Can You Plan to Be Creative?
Do you feel productive because you are a professional multi-tasker and rush around all day crossing things off your to-do list? High five for you! You deserve some kind of award. Is 'laughing' or 'having fun' on your to-do list?
What about taking time to create something?
Learn to focus. How can you be present with yourself if your mind is all over the place? Constant busyness and exhaustion allow zero room for creative inspiration. Slow down and sit still. Make room for your authentic self. Otherwise we're just robots running errands. Fun. The problem is, people don't feel 'productive' if they're not always on-the-go or getting paid to sit in a cube farm. If you really want to be productive, awaken your creative side.
Create!
It will make you feel good too.
Activity feels hard. Inspired action feels wonderful.
Be aware of the big difference between inspired action and activity. Activity comes from the brain-mind and is rooted in disbelief and lack of faith - you are taking action to "make" your desire happen. Inspired action is allowing the law to work through you and to move you.
There is a fine line between activity and inspired action. My thoughts are:
Sometimes you have to plan to be creatively active (even when you really don't feel like it) in order to spark inspired action. But if you truly feel like you're forcing it too much, your body's energy likely is not ready to produce anything at that time. Respect your body's energy flow and come back to it tomorrow.
Twyla Tharp's bestselling book, The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life, asks thought-provoking questions to really make you wonder why you do what you do.
"Creativity is an act of defiance. You're challenging the status quo. You're questioning accepted truths and principles. You're asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:
Why do I have to obey the rules?
Why can't I be different?
Why can't I do it my way?
These are the impulses that guide all creative people whether they admit it or not. Every act of creation is also an act of destruction or abandonment. Too much planning implies you've got it under control. That's boring, unrealistic, and dangerous" (Tharp, 2003, p.133).
But how much planning is too much planning?
Stephen King's memoir, On Writing, talks about the craft of writing and planning a set schedule for your creativity.
"Your schedule exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night, so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams" (King, 2000, p.157).
"Don't wait for the muse. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven to three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up" (King, 2000, p.157).
What is a muse you ask?
According to Dictionary.com, a muse is "the goddess or power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like."
So King is suggesting we make ourselves be creative (writing, painting, filming, etc..) on a routine basis? But how do we plan to be creative? What if we just don't feel inspired?
As a writer, I struggle at times forcing myself to sit and write something. I'm not always inspired to write. But after making myself sit there for a period of time, something will come out of me.
"This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won't make your efforts successful; it's only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts" (Tharp, 2003, p.119).
To plan or not to plan. That is the question. It's up to you to decide how much is too much.
So let's say you are sitting there at your desk, door shut and you have given yourself the next three hours to create something. Man, forcing yourself to be creative can suck sometimes. I can share with you what I have done at times when I'm in a rut. I pick up a book from one of my favorite authors. Then I start copying their writing word for word. (Obviously this is just a creative warm-up and not something I would try to publish as my own work). Sometimes, this exercise will spark a creative idea. Run with it.
It is important to copy someone else's work. You are studying another person's creative process - just like a dancer who stands behind a professional and copies their moves - or like a writer who writes more vividly after copying another writer's work.
"The power of muscle memory gives you a path toward genuine creation through simple re-creation" (Tharp, 2003, p.66).
As a young child in elementary school, I remember taking some of my favorite books and copying the published text word for word. I pretended I were the author. I would even add:
‘Written by Kelly J. Cornelius.’
At the time, I didn't know why I was doing that. It seemed silly. But now I recognize I was smart. I listened to that 'still small voice' of my creative imagination telling me to practice writing. I was honing my creative muscles. It wasn't silly.
The great artists, writers, musicians and poets become great because they acquire the habit of relying upon the 'still small voice' which speaks from within - through creative imagination.
Me at age 2 considering a career as a writer
