors: Tips for using twitter effectively’  was really useful to get started. Reading it again now, there is still so much more I need to understand and apply – such as use of hashtags and using tweetdeck or similar tools more effectively. This article is an excellent starting point with lots of links to other twitter tips especially for writers. (Note to self: go back to this great post and learn some more now you are further along.)

Similarly in his excellent article, Free Advice, Chris Guillebeau emphasises that: ‘The best way to build a following is by doing stuff away from Twitter, and encouraging people who find you elsewhere to add you on Twitter…’  That makes sense and is where I find value on twitter and hopefully where I can add value over time. Chris also comments on the power of twitter, that 25% of his business comes from twitter even though in the previous 30 days he only mentioned his actual business on twitter once.

Naomi Dunford in ‘How to get 8379 new Twitter Followers by Christmas’, provides a blitz of a framework for gaining a twitter presence using a structured approach of tweets over a few days with a formula which is roughly: 1/4 retweeting, 1/4 responding, 1/4 sharing and 1/4 ‘stuff from your own head’ to show you are a human being. Then repeat…Best to read the article for the whole story – it is well set out in steps and phase one and two, plus humour throughout so it’s not so terribly serious. I haven’t gone the whole way with this, more due to my timeframes than anything, but love the structure and have used the ratio formula to try to balance my own tweets and also learn the ‘rules’.

There’s so much I still don’t understand but I have found twitter to be an incredible network of connection and unlimited possibilities. I am especially honoured by the kindness of people I have met through twitter and their genuine interest in me.  People I read and love are amazingly following my tweets. New people are connecting with my story and themes, and I am connecting with theirs. C Patrick Schulze, whose author’s blog I was reading, wrote this blog post for me on planning a novel. It’s about writing a story, not a novel, and has been incredibly useful for where I am now with my own story in moving on with writing. Where else could you get such connection? Every day I log on to twitter and find people connected to me in my thoughts and interests, and I learn more about them, reading their work and thoughts and what they are reading.

‘Bird by bird’ I will move ahead in this space. I wonder how the people with hundreds and tens and hundreds of thousands of followers manage these diverse and dense flocks, but I guess it builds by stealth and you manage it best as anything else likely to overwhelm you, as Anne Lamott suggests, one step at a time.

What has learning to twitter been like for you?

Image, Birds of Paradise by Jen_Mo from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

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creativity writing

Gems #5 Facts, inspiration and story

July 26, 2010

Some recent writing gems on fact in fiction, inspiration and writing a story:

I loved the post, Making True Fiction, from Shanna Germain. It contemplates how true the facts need to be in fiction and how far you need to go with your research and accuracy in writing. It contemplates the conundrum of:  ‘In order to make stuff up, you have to convince your readers that it’s real. Both emotionally real and world-wise real.’

I am interested in this as the novel I am planning is in the historical fiction genre. I can see myself researching forever in the name of factual accuracy when the emotional authenticity of the story is the real issue. But how to get the balance? Starting out with the image of drowning vs the reality, Shanna explores what’s true, what’s fact, what’s accuracy and how much we need of these for an authentic reading experience. It’s an excellent thought piece I continue to think about on many levels. Some great readers’ comments also.

The guest post by Benison O’Reilly,’ Writers, Inspiration and the Ideas We Collect,’ on Suzannah Freeman’s ‘Write it Sideways’  was always going to grab me, based as it is on my favourite bird: the beautiful, sleek, dark blue, satin bower bird. The bowers of these fabulous birds are the result of the most amazing courting ritual of gathering blue items to attract a mate. If you ever see a nest, it’s littered with blue bottle tops, blue pegs and other (blue) detritus. All these riches to attract a mate  – check out the great pic in the article.

The point of the article is that writers need to be like bower birds, gathering, noting, recording, attuned to detail so we can use it for writing:

‘Undiscovered gems are scattered everywhere if you care to look. Keep your eyes and ears open and be disciplined, record everything.’

Read it – it’s brilliant just like the blue of the satin bower bird!

And finally, a custom made article just for me. From reading the author’s blog of C Patrick Schulze and a follow-up twitter conversation, he asked if there was anything specific I needed help with in my writing. I mentioned planning my novel as that is what I need to do next. I have done the research, have the idea but need to plan and get started. The result was a fantastic post with my needs in mind, ‘Don’t write a novel, write a story’. I expected structure, plot, planning details but this overall approach to how to manage the framework of the story was perfect for me just now. My main character’s journey doesn’t seem so heroic on the surface, but this is what I feel – a hero underneath to be resurrected, a victim of circumstances and difficult times that lost her way. I am honoured by the article and its helpfulness. Special thanks to C Patrick Schulze!

Image, Gems by Orbital Joe from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

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