Real Words

Anyone who reads this blog regularly - or semi-regularly - probably knows that I am a big fan of what I call “creative reading”. By this, I mean reading those books which are specifically designed to draw the reader’s attention to the act of being creative. In many cases, these books are designed specifically for writers and use writing prompts as a way to encourage creative writing.

However, in other cases, the books are designed just to encourage the reader to be more creative in his or her art (such as with Julia Cameron’s The Complete Artist’s Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice). And in some cases, the book is designed to simply encourage more creative living in daily life (like with Living Artfully: Create the Life You Imagine by Sandra Magsamen).

The book that I am reading now - What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul by Oriah Mountain Dreamer - does a little bit of all of these creative things. It is designed to encourage the reader to consider the melding of three different aspects of life - sexuality, spirituality and creativity - in order to live more completely. At it’s core, that’s about living all of life more creatively. However, it focuses specifically on the act of writing when making a lot of its points and uses writing prompts at the end of chapter to emphasize this. And yet, these writing prompts can be easily adapted to other types of art so that it applies to the artistic life in general.

There are a lot of things that I’m enjoying about this particular creative reading book. For example, the writing prompts at the end of each chapter are really helping me to think about what I’m reading and to integrate it into my work. And there aren’t just writing prompts here. There are some questions that are posed just for contemplation - questions that can be focused on or that can be tucked away into the back of the mind to guide the day’s thinking. These end pages of each chapter serve to reinforce what was described in the chapter itself as well as to allow the reader to go even further with the work.

When it boils down to it, though, the real reason that I love this book is because I agree with its core foundation. It is based on the idea that we can not be completely happy unless we are able to fully realize ourselves as sexual, spiritual and creative people. Those are rigid terms but they imply looser concepts. They say that we need to be able to experience our own senses in the world, to feel that we are interconnected with something bigger than ourselves and to use our perceptions to create something outside of ourselves. When these three aspects of life are in balance, we can be content. I believe in that idea and therefore this is an easy book to like.

Question of the Day: Do you believe that any one of those three aspects - sensuality, spirituality or creativity - is more or less important to your writing than the others?

[Tags] oriah mountain dreamer, writing, reading, books, creativity, sensuality, sexuality, spirituality [/Tags]

I’m always a little bit inspired by someone who has come up with a great screen name for himself or herself. We so often see online names that lack imagination (many of the ones I use are probably guilty of this) either because we need to use our given / professional name for work purposes or because we’re just in the habit of using the same old screen name that we’ve always used. As a result, it always catches my eye when someone has a great screen name that makes you look twice.

I’m also a big fan of any sort of play on words. I think words should be played with! So my interest was particularly captured when I was stumbling (through the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon) and I came across a profile with the name:

I Break for Trees

It’s a different kind of name. And it’s a great play on words (because of the spelling of break and the phrase ‘brake for animals’ it conjures up). I think we should all break for trees a little more in our lives. If we did, perhaps we’d be more inspired to come up with unique screen names and otherwise infuse creativity into the little things in our lives!

Question of the Day: What’s the best online name you’ve come across on the web?

[Tags] inspired, creativity, screen name, break for trees [/Tags]

I first discovered SARK when I was in my late teens. There was an independent bookstore in my town where I would go to discover things that they didn’t have at the chain bookstore where I worked. In addition to books on creativity and alternative living and artistic endeavors, this bookstore had posters. One of them was a poster of SARK sayings.

For those who don’t know, SARK is an artist and author from here in San Francisco (although I didn’t realize she was from here when I was still living in Arizona). She writes her books in colorful handwriting and dares her readers to dream. She provides simple mantras for living a more creative life, allows space in her books for readers to color outside of her lines and embraces the idea that every page can be a starting point for something else.

I’ve come back to SARK again and again over the years. In periods when inspiration is weak, I’ll remember her writing and print out a copy of one of her sayings to hang over my desk. I’ll remind myself that it’s okay to spend an afternoon coloring or to take a lazy day to just be in bed with a book; things I learned from SARK when I was overworking and making those rare stops in independent bookstores.

Learn more about SARK here.

Question of the Day: Which creative writer inspires you most?

I have been a freelance writer for quite a long time now, working primarily (but not entirely) in web writing and blogging. Part of the way that I maintain this career over time is to steadily increase my freelance rates. (Read this article to learn how to do it yourself!) And having done this consistently over the years, I’ve seen a pattern develop: my creativity rises in direct proportion to the increase in my rates.

Here are some of the reasons that I think raising your freelance rates will boost your creativity:

• More time per project. When I first started out doing freelance writing from home, the majority of the jobs that I get were SEO / keyword article jobs that paid approximately $4 per 500 words. In order to be able to pay my bills, I had to write hundreds of articles per month. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that I could infuse those articles with some creativity, it just didn’t happen. After raising my keyword article rate, I was able to drop down the number of articles I’d write monthly. This let me devote more time to each article and that allowed me to actually get creative with some of the pieces. Sure, they were still keyword-driven articles but I could take the time to write more creatively and research new aspects of each project. I learned more, was more interested in the work and wasn’t so pressured to produce quantity that my quality improved because of it.
• Better projects. When you start charging higher rates, you’ll actually start to get higher-quality projects coming your way. Basically, people figure that they get what they pay for and you’re going to draw a higher-quality client from a higher pay requirement (assuming that you can follow through with quality work). Better projects tend to not only allow you more creativity but actually demand it of you. They don’t want just the standard “fit this many keywords in” kind of article. They want a unique perspective and a fresh voice and that means that they want you to be more creative. They’re paying you for exactly that!
• Time for non-work creativity. When you raise your rates, you can decrease your workload and actually take time for yourself. This may mean that you have the time to actually work on creative writing projects like that novel that’s been hanging over your head for years. Or it may mean that you have the time and money to attend art gallery openings, indie film screenings and other events that inspire you to be more creative in your own life. At the very least, it means that you have some time to read and that can be one of the most inspiring things for a writer!
• You’re more likely to demand creativity of yourself. No matter how hard you may try not to, you probably have a tendency to treat each job in relation to what it pays you. If you get paid $5 to do an article, you just aren’t going to feel motivated to put a lot of effort into it. If you’re getting paid $500 to do that article, you’re going to pressure yourself to give it some more time and attention. You will hold yourself up to a higher standard of work in accordance with the higher pay and that means that more creative work is likely to come out of you.
• Better feelings in general. We may not like it but this society tends to value us based on what we earn for our work. Unless you’re truly enlightened, your own self-esteem and energy levels can be greatly impacted by what you’re earning for your freelance writing. When you’re earning more for your work, you feel like it has more value. This translates into feeling better about your work overall and that can give you the extra enthusiasm that you need to boost your creativity.
• Quality networking. Although getting paid more for your work doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be better at social networking (online or off) it does mean that you’re going to be in a position to meet other people who take their writing work (and yours) more seriously. This opens up the doors to networking with others in the writing field. That kind of networking can serve as a diving board for entering a new area of creativity and focus on your work.

Raising your rates alone isn’t going to suddenly flood your life with creativity. But it can certainly play a key factor in freeing up your time and energy to do more creative work. It can also improve the way that you approach your work and network about it which can make you feel more inspired to do a better job at what you do.

Question of the Day: Do you agree or disagree that raising your freelance writing rates can directly mean that you do mroe creative work?

[Tags] freelance, writing, blogging, creativity, rates [/Tags]

I am currently in the process of reading Creativity for Life: Practical Advice on the Artist’s Personality, and Career from America’s Foremost Creativity Coach. The book itself, written by San Francisco based creativity and life coach Eric Maisel, is about the difficulties that an artist faces after choosing to devote a life to a creative career. However, at the beginning of the book, Maisel mentions that there are three different things that we might mean when we talk about an artistic life. Those three things are intertwined for most artists but are worth taking a closer look at on their own: 

1. Artful Living. This describes the act of trying to infuse artistic creativity into everything you do. It’s about being creative in the way that you parent, in the re-using that you do to recycle items around the home, in the meals that you make for yourself and others. It’s about taking each moment of the day and trying to approach it with your own creative vision at its core. (Another great book specifically about this is Living Artfully: Create the Life You Imagine.)
2. Art-Filled Living. This refers to the way that we try to fill our days with art. We visit bookstores and art galleries, we play music in our homes and attend concerts when we can, we watch fashion shows on television in order to be creatively inspired. These are the ways that we bring art into our every day life in order to be able to see the world with a broader creative perspective. This is of utmost important to developing creativity because without constantly refilling our own creative wells, our sources of inspiration may run dry.
3. An Art-Committed Life. This is what the bulk of Maisel’s book is about and it refers to the life that we live once we have chosen to actually make art as a living for what we hope will be the rest of our lives. It is about art as a way of life and not just a part of life.

We may find that all three artistic ways of living apply to us. We may find that only one is really a part of our lives on a regular basis. And we may find that although we have one of these in life, we aren’t embodying the other as much as we would like. (For example, you may bring a lot of art into your life but not approach life as creatively as you would like so you have an art-filled life but not an artful one.) By examining these different methods of filling our lives with art, we can make wiser choices in how artfully we want to spend our days.

Question of the Day: Which of these art lives is most important?

[Tags] art, creativity, inspiration, artful, living, choices [/Tags]

 I stumbled upon Brazilian artist Icaro Doria quite literally by using the StumbleUpon toolbar that I have intalled on my computer. Stumbling is something that I occasionally do just to find something new that inspires me. In this instance, I was successful. Icaro Doria’s series of artistic flags uses colors, proportions and statistical information to convey facts about the socio-political environment of different countries and causes. I haven’t ever seen anything quite like this is which is why it stands out as something to be noticed.

Doria uses really simple images to display really complex ideas. He touches on a range of different socio-political topics including HIV, education, drug use, oil consumption and other types of things that affect the global landscape. Breaking these down into really simple images makes it possible for us to just look at the flag and think “wow”. You could get lost in trying to break down the meaning that each image makes about the world around you.

I’m not sure if this is something that I’ll ever use in my own work or not. I keep a scrapbook filled with images of things that have inspired me which I go back to again and again to draw from as a resource for art and writing. I’ve included one of the flags in that book in the hopes that I’ll find something to do with it in the future. Perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t but I’ll enjoy the artwork again and again every time that I see it.

Question of the Day: Can you think of any artist doing work similar to Doria’s flags?

Find Icaro Doria’s work on Centripetal Notion, One Club and Technorati

[Tags] Icaro Doria, flags, art, creativity, stumble [/Tags]

As a writer, I read voraciously. I consume the written word on a daily basis. Although I explore all genres and all types of books, it has become important to me this year to specifically focus on finding and enjoying more books that are specifically about creativity.

There are many different types of these books. There are lengthy academic books on the creative brain and the creative process. There are tips for being more creative in your daily life. And there are books at every level of the spectrum in between those two ends. They are all valuable for providing writers (and other artists) with new ways of looking at their work - and their lives.

One of the books that I picked up this week is Unleash Your Creativity (52 Brilliant Ideas): Fresh Ideas for Having Fresh Ideas. This is similar in many ways to “writing prompt” books but also provides additional information and ideas that makes it a little bit more than this. Like those books, it offers lessons and suggestions can be done in bite-sized pieces in order to jumpstart your creativity. However, it also provides a description of a certain facet of the artistic life, information on challenges that you might face in this area and tips for taking the “prompt” further if you want to.

For example, Tip #23 is “Play Your Part” which suggests that you do some role-playing to embody the character that you are trying to write about. It describes why this is good, why you might want to do it and what role-playing really means. It gives suggestions for doing this at different levels of subtlety so that it can be incorporated easily into your real life. (Such as reacting differently in a business meeting than you normally would or simply considering how you would react differently if you were another race or gender than you are.) It provides a specific exercise, a related quote, and direction to another part of the book for a related tip that can expand on role-playing. It also provides two challenges that people doing this exercise might face and resolutions to those challenges. And it does all of this in five pages.

The tips are easy to complete and have the potential to jar you into new creative action. The book can be picked up and turned to any page so that you don’t have to do the exercises in any sort of order. Each one links to another one in the book so that you can see your creativity developing and connecting back to itself. It’s the kind of book that you don’t read at one time but read regularly throughout your creative life.

Question of the Day: What other writing prompt or writing exercise books do you recommend?

[Tags] writing, creativity, reading, bevan, prompts, writing exercise [/Tags]

Writers need to explore visual creativity. Or maybe that’s not true of all writers but it’s certainly true for me. There are just times when the words get to be too much; times when I can’t think straight because there are just too many words and word choices and ideas expressed in language. When it gets to be that way, I turn to visual art. Sometimes I play around with it myself as a means of new expression. And sometimes I just observe it and enjoy it and try not to think about it in words.

Collage art has always been my favorite form of visual art in terms of how I like to creatively express myself. I like the cutting and pasting of different images to create something new. It seems to translate to what we do regularly as writers; we recraft the same themes in different ways so that they look new and make more sense and strike us differently. And collage art can also be meditative - taking apart, reassembling, shaping, changing …

In playing with collage art over the past few days, I rediscovered the art of the altered book. I had explored altered book art a few years ago because several friends left over from me penpalling days had started to get into making this kind of art. For those who don’t know, it’s the taking apart and changing of books. Sometimes the artists merely paints the pages of the book or collages over them. Other times, the book is cut or burned and reshaped into a new design. Many times, found objects become part of the collaged piece; it starts with a book as three dimensional canvas and becomes a work of art.

At the time, I didn’t get into doing this type of collage myself. For one thing, I had something of an inhibition about tearing up books. Sure, it was re-using them and re-purposing them and that’s fine. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to deface the books I owned. And I also was exploring photocollages at the time and felt that’s where my own artistic inclinations were best expressed. However, I’m seeking something new these days for creative expression and think that altered books might be a good step forward for me.

I have a bunch of books that I’m done with. They aren’t worth keeping around and they have no monetary value for resale. They aren’t in good enough condition to give them as gifts. And I don’t believe in just throwing books away. So perhaps trying my hand at some altered book art is a good choice right now. More importantly,  I’ve recently discovered a new type of altered book art that I hadn’t seen previously. It’s called “found poetry”.

The artist chooses words on the page of the book to create a poem. The other words on the page are scratched out or painted over or collaged on top of. The poetry words stand out amidst an artistic creation. I’ve always loved the pairing of poetry with images. I’ve always liked collages that incorporated text. And I enjoy the idea of using words already on a page to create something that reads entirely differently than the original author intended. It’s an interesting creative challenge and one that I think can be used to open up new channels of thinking, a means of allowing new creative ideas to flourish.

Question of the Day: What experiences with altered book art can you share?

Related links:  Altered Books by Judi Riesch, Karen’s Whimsy Altered Books, The Importance of Collage Art, Altered Book Artists

[Tags] altered book, art, creativity, writing, collage, books [/Tags]

I am one of those people who reads more than one book at a time. The benefit to this (besides that I don’t get bored with what I’m reading) is that the books often link together in my mind to provide me with ideas that are bigger than what is presented within just one book. That’s been the case this week as I’ve read two books about creativity and one about simplifying life.

These are the three books I’m reading right now and what other writers might get out of reading them:

1. Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity by Susan O’Doherty. This is a self-help type of book for the creative person who is feeling blocked. Although I don’t feel that at this current time, I think it’s always beneficial to work through writing exercises in these types of books. This one takes the approach of asking you to do one exercise per chapter (things like figuring out what people negatively impacted your creative process at a young age). It provides the stories of multiple women to assist you in understanding how others might work through this. This book is intended for women and is best for those women who are helped my a psychological, therapeutic, self-help approach to tackling their creative problems.
2. The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by  John Daido Loori. At the other end of the spectrum is a book on creativity that takes a zen approach to art. In fact, the bulk of the book seems to be about teaching you how to practice zen meditation and to bring yourself to a place of stillness. The underlying foundation here is the belief that if you can be still, you can hear your artist’s heart and really bring yourself to the core of your artistic self. This book is good for people who are interested in a spiritual approach to creativity.
3. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz. This book isn’t about creativity per se. What it’s about is understanding how the availability of so many choices can effectively immobilize us in our lives. In a way, this ties in to the zen book. It’s got a theme of appreciating choice but also letting some of the decision-making go. It’s about living a simpler life so that you have the time and energy for other things, things like art. It’s the kind of book that helps me as a writer to remember what’s important to my creativity and what is just fluff on the edges.

These are just three books about creativity. I’m always looking for others and would welcome your suggestions here!

Related links: Susan O’Doherty, John Daido Loori, Barry Schwartz

[Tags] creativity, zen, self-help, writing, books, reading, recommendations [/Tags]

I am a firm believer in the idea that creative people must constantly refill their personal wells of inspiration in order to stay fresh in their work. I find this to be particularly true since I make a living as a writer. I spend almost all day, almost every day, writing for work. In order to avoid recycling the same ideas again and again, I work to engage myself in activities and projects that will broaden my creative experience.

One of this year’s projects is what I call “the neighborhood project”. The idea is that I’ll explore all there is to see in each of the different neighborhoods of San Francisco, taking them one month at a time. Because I made a move in January to begin working part-time in Berkeley, I decided that I’d choose that city for exploration in the month of January (as opposed to a neighborhood actually in San Francisco). It was difficult to do all that I wanted to in this first month because I didn’t make the move until halfway through the month. However, I did manage to experience some neat things which helped to inspire me in different ways.

Here are some of the things that Berkeley month did for me:

• I learned about some of the hiking areas in and around Berkeley. The only one that I have been able to check out extensively so far is Lake Chabot over in Oakland. The hiking that I did there gave me a renewed apprecation of the vast amount of nature that lies around the city. It also got me thinking about the way that places get their names (Lake Chabot is named after Anthony Chabot, as are many other things in this area). I’m not yet sure how that’s going to work it’s way into my writing but I hope that it does.
• I discovered Berkeley street poet Julia Vinograd. This got me reading poetry again which is something that I find really helps me get centered. There’s a simplification of words there that doesn’t happen in the other stuff that I read regularly, even blogs.
• I started to find the coffee shops, book stores, clothing stores and odds-and-ends shops that I hope will be places that I can go for self-expression over the next several months.
• I discovered the art museum associated with the college and put it on my list of things to visit in the next month. Also on this list I’ve put seeing a dance performance at Ashkenaz, music at Freight & Salvage, and theater at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. These are things that I hope will be ongoing sources of inspiration.

Because Berkeley is going to be a place that I’m going to be spending a lot of time, I was more focused on doing research for future sources of inspiration than really experiencing the creative moments available to me here right now. That sense of excitement about stuff that’s to come is, in itself, a great source of inspiration. I feel excited to see where I am which I think provides a great perspective for taking a new approach to work.

Tomorrow kicks off Chinatown month … who knows what I’ll discover in that famous San Francisco neighborhood?!

Question of the Day: Can you share something about Berkeley with me that I haven’t learned yet?

[Tags] berkeley, inspiration, writing, projects, creative, vinograd, chabot [/Tags]

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