Creativity Tweets of the Week — 11/28/11

Witness the triumphant return of Creativity Tweets of the Week. It’s been a long week; the last such post went up November 4th. But in the meantime I’ve written a guest post on creativity and leadership, “Leading Through Storytelling,” for Deborah Connolly’s Creative Leadership Coaching blog, and a personal essay on returning to a creative life, “Oxygen,” for the site Creativity Flux, curated by Terre Britton. Now it’s time to return to The Artist’s Road, and serve up more links on creativity and writing I’ve circulated on Twitter and Facebook.

• 

  Clammy the Christmas Clam would like to announce that a new Crustacean Christmas post will be coming in December. Find last year's post by typing "Crustacean Christmas" in Google; it should be your first result.

  “8 Counter-Intuitive Ways to Improve Your Well-Being and Creativity,” The Behance Team at 99%: I recognize the value of #3, exercise in the middle of the day, but I’m often more inclined to nap. (Related: 3 Steps to Creative-Business Balance)

• “Three Roadblocks to Success as a Creative Entrepreneur (and How to Get Past Them),” Mark McGuinness, Lateral Action: I like the call for some digital downtime. Just make sure you leave time to visit this blog and follow me on Twitter. (Related: Forest Foursome)
• “Teaching Creativity: The Answers Aren’t in the Back of the Book,” Brian D. Cohen, HuffPost Arts: You know the old adage about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish? The same goes for creativity, it seems. (Related: The Zen of Teaching Creativity)
• “Creativity & Time: 12 Riffs to Show Up and Shape Time,” Jeffrey Davis: Among the interesting points was #7, discussing the idea of creative “sprints.” (Related: 4 Steps to Breaking Out Your Creativity)
• “6 Tips to Run a Creative Business,” Thursday Bram, Portfolio.com: Insights from a self-employed writer. (Related: 9 Steps to Self-Employment Success)
• “How Blogging Can Help an Aspiring Writer,” Kimberley Wilson, guest post on Nick’s Writing Blog: As a longtime blogger, I fully agree it can aid with developing the art of brevity. (Related: When a Blog Post Goes Viral)

An Artist’s Road reader recently noted that after weighing the idea of tweeting older blog posts, I decided not to do so. He is right, I don’t tweet old posts. But I do occasionally provide links to past posts in blog entries when they bring value to the discussion; I have done so above, with the “related” posts following these links in parentheses above. Enjoy!

Honoring Your Child AND Your Muse

"Muse" by Marisa Ross

How do you honor your muse when you put your children first? It’s a question every art-inclined parent surely has weighed. This blog chronicles my return to an art-committed life, but it generally avoids looking back on the choices that kept me off-road. It’s not always easy for me to look back, but it’s part of the story.

I share some of that back story in a short personal essay, “Oxygen,” that has now been published on Creative Flux. The online journal is published by Sirius Press and curated by polymath artist Terre Britton. Terre (@TheFourOrders) is a visual artist, a science fiction author, a graphic design firm owner, and a vice president with Sirius Press. I assume I was fortunate enough to be invited to contribute to a site “where ideas gestate and mutate” because those many muses occupying Terre’s time didn’t allow her to conduct a more extensive author search. I thank her muses for those distractions.

Please enjoy “Oxygen,” and join Terre and I in conversation below the post on the Creative Flux site. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the challenges of honoring both your children and your muses.

Leading Through Storytelling

I am at my core a storyteller, whether working as a journalist, a PR professional, or a creative writer. I know that’s true of my readers as well. But we are all storytellers, and telling our own stories well can inspire others.

Thanks to the kind invitation of Deborah Connolly of Creative Leadership Coaching, I have a guest post on Deborah’s blog titled 8 Steps to Leading Through Storytelling. I invite you to take a look, and also if you missed it read the guest post Deborah wrote for this blog a few weeks ago, How I Use My MFA to Cultivate Creativity.

5 Steps to Meeting Self-Imposed Deadlines

We love to bitch about deadlines, but there is a certain appeal when they are imposed upon us. We know up front when something is due, and we know what the consequences are for not meeting the deadline.

Deadlines help creatives create. But what if there is no external deadline– no gallery publicizing the opening date of a gallery show, no recording studio booked, no editor waiting on a manuscript?

What incentive can I use to encourage me to meet a self-imposed creative writing deadline? A classic Ferrari like this one at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA might do the trick.

That is what I’ll face for the next two months as a creative writer, now that I’ve finished my first MFA semester. I’ve grown accustomed to MFA creative writing and critical essay packets being due every four weeks. So I know I should impose my own deadlines, to ensure I keep writing. But what will it take for me to honor those deadlines?

Some writers rely on peer pressure. It could be informal, say a writing buddy or a local writer’s group. Or it could be highly organized, like NaNoWriMo, in which would-be novelists meet word-count goals simultaneous with thousands of strangers online. There’s a lot to be said for using others to hold you accountable. It’s easier to diet when your spouse joins you. It’s easier to go to the gym when a friend is waiting there for you.

Then again, I'm not sure I can even afford the entry fee to Disneyland so I can ride in an Autopia car with Pluto.

But there are limits to what you can ask of others. Are there consequences for failure? Will your writer’s group kick you out if you don’t produce pages that month? I’ll bet a lot of us are guilty of showing up at a book club without having read the book, but we still get to enjoy the company of friends. And does a system designed to accommodate tens of thousands, like NaNoWriMo, always work with your particular creative needs? What if you need to produce raw pages not in November but March, or you wish in November not to write raw material but fine-tune a rough draft into a polished manuscript?

I’ve spent some time reflecting on the challenge of creating, and adhering to, self-set deadlines. Here are five steps I intend to follow:

1. Be realistic. You know this from starting a diet. It’s useful to set weight-loss goals, but if you’re too ambitious you set yourself up for failure.
2. Set interim goals. Keeping with the weight-loss metaphor, you set up your weight-loss goals in increments of, say, a half-pound at a time. The overall goal is less daunting and you have more opportunities to log success.
3. Mark your progress. I track my project deadlines on a large whiteboard wall. Maybe you’ll want to use a wall calendar, or a to-to list or printed spreadsheet taped to your monitor. I do feel that even if you track progress digitally, you should have an easily visible physical representation of it, so you have both the satisfaction of drawing a line to mark your progress, and reminders of your progress every time you walk by the display.
4. Celebrate victories. You know yourself better than anyone; yes, even more than your virtual NaNoWriMo friends. What treat will you allow yourself for each internal deadline? A bubble bath? How about meeting the final deadline? A spa weekend? You can apply a little bit of that pressure that comes from an external deadline if you book that spa in advance and arrange for your kids to spend the weekend with your sister.
5. Accept the consequences of failure. This is a bit harsh. But maybe you need to tell yourself that if you haven’t reached your goal by your spa weekend, you will eat the cost of that reservation. You will ignore your kids’ frustration at missing out on the visit with your sister, who serves bacon with every meal. (Can I go in their place?) I’m more of a positive reinforcement kind of guy, but part of the power of external deadlines is the reality of negative consequences if you fall short.

I’ll still be busy with my MFA the next two months. Shortly I’ll be receiving a packet of about a dozen other students’ 20-page writing submissions, which I’ll need to read and critique before we’re all workshopped at our next 10-day residency in Montpelier, Vermont over New Year’s. But I’ll keep up my creative writing during this time, even though I won’t have an advisor waiting to receive it. Now I need to go mark some self-imposed deadlines on my white board.

What steps do you take to set self-imposed deadlines and adhere to them?

Letting Go

Goodbye, Mr. Bacon.

The sassy strip of undercooked pork made his debut on The Artist’s Road in August, after he hijacked the summer vacation I was trying to enjoy with my family. This blog seemed a reasonable place for him to hang out, given the word “bacon” occurs here with sufficient frequency to justify its own category. In fact, a few months ago a commenter wrote this: “I really love your bacon blog, and that it occasionally touches on creativity! It’s a combo platter.”

Safe travels, old friend.

Mr. Bacon has visited here on and off with some frequency, most recently last week. But Mr. Bacon has a traveling jones. Yes, I said I was fine with him going on a walkabout. But, to my surprise, it has saddened me to see him have his own adventures, often without a shout-out to where he came from. Perhaps this is how I will feel when my children leave home and forget to write.

J.D. Salinger went to court to block his character Holden Caulfield from appearing in another book. While Mr. Bacon as a toy came from Think Geek, Mr. Bacon as a blog character was created here. But it seems his spirit is too large to be contained. I don’t own him anymore. I wish him the best of luck as he continues to make appearances on other writers’ blogs, and I will enjoy reading those adventures. But I will not be breathing further life into him here. It’s time for me to move on to other voices, other characters, other stories.

Creativity Tweets of the Week — 11/4/11

The Artist’s Road is back with more links on creativity and writing. Mr. Bacon is also back, petulant at having been left off of the blog for several weeks. He’s lucky I haven’t cooked him.

CREATIVITY

• 

  Perhaps inspired by the two posts featuring "7" below, Mr. Bacon attempts to bend 7 LEGO men to his ill-intentioned will.

  “Scheduling Spontaneity,” Jonathan Fields: Good advice, but not an original line. Does anyone else remember this line by Daphne Zuniga in The Sure Thing? “Spontaneity has its time and place.”

• “music and the mind,” Stan Stewart, Muz4Now: Did you know music is medicine to the mind?

WRITING

• “Death of a Dream: one writer’s journey from hopelessness to inspiration,” Shari Lopatin, guest post at Anthem Exposition: I confess to being a sucker for stories of journalists seeking a creative path.
• 

  Now here's a question for you: Has Mr. Bacon formed a LEGO man army, or is he on the run from one?

  “The Artist’s Path,” Paige Crutcher, Ringing out my bailalika: This is proving to be a recurring theme in original posts on The Artist’s Road and in links like this one–a writer struggles with her muse and with maintaining a blog.

• “Going Part-Time (Hard Habit to Break),” Allison Tait, Life in a Pink Fibro: Like Paige, Allison is looking for creative balance and more time and motivation for her creative writing. This daily blogger is shifting to a more reasonable post schedule.
• “7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” by Mara Purnhagen,” guest post on Writer’s Digest: I like the novelist’s #3, “Get used to weird questions.”
• “7 Words I Never Want to See in Your Blog Posts,” Joey Strawn, FOR bloggers BY bloggers:  Years ago I wrote an online grammar column. I didn’t like telling people what they were doing wrong, but I enjoy linking to others who do that.
• “Tuesday 10: How to Write When You’re Not in the Mood,” Cheryl Reif, Cheryl Reif Writes: Cheryl offers these tips at the start of NaNoWriMo. You wouldn’t want to be NoWa(nna)Wri(te)NoMo(re).

Keep creating!

The Universe Provides… Books!

This is a story of a sacrifice being rewarded three-fold.

To honor the first anniversary of The Artist’s Road, I decided to emulate other bloggers with a book giveaway. I felt it should be a valuable prize, and that I should have to sacrifice a bit as a show of gratitude to my readers. So I made the hard decision to give away a choice of one of my favorite books on creativity from my own collection. The winner selected Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I experienced the Universe providing, or more accurately Tara and Andrew Barney of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, providing, while crossing eastern Oregon (above) on my cross-country US road trip. There was no place to stop to eat for miles and miles, but the tasty banana bread Tara and Andrew had sent me on my way with days earlier provided on this desolate stretch of road.

Three days later I attended the Creativity in Business Conference 2011 in Georgetown, D.C. At a seminar, memory guru James Jorasch said he’d give away a copy of the book that inspired him to improve his memory–Use Your Perfect Memory by Tony Buzan–to the attendee who through audience participation said something he liked. Somehow that person proved to be me, and he handed me the book.

That evening I joined some of the speakers and attendees for dinner at a local restaurant. After dinner I was chatting with creativity and innovation blogger Gregg Fraley, and he gave me a signed copy of his business novel Jack’s Notebook.

Fast forward to Sunday, when I received an e-mail from conference organizer Michelle James.  Apparently my business card had been drawn from a fish bowl placed at the conference’s registration table. (I don’t remember putting it in there, but it was not even 9 am on a Sunday and I was low on coffee.) My prize? The book Training to Imagine: Practical Improvisational Theatre Techniques to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork, Leadership, and Learning by Kat Koppett. Kat had so impressed me at the conference that it was her presentation I chose to blog about.

I chose to give away a book that inspired my creative journey, and the universe gave me three creativity books in return. All three of these books will help me on my personal journey of an art-committed life, but will also benefit my consulting business.

I don’t know if I could replicate this experiment. It’s possible it worked because I did not expect anything in return for my sacrifice. But I’m very pleased it worked out this way. My only problem: I’m really backed up on my MFA reading, so it may be awhile before I can get to these. Perhaps I should read the memory book first, so I retain more of the other two.

Do you believe in the idea of the Universe providing returns?