Creative people often feel the pressure to have all the answers, to know precisely what they're going to do and how they're going to do it.  It makes others nervous when they see the splotches of paint, scattered lumps of clay, and half written stories lying all about.  But, hey, that's the process.

There's a time and place for everything: for setting goals and for ditching them, for managing time and losing track of it, for traveling a preset route and wandering blamelessly.

Do you know why creative people get stuck?  

 

It''s usually because they're spending more time worrying about what to create than creating.  

 

They're either afraid of making the wrong things or making bad things, but sometimes you have to forget about all of that, let go, and get a hold of yourself.

 

When creative people aren't making things, it drives them insane, so why not go crazy anyway and go on a creative binge?

Write poems, draw pictures, create an entire village of penguins made of modeling clay.

Start a personal blog and post whatever you want.  Post stories about your grandmother, pictures of your cat, and lyrics from your blossoming Broadway musical entitled Mondays Suck the Big One.

And remember, remember, and never forget.  None of it has to be any good.  In fact, it can be horrible.  Bad stuff has a way of leading to better stuff.  It's just one of the things I call the Cringe Benefits of Doing Something Badly (an upcoming blog post).

 

I'm telling you all this because it's precisely what I had to do to get a handle on my blog and everything else that was brewing in my heart and mind.  Comb through my blog posts and you'll find more than a few that make me want to run and hide.  They're full of half-baked ideas, ill conceived concepts, and broken promises.  Trust me.  They're embarrassing.

But I can also tell you this: they helped me get a hold of myself.  By throwing anything and everything at my blog, I discovered what worked and what didn't.  I learned more about my readers, more about myself, and more about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to go about it.  Without the flops and failures, I would have never found my way.

Focus and clarity are beautiful things for sure, but they're usually preceded by a long, strange journey into confusion.  And that's just the way it ought to be.

 

 

 

 

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