Your creative yearnings are REAL. They’re not make-believe. The characters in your novels are real, your business idea is real, your vision is real. It’s real energy that wants to come through and be expressed through you. It’s not make-believe.
If you’re getting a vision for something, you’re not making it up.
A fellow in Spain has started a blog about my book Getting Messy. Here’s the link: http://bm31-liburuak.blogspot.com/2010/07/getting-messy.html. He is from the Basque region in Spain, so I don’t know if anyone reading this can read Basque. If so, please let me know what it says! There’s also a new review up on Amazon about Getting…
When I teach writing classes, people often ask me for tips on how to be more disciplined and productive. My response to them is always the opposite. I don’t believe that creativity can be forced. Rather, it needs to be “fed.” When you take care of yourself, treating yourself to whatever makes you feel warm…
Space under the surface. Have you ever found yourself saying, “I feel inspired around her” or “I get amazing insights in that person’s seminars” or “I don’t know what you said, but it shifted everything.”? Those are examples of how we (perhaps unwittingly) create space for others’ growth. Magda Cragg said her husband, the poet…
I’ve been thinking about this topic for awhile now, but have held myself back from writing about it because genius has such elevated connotations. We confer that term to people (usually men) after they have accomplished a large body of work, and typically after they’re dead (Einstein, Da Vinci, Picasso….) But what if genius was…
… said Carl Jung, which segways nicely to my upcoming workshop April 16, at Book Passage. Here’s the description: Images lie at the heart of the creative process. They are the language of the “middle realm,” a place where literal words don’t yet exist. Depth psychologists believe that images are animate and in this seminar…
The physicist Arthur Zajonc says that our culture needs the artist’s cognitive capacities. But what is it that poets and artists do that take them beyond ordinary capacities of knowing? Perhaps it’s the artist’s willingness to be confused, welcoming any unlikely connection that shows up; or his or her sensitivity to nuance and qualities…