NOTE: These posts are inspired by The Artist’s Way, a 12 Step Process to recovering your creativity by Julia Cameron. You can read all about it here.
CREATIVE ABUNDANCE
In my post The Problem with Writers and Money, we talked about relinquishing the old poor, starving artist cliché. Today we talk about living a life of luxury.
And it’s not what you think…
FROM THE ARTIST’S WAY
All too often, we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money. This is never an authentic block.
The actual block is our feeling of constriction, our sense of powerlessness.
Art requires us to empower ourselves with choice.
At the most basic level, this means choosing to do self-care.
by Julia Cameron
Authentic Luxury
We don’t have to book a 5 star hotel or buy the a $300 bottle of wine to get a sense of luxury.
We can take a mundane task and turn it into a moment of luxury.
Instead of rushing through your daily shower, bring a blue-tooth speaker and a scented candle with you.
It is surprising how adding a few more sensory delights transforms mindless routines into a luxurious experience. (You will probably get some great ideas too. Great ideas always pop up in the shower).
Or, try this—next time you’re at the store, buy one small thing for yourself that isn’t on your shopping list. Nothing practical or needed. Pick out something out of the ordinary and frivolous.
A while back, I bought a wine-colored wool fedora. Not practical in scorching Panama, but I like owning it, and it could be used for a future author photo.
Before that, I ordered two Klimt prints for my office from Great Big Canvas. I can’t tell you how luxurious and inspiring it is to write surrounded by my favorite fine art.
There are endless things you can order online purely for your own pleasure.
Ship them to your home, and it’s like receiving a gift from yourself. How thoughtful of you!
Your turn to luxuriate
You can create a sense of creative abundance all around you by becoming intentional about how you shape your experience.
Treat your life as a work of art. Get creative.
What would your weekend look like if you could design it?
Because you can.
Let’s do it right now.
CREATIVE LUXURY CHALLENGE
For this coming weekend, write a list of 10 things you could do to feel luxurious, like …
Order a fancy fountain pen.
Buy yourself a bouquet of roses.
Order new athletic gear.
Luxuriate in an afternoon of unstructured time.
Go out for a gourmet gelato.
Pick one or more items and enjoy.
Work your way down your list in the coming weeks.
Would you like to join us for more exercises like these? Treat yourself to becoming a better writer. Sign up here!
No one will respect your writing time if you don’t.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell why we are doing something and even harder to figure out where to draw the line.
For example, someone asks you for a favor during your writing time. You say yes, even though you’ve been neglecting your WIP and are getting increasingly frustrated that it isn’t finished.
Did you agree to do the favor because you really want to and don’t mind putting your work aside … again?
Or did you cave to avoid guilt or disapproval?
These mini-decisions may seem inconsequential, but add each of these occasions up, and you have a lifetime of saying yes to things that take away from your creative possibilities.
You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Is being the “nice guy” more important than getting out the many worlds inside you?
Think about how you will feel in the future? At the end of your life? Will you have regrets?
Of course, there are some responsibilities we can’t and should not avoid. We have to be workers, parents, friends, spouses, and humans.
But we are at our best and most giving when we are happy and fulfilled, and we are not happy if we are not living the artistic life that excites us.
We are pleased to invite all fiction authors (published or unpublished) to our annual Author Year End Review for 2022.
Now that we’re about to close out 2022, it’s important to process all that happened (or didn’t happen) for us as writers this year.
We need to find out what worked and what didn’t, so that we can double down on the things that brought us results and eliminate whatever is draining our time, energy, and creativity.
Author Year-End Review
What worked for you? What didn’t?
What reasons do you have to celebrate?
What helped or hindered your creativity?
How close were you to your writing, publishing, and sales goals?
What daily habits and mindsets are holding you back?
If you want to make 2023 your best year ever as a writer, then the Author’s Year-End Review will help you 100%.
Growth is uncomfortable. It’s messy. It hurts. Sometimes it feels like everything is falling apart. We are losing grip on who we are. The ground is caving beneath us.
This is a good sign. Nothing is worse for creativity than being stagnant.
Growing pains mean that you are changing. Transformation means inspiration.
Be patient with yourself. Don’t try to run away.
Wait to see what happens and who you will become through your experience.
May the muses be with you,
—Christa
*****
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
MARTHA GRAHAM
WHAT’S INSIDE
Crystalize your vision of what it means a successful author
Develop your own Writer Manifesto
Reverse engineer a step-by-step plan to your career as a writer
This year, I published my first full-length novel called Oblivion Black. Members of the Writers’ Mastermind witnessed me slaving over this manuscript in our weekly co-writing sessions since our virtual writing group began two years ago. They also know that I have been “working on” this story since 2012.
Yes. TEN years.
It seems like an impossible amount of time to be sitting on a book. And yet, here I am in 2022 just releasing it. It staggers the mind (and also makes me feel old to have been an adult long enough to say that I spent a decade with the same damn novel).
I say “sitting” on a book, because most of time I spent changing things, and changing them back, overthinking and overworking everything instead of moving forward in the process of actually publishing a book. It was ten years wasted second guessing, self-doubt, and perfectionism.
So sadly as you can see, I am more than qualified to speak about today’s topic.
FROM THE ARTIST’S WAY by Julia Cameron
Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.
It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.
The Flip Side
On the other side of perfectionism is sloppiness, carelessness, and recklessness. Equally harmful, this is when we don’t take the time and energy to learn what we need to do and how to do it. The artistic wave is so exhilarating, we don’t think about whether or not our boat has any holes in it, and we sink before we reach the shore.
This comes in the form of impatience, self-importance, idealism, and ignorance. But some of this energy is needed to produce compelling work. We must find a balance. We can’t be be blindly confident or overly cautious.
So how do we strike this balance?
As a writer who struggled with crippling perfectionism, here are a few signs you have a problem.
7 Signs Perfectionism is Ruining Your Writing
1. You revisit the same material more than a reasonable amount of times.
2. The things you’ve changed, you change back to their original state, sometimes more than once (second-guessing).
3. You ask for feedback over and over again and shape your story to everyone else’s opinions
4. You don’t believe anyone when they say it’s good or great.
5. The story has lost its original urgency and rawness because of overediting.
6. It has taken you more than a few years to finish (I’ll give you one to three years for a novel, excluding those who have a demanding job or personal live. NOT 10 YEARS, unless you’re Proust!).
7. Your WIP has become such a burden, you struggle to breathe (either metaphorically or literally).
Be mindful and watch yourself for the neuroses of perfectionism.
At some point, have faith, be decisive, and move on.
*****
Do you struggle with perfectionism in your writing?
Or have you rushed into things and released them before they were ready?
Please reply/comment below.
And, may the muses be with you,
—Christa
WHAT’S INSIDE
Crystalize your vision of what it means a successful author
Develop your own Writer Manifesto
Reverse engineer a step-by-step plan to your career as a writer
Brenda Wilkins reads an excerpt from Universal Justice, a thriller with a scifi twist.
Wrongly accused of murder and rape, Brian has been sitting on death row for three years. Once known as the black Walter Cronkite, he now recalls how his nightmare began.
