Unleashing Your Creative Monster: Say One Thing Strong

My friend Don­ald was kind enough to leave a com­ment on my pre­vi­ous foul-mouthed post, clar­i­fy­ing that I’m really a much nicer per­son in real life.

I’d like to think so too.

So why did I swear like a sailor in writ­ing Unleash­ing Your Cre­ative Mon­ster: Know Who’s Your Bitch?

I strug­gled with writ­ing that post for the longest time. I wrote drafts and drafts of my thoughts on cre­ativ­ity, things I’d learned through more than 10 years of study­ing and work­ing in the cre­ative fields. The drafts hemmed and hawed, went this way and that, and turned out bloated and bor­ing. None of them worked. Cre­ativ­ity is a para­dox­i­cal sub­ject and I was try­ing to cover all the dif­fer­ent points of view possible.

As a result, the drafts didn’t have one sin­gle strong point of view.

When I finally decided to heck with it, I was going to write with my foot down and dammit if I missed any­thing, that the draft that became Know Who’s Your Bitch came into being, eas­ily and quickly.

You see, the secret is very sim­ple. In real life, I can be mild-mannered, fair and non-judgmental. In a con­ver­sa­tion, I have the time to lis­ten, to try to under­stand and see all points of view. Unless I turn out extremely bor­ing, chances are you won’t bolt (chances are too that you’ll be more inter­ested in talk­ing about your­self than hear­ing me go on about me).

But on the writ­ten word, there’s no guar­an­tee that you’ll stay with me beyond my first sen­tence. One sen­tence too long, one para­graph too wind­ing, one pas­sage too flabby, and it’s off you go.

On the writ­ten word I have to grab you by the throat, slap you silly with my point of view and still leave you pant­ing for more. I have to say what I bloody well mean or shut up, because oth­er­wise I’m just wast­ing your time.

Some­times when I do that, it turns out flip­pant and sar­cas­tic. Some­times it doesn’t. But that’s the other thing about the muse and the cre­ative process: you can’t always decide in advance how you’re going to end up. You can only fol­low your inspi­ra­tion for the ride and hope you end up some­where good.

I was ner­vous when I fin­ished writ­ing Unleash­ing Your Cre­ative Mon­ster: Know Who’s Your Bitch. I even won­dered if I should pub­lish it, if I would end up push­ing it too far with the swear­ing. But as an artist – that fear of push­ing the bound­aries comes often.

You’ll always have to take that leap into the unknown, some­times you’ll fall and some­times you’ll fly. You have no say in the mat­ter. All you can do is make what you need to make, do the damn bestest you can of it, and decide you’re either going to grow by tak­ing a chance or stag­nant by doing what you’ve always been doing.

Related Posts

1. Unleash­ing Your Cre­ative Mon­ster: Be Proud
2. Unleash­ing Your Cre­ative Mon­ster: First, Care
3. Unleash­ing Your Cre­ative Mon­ster: Be Afraid