Creativity

Unless you’re extremely lucky, tal­ented or rich, along the path of doing cre­ative work you’ll find your­self doing stuff you won’t be proud of, just for the money. These are works you won’t be dying to show the world, they’re sim­ply projects you do to pay the bills.

Noth­ing wrong with that. We’ve all been there, done that.

But.

You still need to do work you can be proud of, even if it doesn’t pay, even if it nobody else sees it. You need to do them because if you don’t, your cre­ative mon­ster will die.

Before I started 21 Drag­ons, I ran a blog called Life Coaches Blog. These two blogs couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent. Life Coaches Blog was my attempt at run­ning a pro-blog (pro­fes­sional blog), and the idea was the more traf­fic I could attract, the more money I could hope­fully make off clicks on ads. That led me to focus not on writ­ing the best that I could, but on writ­ing the most atten­tion grab­bing posts that I could. A lot of cheesy writ­ing exists in that blog because of that, cheese I remain embar­rassed about to this day.

When I got tired of that, I started 21 Drag­ons. I don’t care much about get­ting traf­fic at 21 Drag­ons, or mak­ing money off ads (there aren’t any). Instead, I do my best to craft the best posts I can each time I write. They may not all be gems, but I try to make some­thing I can be proud of each time. It encour­ages me to keep upping my game when I try to make some­thing good. A dif­fer­ence in per­spec­tive, but it makes all the difference.

When­ever I thought of writ­ing this post, this scene from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back always came to mind:

You think you won’t be afraid on your way to unleash­ing your cre­ative mon­ster (is that title get­ting old or what)? Oh you will be, you will be.

There’s a per­cep­tion going around that when a cre­ative per­son achieves Epic Genius rank in the dark arts of cre­ativ­ity, she will no longer be afraid of new projects, and all cre­ative tasks will cower before her in fear and the low­est sub­mis­sion, ready to roll over and give up their gifts if she only but wishes.

Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

The truth is that fear is a good thing. Not the gut-wrenching fear that tells you (wisely) not to step into a dark alley at night, but fear of doing things that are good for you. Things that are new. Things that will help you grow. Things that will stretch you. The fear of hit­ting up against the edges of your com­fort zone and step­ping beyond them.

In his essen­tial book The War of Art, Steven Press­field calls this fear the Resistance:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Between you and your best cre­ative work stands the Resis­tance. And how will you know the Resis­tance? By your fear.

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).

Cre­ativ­ity is a moth­er­fuck­ing bitch.

There are no two ways about. Any­one who’s ever messed about the cre­ative process, ever tried to define it, explain it, ever tried to teach it, ever tried to wres­tle it to the ground and pro­duce heart­break­ing works of stag­ger­ing genius on a con­stant basis, is sooner or later dashed upon the rocks of paradox.

For cre­ativ­ity is a, but also b, is some­times x, but other times def­i­nitely not x, and even though you can cer­tainly nur­ture it with steps and best prac­tices, because of how much cre­ativ­ity likes to break the rules, some­times doing the exact oppo­site of those steps and best prac­tices yields the cre­ative results.

Cre­ativ­ity is a moth­er­fuck­ing capri­cious bitch.

And yet, like any other fool who’s tried to make cre­ativ­ity his bitch and ended up going slightly deranged with the effort of it, I too am mak­ing the attempt to teach you, oh enrap­tured reader, how to unleash the cre­ative mon­ster in you. Unleash I say, a cre­ative mon­ster, so you too, can go out into the world and inflict your cre­ative gifts upon it, not unlike spread­ing a sheen of sheer silk onto soft yearn­ing skin.

You’ll also be hap­pier, less prone to hair-tearing and ear-slicing, bring more beauty into the world, and be an irre­sistible mag­net to the sex of your choice.