The Creative Spark Revisited
It’s Martin Luther King Day—a national holiday here in the States—and many of you have the day off. Me, I’m playing catch-up with a pile of work correspondence. So while I do, I’m going to leave you...
View ArticleShort Saturday: Inspiration for Creatives
Many of us are still all caught up in winter’s last gasp, so perhaps a little inspiration is what we all need to keep going. A few months ago I stumbled on a post from the Zen Pencils website—a weekly...
View ArticleCraft and Creativity (An Update*)
Yep, I’m still working on summer update posts. It’s a great way to feature some really smart articles, draw attention to some of my older posts, and take just a little blog break—even though I truly...
View ArticleTelling Your Story Creatively (An Update*)
When I got started on this blogging adventure, a wise friend suggested I stockpile blog posts for those times when I’d be unable to keep up. It was great advice, as I’ve been slogging through a very...
View ArticleShort Saturday: The “Other” of the Psyche
Click on the word creativity in the cloud of tags to the right of this post and you’ll see it is a topic that interests me. I suspect it interests you, too, as a writer. Where do you get your ideas?...
View ArticleShort Saturday: The Nonpursuit of Creativity
If you’re here, you are probably a creative person. Probably a writer, but I don’t want to make any assumptions or assign limitations; most of the creatives I know exhibit those tendencies in more than...
View ArticleThe Waiting Is the Hardest Part
Several months ago I was listening to this NPR interview with Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, married singer-songwriters who form the core of the folk band Over the Rhine, and I was caught by...
View ArticleShort Saturday: On the Gestation of Ideas
As you know, I’m in a period of reading and writing about creativity. How to get it, how to find it when you lose it, how to keep the momentum, and so on. On Thursday I talked about my creative...
View ArticleInspiration Is for Everybody, Even Real Writers
A few weeks ago I saw this on Twitter—“Inspiration is for amateurs. Real writers write.”—and (as we say in the South) it just about made me lose my religion. Meaning it made me so furious I ranted...
View ArticleShort Saturday: More on Narrative Voice
We’ve just been talking about voice (and I think I may have more to say about it, but that’s another blog for another day), but this morning I want to show you two articles from two authors who discuss...
View ArticleThe Tao of Morning Pages
In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. I ask you to do this by an apparently pointless process I call the morning pages. … Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand...
View ArticleThe Deep Gratification of Poetry
So many people are denied the deep gratification of poetry. Their educations have trained them to read for information. When I told my uncle that a book of my poems had been published, he said, “Poety...
View ArticleArt and Fellowship
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing....
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Where Do You Get Your Story Ideas? (Part 9)
The photo you see below stopped me in my tracks when I saw it on Facebook about a year ago. It spoke to me. Heroes in their own story … Some of you may know these friends of mine—twins, their mother,...
View ArticleStruggling Through the Creative Process
The conversation focused on the unavoidable uncertainty, vulnerability, and discomfort of the creative process. … Absolutely no amount of experience or success gives you a free pass from the daunting...
View ArticleListening for Inspiration
The ability to listen is a skill we are honing. … Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down. The directions are important here. If we are trying to think...
View ArticleThe Internal Dialogue
Reflect for a moment on the quality of mind that is least creative—when the mind buzzes like the white noise on a TV screen. This is “monkey mind,” a cacophony of voices and sensations. Everything...
View ArticleMozart and the Nature of Creativity
When I was in my early thirties, I had a love affair with Mozart. (It continues to this day, actually. How could it not?) I was the daughter of a classically trained pianist, had taken twelve years of...
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Where Do You Get Your Story Ideas (Part 10)
Almost three years ago, we were discussing a national poll that asked, “When thinking creatively, do you think in pictures, words, or sounds?” Fifty percent of the respondents said they think in...
View ArticleJust Get a Job!
I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life. I knew better than to ask this of my writing, because over the years, I have watched so many other people murder their...
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