The Hidden Barrier to Finding Creative Time

Parent-writers and parent-artists often tell me their biggest barrier to being creative is time — as in, they have none. On one level, I absolutely believe them and I absolutely sympathize with them. But on another level, I frankly want to beg them to reconsider.

We’ve all heard the admonishments about time management being a matter of priority. I believe this is only partially true, that there are other things involved — things like energy, awareness, and focus. But even these things don’t touch on a HUUU-UUUGE barrier to making time for art – a barrier that underlies everything, especially when you’re talking about parents who are writers and artists.

That barrier is guilt. GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT. Guilt, as in:

Do the should-reallys ever stop, as parents?

They should. REALLY.

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It’s not that we shouldn’t do things for our children — of course we should — but we don’t have to do everything for them. NOT doing things for them sometimes makes them strong. Even D. W. Winnicott said as much, and he should know.

I mean, we don’t throw them in the water to teach them to swim (at least I don’t), but we can’t keep them out of the lake completely. The whole point of growing up is to become gradually more competent at many things – so that one’s parents can gradually have more time to, among other things, write that novel or be in community theatre again or, I don’t know, go on the competitive contradance circuit if that’s what they want. It’s not that we don’t love our children – DUH — it’s that we are more than parents, all of us, and that fact is not looked on kindly from many quarters of our culture. Especially for mothers. Even, yes, in 2010.

Hence the guilt.

When I ask you to let go of the guilt you have around sometimes choosing your own creativity over your children, I am not actually asking you to choose between your children and your art. I am asking you to sometimes choose your art because, first, that is a healthy way to live. I am asking you to sometimes choose your art because, second, doing so models positive mental health and lifestyle choices for your children, who are watching you, who are taking from you their cues about what they should value in life.

And when I ask you to sometimes choose your art over your children, I am not asking you to sacrifice your children to your art every single time: That’s not healthy either. What I’m asking is that you examine, with both eyes open, what is truly important to you in parenting and in art — and then, AND THIS IS CRITICAL, to release whatever guilt you might have about the choices you make. Because as long as you continue to feel guilty about sometimes choosing your art, you are going to sabotage that art. Full stop.

There is no right answer about your choices here. I might choose the Halloween costume but not the perfectly-folded sheets. You might do the opposite. That’s fine. The only thing I ask of you here is to be brutally self-aware, to admit what is truly important in your parenting versus what you only trick yourself into thinking is a priority because, for example:

When we say we don’t have time for art, what we’re often saying is that we’ve made other things a higher priority – but we might not even realize it: So often our so-called priorities go unexamined, because more than anything those unexamined priorities are unconscious reactions to fear (which is, itself, a symptom of perfectionism). And we cling to these unexamined priorities out of guilt, out of the perception that if we do not, say, take the toddler to the park every single day without fail, or fold the sheets perfectly, that somehow we are bad parents who are messing up their children for life.

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The word “guilt” comes from the Old English word meaning “crime” or “sin:” There is a sense we’re doing something wrong, committing some kind of crime when we turn our attention away from our children in order to be creative. The crime, we believe, perhaps unconsciously, is that we’re stealing time from our children to give to ourselves. HOW DARE WE?

But there is nothing wrong with that. It is not a crime for a parent to take time for his or her own creative life. It is not a crime to ask your five-year-old to play by himself for a half-hour while you write. It is not a crime to expect your teenager to fold her own laundry while you paint. It is not a crime to trade babysitting with another parent so you can have time for your art once a week. You do not, as a parent, have to be the martyr society still expects you to be – expects it especially if you’re a mom. It’s not healthy for you, it’s not healthy for your kids, it’s not healthy for society. And it’s not healthy for your art.

Seriously, parent-artists. Seriously, parent-writers. Let us please get real here. You are not a bad person if you take some time for yourself, for your art. You are not a bad parent if you encourage your kid to go it alone on the science project this time. You are not a bad parent if the bathroom mirror boasts a splatter of dried toothpaste for one more day.

Because honestly? Your kids, my kids – and, for that matter, all the people in the entire world right now – need your art more than we need your floors to be spotless.

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What to Do with the Novel in Your Head

I can’t count the number of times someone has told me they have a novel in their head. But this time, it was different.

Our friends had — in that week alone — been involved in a workplace shooting, signed papers for the sale of their house, and had a minor car accident. Their two small boys were energetic with an extra dose of lively, and the couple hadn’t slept well in days years.

But they packed up their boys and trooped up to the mountains anyway, to meet us and our two boys at our long-ago-planned destination. We were in for a weekend of hiking, campfires, and twilight elk sightings.

And although there was plenty of recounting the tales of woe from the previous week, what struck me most was — hiking up the Hot Springs Trail on the Ohanapecosh River near Mount Rainier, four springy boys bouncing beside us — the greatest focus and energy my friend had all weekend was when she started to talk about the novel in her head.

She had it all tracked, from characters to plot to scenes that moved the story along. The climax was richly open — the broad outlines there; the details to be filled in later, deliciously, when the time came. She knew the characters, their backgrounds, their relationships, the way they changed and moved around the novel’s landscape over the course of the story. And she’d been doing research on the things she needed to know about: treating snakebites, identifying edible plants. The way she described it started to sound like a book she’d just read and loved and was recounting to me.

Finally, I had to say, “Have you written this down?”

“No,” she said. “But I think about it a lot and try to flesh out different parts of it, figure out how this scene will work out, or research that little bit of information I know I’ll need when the time comes.”

I walked along silently beside her. I was amazed.

“But I’m going to write it down, for sure.” She paused, and called to her boys to slow down, to stay where they could see us. “It might take me 20 years,” she sighed. “But I’ll do it.”

More than anything, parent-artists and parent-writers need time. Money to pay for a babysitter would be nice. Energy to get the work done would be great. But time is the most valuable currency among parents in general — especially parents of young children, and especially parents who have both small children and a creative destiny to meet.

But how do you find time / make time / steal time?

In part, like my friend does: Focused mental activity on a single creative project, in little bits and pieces, sustained over a long draw of days — or even years.

Now, of course, that may not bring the project to physical (or typewritten) manifestation, which is an ultimate necessity for any creative project. But it does serve three important purposes.

First, creating bits of the project in your mind, many times over a long period of time, sets intention, generates internal energy for creating — energy you might not otherwise be able to generate — and keeps creative juices flowing.

Second, it greases the wheels for when you do have the time to write or make art. When you get to the notebook or computer or studio or stage, you’re not creating from scratch because your mind has been at it all along. You know the nuance and detail of what you’re now manifesting. You’ve been living with it, maybe for years. You know it.

Third, it saves your sanity. If you’re a creative type and you need to create and you’re not creating, you will be unhappy and resentful and maybe even depressed. Creating in any way you can — even in your head — provides an important outlet for you.

So the thing to do with that novel in your head — if you truly aren’t ready (or able) to bring it to paper but need to be doing something on it — is this: Write it in your head. Bit by bit. Put it down on paper whenever and however you can, sure, but more importantly, just feed it and and water it and love on it however you can — even if that’s just playing out a new scene in your head each week, or adding details and backgrounds to characters so it becomes evermore vivid in your mind, or researching bits of data on your smart phone in the doctor’s waiting room or the grocery line — so that it is so alive to you that there will come a point, eventually, when it’s right, when you simply have to write it down or you will burst.

This is not an excuse to take no action. Rethinking the same plot piece over and over, or reveling in how clever that bit of character background is, won’t get the novel written, even in your head. You have to move it forward, even if it’s not on paper yet. But if you can discipline yourself the way my friend has done, developing her novel piece by piece, “all in your head” could be a very good thing for you — for now. Parents who are artists and writers have to find ways that their creativity works within the demanding confines of family life. And just like the dishes and the laundry and the dusting, you’ll get to writing it down, well, when you get to it.

And if it’s important enough to you, you will.

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Why Trusting the Process is Bullshit

Trust the process!

It’s said so often, in so many ways, about so many things, that it’s become a cliché. Worse – it’s become a parody. And quite a meaningless one at that.

“If I could only trust the process, I could get this book written.”
“If I trusted the process, I wouldn’t put off painting anymore.”
“I know, I know – I just have to trust the process.”

No. No, you don’t. You don’t have to trust the process.

You have to show up for the process. You have to practice every day. You have to pick up your pen or your brush or your script or whatever medium you’re working with, and work it. But you don’t have to trust it.

“Process” simply means “going forward.” You don’t have to trust the process of walking in order to put one foot in front of the other. You don’t have to trust the process of driving in order to get from your house to the grocery store and back. And you don’t have to trust the creative process in order to make your art.

You don’t have to trust the process. Regular, consistent, persistent practice over time will become a process, and eventually a product, whether or not you trust it. Don’t mistake trust for talent or hard work or showing up for your art every day. The process will happen as long as you move your art forward, as long as you do your art daily, regardless of whether you trust it or not.

So the whole “Trust the process!” saw? Utter bullshit.

What you need to trust is yourself.

Trust in yourself.

Because we all know that what’s scary about the process is not whether you choose to do it at six in the morning or right after dinner. What’s scary about the process is not whether you light a candle to begin, or chant for eleven minutes, or just bust right into your studio and start making art without thinking. What’s scary about the process is that it’s all you, right there, naked in the words or the clay or the monologue or the song.

It’s you, naked art, staring back at you with all your flaws and embarrassments and self-doubt. Your whole history, or your whole heart, or the most potent slice of it, hanging out in the wind for everyone to see. AND JUDGE.

Or it’s you, naked with nothing to wear, no art to clothe your rawness in, waiting for the next idea to come flying in. And it’s not. It’s not flying in, or even creeping. And your monkey mind is taking over, your inner critic is talking you down from self-confidence into self-doubt. You can’t do this. You’re not an artist.

Or it’s you, naked and flabby and gray, lackluster and bored, proving to yourself once again that your art doesn’t matter.

Because you don’t trust yourself. You don’t trust yourself to create something “good,” or you don’t trust yourself to connect with inspiration, or you don’t trust yourself to make your art vibrant and alive and meaningful.

You’re frozen with self-mistrust because someone, or several people, or many many many people, somewhere in your history told you things about art and artists and creativity and most of all about yourself that you then internalized, you took as real, you trusted those people more than you trusted yourself, and now their words have become an unholy part of you that keeps you from trusting yourself so you can show up for your art.

And that is how you actually end up creating art that feels stilted, or uninspired, or self-conscious. Or how you end up not creating art at all, even though a very deep part of you, maybe the deepest-of-all part of you, wants to. Yearns to. It’s not because you don’t trust the process.

It’s because you don’t trust yourself.

And the way to get around that, the way to get through it, the way to find your own trust in yourself once again, is to show up for the process and listen to your authentic voice and give it expression.

Your authentic voice? You know, the quiet, uncertain one? The one you tend to brush off as needy or dramatic or doesn’t know what she’s talking about? The one you haven’t been trusting all these years because you’ve been trusting that inner critic for far too long?

Yeah, her. Bring her to the process next time and give her space to unleash. Make the process whatever you want to make it. Do it standing on your head for all I care. But whatever you do, give your full attention to that authentic voice. You might be surprised at just how trustworthy she is.

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The Parent-Artist: When Worlds, and Identities, Collide

When I unleashed Stark Raving Muse in June, my intent to do a creative act every day was focused solely on my own needs, activities, and identity as a writer and artist. I needed to get back to my creative juiciness, to make time and space in my everyday life for potent, creative originality. I imagined I would sneak tiny little slices of each day to hole up in my office typing furiously, or in my studio painting or sculpting, while my husband and children were, I don’t know, elsewhere.

In my mind, my identities as artist/writer and mother were almost completely separate.

How odd that seems, in retrospect.

Artists and writers often rail against boundaries, deadlines, and other hard realities that put limits on their creativity. But we also, sometimes grudgingly, acknowledge that such limits actually make our work more vibrant, more muscular. Stronger, with more impact.

Little did I realize how much my mothering responsibilities — what felt (and, let’s face it, still feel) like severe limits to my artist/writer needs — would offer opportunities for productive creative tension. For in the four months I’ve been at it, my daily creative acts have included family storytelling, mind mapping with a preschooler, planning two birthday parties, setting up and shooting zillions of photos of my kids, taking my children to art galleries and public art installations, brainstorming backup plans in case it rained on the Fourth of July, articulating reasons for parents to make art, writing a very personal memoir of our son’s NICU stay, making a Halloween mask for my five-year-old, doing arts and crafts with him, and making this birthday cake for him, which I am almost obscenely proud of:

Looking back over the last four months, it is abundantly clear that my identity as a mother is in no way separate from my identity as a writer/artist. They infuse and enrich each other. Yes, of course, usually my mothering responsibilities dominate my daily landscape, often to the point that I am staying up late into the night to satisfy the writer or artist within (and then staying up even later to soothe the baby back to sleep). And I can’t deny that I resent having so little time for my art. But almost as often, and more and more lately, I’m finding ways to integrate the two roles, to bring creativity to motherhood and to bring my identity and experiences as a parent into my writing and my art.

Obviously, a writer or artist still needs her own time and space to do the work that is truly unto herself and not so easy to integrate into family life. For many people the chosen medium requires solitude and deep focus — the very antithesis of mothering or fathering. But for all of us, including those whose artistic mediums truly require solitude and focus, ways can also be found to integrate at least parts of the two identities and two sets of responsibilities creatively.

You can start by asking yourself these questions:

  1. Must my parenting activities be completely separate from my writer/artist activities? Is it necessary to have a parenting identity that is completely separate from my identity as a writer/artist? If not, what portion of each might be integrated into the other — for example, hands-on research? materials preparation? actual creating, perhaps side-by-side with my child?
  2. How bound am I to my particular medium? Can I try another medium that is more adaptable to family life — writing micro-poetry, for example, instead of a novel? Doing collage side-by-side with a child instead of something more fragile? Learning guitar by playing children’s songs instead of classical music? What if I deviated completely from my ideal medium to try something more resonant with family life, say storytelling or cake decorating? Would my creative drive be satisfied enough, at least for now?
  3. What am I teaching my children (and communicating to my own subconscious) about the value of art by the way I relate to my art and my artistic identity? That art comes last? That it is less valuable than other roles and responsibilities? That it is accessible and available to anyone, anytime? That it is rigid — or flexible?

These are questions that artists/writers who are not parents don’t have the responsibility — or the good fortune — to ask. They are difficult questions but ones that are critical to forging and strengthening your identity as both a parent and a writer/artist. Knowing the answers to them will help you clarify both identities, figure out how and when to give time to your art, and center yourself in your parenting and creative practices.

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Why Work Before Play Doesn’t Work (Making Time for Art, Part 4)

This is the last in a four-part series on making time for art. The original premise of this series is that having time, or feeling control over your time, is the proper management of four things: priorities (Part 1), focus (Part 2), awareness (Part 3), and energy (this post).

The traditional way of scheduling our time is to do the heavy lifting first: the intense intellectual work, or the more odious tasks, or the clear-the-decks stuff meant to make head space or physical space for the fun stuff. Once that stuff is done, the logic goes, you can relax and really get into the good stuff: reading, writing, making art, whatever.

But by that logic, most people never actually get to their art. I know countless parents who are itching to write a novel or make papier-mache pigs or learn to salsa dance. But they’re not doing it because the responsibilities of running a family and a household always take precedence. Always. The dishes, the laundry, the groceries, the cooking, the soccer practice, the play dates, the school fundraisers, the birthday parties, the holiday shopping — the tasks of parenting and householding are never-ending. And they suck us dry so that, by the end of the day, there is no juice left in us for writing, for art.

The reality is, we’ve been doing it all backwards. Work Before Play — because that’s what this is; that’s how we parents are ordering our days without even realizing it — is an old Puritanical principle that shortchanges you before your day has even begun.

Why?

Why on earth would you deplete your energy, set a negative tone for the day, and consistently tell yourself that you don’t deserve to have fun? If your therapist or your spouse or your friend told you as much, in such bald terms, you would balk: It just doesn’t sound right. Because it’s not.

In my experience, there are four types of activities:

Activities that you initially have the energy for but that ultimately deplete your energy are especially toxic because the energy may be coming from false perceptions or expectations that are out of whack with reality. Your energy is depleted when you inevitably run into roadblocks, disappointments, and frustration. These are the things that make you feel like you’re swimming upstream, or hitting your head against a brick wall. Generally they require serious soul-searching, reality checking, and/or taking it slower – maybe you’re trying to jump ahead to a skill level you haven’t yet achieved and need, for example, to take a class or get some mentoring.

With the exception of Type 3, which probably needs a complete overhaul altogether, this also happens to be the basic sequence in which you should order your day. (I’d argue you shouldn’t be doing #3 at all – if you are, that would be the first issue to address.) You could change up the first two, but you really shouldn’t be doing stuff that depletes your energy as the kick-off to your day. In fact, the further back you can push that stuff, the better, because the energy you generate from the fun stuff can actually make the energy-depleting work go easier.

So these are the questions to ask yourself:

Try this: For just one week, do something energy-generating first thing in the morning. Take a walk, paint, call a friend, play with your dog. Whatever generates energy for you, whether you have to muster that energy up or have ready access to it. Then do the energy-depleting work and see if it isn’t easier than usual. See if it’s not more productive — even, dare I say, more enjoyable. I can almost guarantee it will be.

And that is some deep time management.

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Watching the Clock (Making Time for Art, Part 3)

This is the third of a four-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Having your priorities straight and knowing how to focus make finding time for art easier. But bringing continual awareness to how you spend your time is really critical.

When I say awareness, I’m talking about both a practical kind of awareness — What am I doing with my time? Am I spending it well? — as well as a deeper sense of knowing time.

In many ways, time is like money: We have it, we spend it. However, unlike money, everyone starts out with the same amount of time each day. And also, unlike money, we all have to spend it down at the same rate. There really is no such thing as “saving” time — it’s not like you can put it away for later. It’s here, right now, and we get it on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. There is no bank where you can buy or borrow an extra few hours. For better or for worse, it just doesn’t work like that.

So what matters is spending it well. And if you don’t know how you’re spending it — if you’re floating through your days on a cloud of distraction and confusion, or attending to priorities that don’t make your life juicy and alive and worth it, then you’re spending it poorly.

So if you really want to get control over how you spend your time, you need to be aware of exactly how you’re spending it.

Keep a journal in 15-minute increments. Keep it for a day, three days, a week, however long you can. Then take a look: How much of the time allotted to you did you spend on the things that are truly priorities? (Refer back to Part 1) How much of the time allotted to you did you spend distracted, unfocused, not energized? (Refer back to Part 2) Were you aware of how you were really spending your time before doing this exercise? If not, what surprised you?

Keeping a time journal can not only help you identify how you spend your time versus how you’d rather be spending it; it can also help you deepen your awareness, then, so you’ll be able to answer questions like:

Knowing all these things will help you focus, set realistic deadlines/timelines, and stop or modify your approach when low-priority tasks start taking up too much time. Not knowing all these things puts you at risk for spending your time less optimally — and that can cost you.

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What to Do with Distraction (Making Time for Art, Part 2)

The word “focus” is a Latin term meaning “hearth” or “fireplace;” it was used for some time to mean “fire” itself.

Think about the last time you were sitting around a campfire, or in front of a fireplace, or across from a candle, gazing upon it. If you gaze long enough, eyes soft but still, the flame begins to disintegrate everything around it. You can’t see anything but the bright licks of heat themselves. Fire consumes your attention. It’s a magnet.

So it is with focus.

When we’re truly focused, we can feel the intense fire burning behind our eyes, stirring up the energy in our hearts until all the distractions that tempt us fade away in the light of that energy. Focus self-replicates excitement and forward-motion, opens us to standing in its light in a way that blocks out all other distractions.

If we’re continually pulled away — by fear or self-doubt, by telephones or texts, by tasks that suddenly seem so much more important than our art — then focus has no chance to catch fire inside of us. But if we can stir the flame of attention long enough to attend fully to the task at hand — deep enough so that all other distractions fall by the wayside — then we can begin to develop focus; we can begin to settle into a way of doing things that is present-minded and deep.

Distractions are like winds blowing around us at all times. They threaten to put out the flame before it really gets going. But if you can protect the flame long enough — if you can guard your creative time jealously when it’s still young and somewhat fragile — then the flame, the focus, begins to feed itself. Your undivided attention becomes easier to access, and although the winds of distraction may not die down — ever – the fire before you grows strong enough to resist it, bright enough to warm and slow the winds licking at its edges.

But you have to know what your distractions are.

Many of us are very good at blaming other people, or TV, or the Internet, for distracting us. We tell ourselves, in irritation, that if only the neighbor hadn’t talked at us for 25 minutes on the porch, we would have done some art today. We would have written that next chapter. We would have practiced Moonlight Sonata.

But distraction is as deep inside of us as focus could be.

Distractions are not just external. If you think that you’re serving your focus by “getting things out of the way” before you sit down with your art — things like vacuuming or catching up on e-mail or running to the grocery store for one more thing for dinner — you’re lying to yourself. These things don’t need to be done before your art. No no no really: They don’t.

In fact, I’ll tell you a secret: If you take the time to write or perform or make art before the household chores or the extra work, if you do art first instead of last, the whole rest of your day is more energized, excited and focused. Because you don’t resent the laundry, then, or the e-mail; you’re not trying to hold onto that shred of idea or inspiration you woke up with; your mind is clearer and more open to each unfolding moment.

And then you have more focus everywhere in life, not just in your creative work but in the household drudgery and the workplace overwhelm and the commute and the marriage and the kids and whatever else you’re carrying around.

You have to ask yourself:

This last one is the clincher. Seriously. My big distraction is e-mail and social networking sites like Facebook. About two seconds of reflection showed me that that distraction is trying to fill my need for connection. And clearly, as much as I adore my Facebook friends, my distraction is telling me that I need to nurture connection in other — face-to-face, flesh-and-blood — areas of my life.

So, hearkening back to Part 1 of this series, which discussed priorities, Facebook and Twitter are not priorities, but connection — love and belonging — are. The next step, then, is to ask myself how I can focus on those things in my flesh-and-blood life so I can dispel the distraction that threatens my focus.

Your distraction may be different. You might feel the need to clean the entire house before sitting down to write, or finishing the book you’re reading before you get your paints out. It’s not just the talky neighbor or the thank-you notes to be sent or the absolute need for a sandwich right now. Your distraction is whatever’s blowing your creative focus over before you can even set it afire.

What’s that distraction serving? Connection, like mine? Is it providing comfort? Appeasing a snarling inner critic? Do you tell yourself that it’s “clearing your head”? What do you get out of it? An excuse for not writing today? A daily report to your spouse that’s well within your comfort zone (“No, I didn’t sculpt today — too busy.”)?

For whatever is keeping you from your art, sure, you need clarity. Sometimes you need to actively banish it for a while so you can get to your art: No e-mail, say, for a whole hour while you write. But those aren’t the main things.

But the main thing to do with distraction is to turn away from it — to turn toward fire.

In many esoteric traditions, fire is associated with passion, intensity, and inspiration. If you can’t find the fire in what’s in front of you, you’re distracted. You need to turn. Turn your whole body, not just your head. Take up the thing of passion. Focus will come so much easier.

And when you do, the rest of your life will feel more focused, too. Because you’ve given focus space and energy and attention. Your body knows how to do it now. Keep teaching it. Light a flame and fan it.

You’ll have more time for everything. Really.

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Making Time for Art (Part 1 of 4)

Lack of time (or, rather, the perceived lack of time) has always been my number-one reason (or, rather, my number-one excuse) for not writing or making art.

As it turns out, I’m not unusual. At. All.

So I’ve been thinking about the issue a lot because, although I’m still plugging away at my one-creative-act-a-day project, I’m not spending as much time as I’d like to on art. Not only that, I constantly feel behind the 8-ball on most of life and hurried and harried all the time and not really the way I want to be living and things are getting dropped left and right and — I just have to stop.

Put up my hand and say That’s it. There has to be a better way. Just because I’m a mother and an artist and a whole bunch of other things doesn’t mean I have to feel up against a wall every moment of every day.

So I stopped. I took a lot of time this week to think about — well, time. I mean, Time.

And what I came up with is that I think we do the whole time management thing wrong. We talk about streamlining and multitasking and cutting out obligations and prioritizing. And all those things work, to a degree, I guess, if you’re just kind of looking to, I don’t know, survive.

But for those who need an alternative way of living, of thinking about their very relationship to time, I suggest we start approaching time management in a different way — not in terms of tasks required of us but instead in these terms:

Having time is the proper management of priority, focus, awareness, and energy.

I’ll talk about focus, awareness, and energy in future posts. But today is all about managing priority. Not just prioritizing because, again, that is so task-oriented that you have to keep redoing it and redoing it. I’m talking about managing priority in your life.

That is: Are you doing your priorities in order — are you doing the thing that’s most important in this moment? I know it’s kind of an old-school way of looking at things, but I think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need is really useful here.

So when we’re thinking about time management, the first priority to think about is our physiological needs: Can I breathe? (If the answer is no, this obviously trumps any other priority. I mean, we can’t write a novel if we’re struggling to breathe, right?) Do I have water, food, and sleep? (I would add shelter as well.) Is my body in tune with the environment? Is it able to clean itself out? Is it getting the touch that it needs?

Then: Are my family and I safe and secure — in terms of body, resources, employment, assets? Do we feel like the rug isn’t going to get ripped out from under us if we experience a job loss, major medical bills, or our house burns down? I mean, we know there’ll be crisis and transition, sure, but are we confident that we’ll be able to get back on our feet? Do we have enough insurance?

Then: Do I experience love and belonging regularly, in healthy ways? How’s my relationship with my spouse/partner, my kids, the rest of my family? Do I have a strong social circle that knows me and supports me? Do I feel part of a larger community and feel I have a role to contribute to it?

Then: Do I value myself? Do I feel valued by others? Do I value them?

Then: Do I feel connected to a larger purpose? Do I have meaning in my life? Am I engaged in my creativity, morality, and spirituality? How so?

The thing is, for a lot of people (especially, I’m going to go out on a limb and claim, a lot of artists), the “higher level” or more evolved needs are much more fun and interesting than the earlier ones: the biology, the safety, the security. Who wants to worry about earning enough money for health insurance when you could be meditating your way to enlightenment. Am I right?

But if those more basic needs aren’t taken care of, the reach for the more evolved ones is a crap shoot at best. Maslow is not unlike the chakras: You have to strengthen the lower chakras (which correlate with safety, security, and sex — by the way!) before you can strongly balance the upper ones. You can’t fool Maslow by putting aside your need for, say, water or sleep in order to work on your self-esteem or your social life.

Similarly, if more subtly (but more relevant to this space), it’s not surprising that so many artists find it hard to make time for their art — their creative, spontaneous, self-actualized work — when they haven’t resolved issues such as security or self-value.

These things build on each other.

Maybe, for some people, it is to hard to find the time to write or make art because their lower-level needs aren’t yet taken care of. Their subtle energy is directing them toward self-care in other ways: by feeding themselves right or securing immediately-paying employment or nurturing their family life. Trying to write or paint or sing under insecure conditions is not impossible (and indeed some very eternal works of art have come out of conditions like this), but it is not very, let’s say, efficient. Which isn’t a sexy term but it’s true.

So, of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t write or make art at all before we’ve established ourselves in the lower-level areas. If we waited till everything was in order before we created, we’d never get to our creative work! But perhaps we need to look at Maslow again, for the first time since the tenth grade, to really understand what’s not secure in our lives, to understand what we’re neglecting for the sake of our art, to understand whether our priorities are really in the right place. Maybe we ought to work on things like physical health and family relationships not as a barrier to our art but as an avenue to it.

And then maybe if we gave our security and relationships and bodies and the rest of it the attention and love they need, if we focused on the critical needs that we’re currently neglecting, then maybe just maybe we would fortify ourselves in stronger and stronger ways for that space of time that, I’m sure of it, will then open up and welcome more and more of our creativity.

Next up: Managing focus.

In the meantime: Looking at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (above), do you see lower-level needs that you’re leaping over to get to your creative work? What might your life be like if you took care of those needs? How would your creative work be different?

Maslow image
Clock image

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Posted on September 25, 2010 at 11:56 pm by starkravingmuse · Permalink · 6 Comments
In: I don't have time. · Tagged with: ,

Why You’re Not Making Art: The Truth About Inspiration

I know plenty of people who are sitting around waiting for inspiration so they can make art.

I also know lots of people who’ve decided to take matters into their own hands and orchestrate inspiration themselves instead of waiting around for it.

But the most successful artists I know don’t do either.

Inspiration is a funny word. It literally means “to breathe in,” but the “spir” part of it is related to the word “spirit,” and there’s a definite sense of divine intervention about the idea of inspiration.

Being inspired is, we believe, something that happens to us or, at the very most, something we conjure through a sidelong mysterious sort of magic — not something that’s automatically at our disposal whenever we want it. Not like, say, your toothbrush or a bowl of ice cream. Inspiration is not just sitting there waiting for us to pick it up.

Right?

Um, wrong.

Inspiration can be available for the asking. But we go about it all the wrong way. Like a lover sitting on the stoop without making eye contact with a single passerby — we wait and wait and wait for inspiration to come sweep us off our feet. But nothing’s even going to approach us, much less sweep us up, if we don’t approach it first.

And so it never comes. This is especially true for artists who are parents: The inspiration we await never, ever comes, because no moment is ever perfect for making art. There’s always a child tugging at our sleeve or a pot of soup boiling over or a screaming carpool to ferry home safely. Even in the dead of night, when so many of us steal a creative moment for ourselves, the baby cries or the preschooler wets the bed or the teenager comes rolling in after curfew. No moment is inviolable when you’re a parent.

And for many artists who aren’t parents, too, this issue crops up: It’s not a wet diaper but a dog who needs to be let out or a potluck to make cookies for or a boss who expects us to work late because we don’t have a school play to go to. Parents or not, we artists and writers so often fill our lives with obligation precisely so we don’t have to face the blank page, the blank canvas, that lump of clay sitting and waiting for us to make something of it.

We’re scared that inspiration won’t come so we fill our lives with obligations and then tell ourselves we can’t get inspired because we don’t have time. And that’s why we don’t make art.*

So we have to learn a different formula for inspiration — one that gives us reliable access to our creative energy, to the inspiration we maybe once had in spades but that now seems trapped under the endless laundry pile or beyond that boss’s tapping toe.

And it’s actually a simple, if elusive, formula. Here it is, totally free:

Inspiration follows art.

I feel so strongly about this that I’ll say it again, louder and more emphatically:

INSPIRATION!
FOLLOWS!
ART!

So many aspiring artists sit around waiting for inspiration, or trying to conjure it by meditating or playing music or having a glass of wine or whatever — because they mistakenly believe that art follows inspiration.

But it doesn’t.

Don’t forget that one of the Greek Muses was named Melete — Practice.

Practice is your Muse.

What does this mean? It means that you don’t generate art by being inspired — no, no, no, no, nooooooo! You generate inspiration by doing art. You set the intention to do it every day — even if it’s just five minutes with pen and paper while you’re sitting on the toilet with the door locked and your eight-year-old knocking incessantly — and then you do it.

And before you know it, you’re inspired to write more, or paint more, or sing more, or whatever, because you’ve been practicing. You know that old saw about Practice Makes Perfect? Whatever. We don’t need perfection. We need to make art. And practice makes art. Daily habits create new neural pathways that make it easier and easier, over time, to come to the page, the canvas, the stage, whatever your medium, and make the art that’s inside you.

And as you do it more and more, you’re seeding your own inspiration. You’re banking it for future days so that you don’t have to wait — so that inspiration is just there, ready and waiting, like a bowl, a spoon, and a carton of ice cream: there for the taking, whenever you have sixty minutes, or five, to create.

Meditation image
Flower seeds image

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Posted on September 18, 2010 at 11:52 pm by starkravingmuse · Permalink · One Comment
In: I can't get inspired.

A Little Update

I know you know that I haven’t been posting every day lately as I was most of the summer. There’s a reason for that: I realized that what I had to say on a daily basis wasn’t nearly as interesting (at least to me) as when I took a step back and let things roll around and deepen a bit.

The Stark Raving Rules are still that I do one creative act a day, but I’ve dropped my self-imposed requirement to blog about it every day. The point is not to tell the world every time I lay down a new layer of papier-mache on a mask or rework an essay. The point is to maintain a daily practice and blog about my creative process — hopefully helping other writers and artists commit and create as well.

So though I’m not writing here as frequently, I’m as committed as ever to Stark Raving Muse and find my reflections on the project, and creativity in general, growing deeper and more useful every day. I hope you’ll stick with me as I continue to explore issues of creativity, inspiration, self-confidence, time and energy, motivation, fear, voice, and more in these pages.

Onward!

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Posted on September 17, 2010 at 12:20 am by starkravingmuse · Permalink · One Comment
In: Uncategorized