Grape Nuts (TM) for Creatives

On regularity...

I’ve been on the road and around the country - 4 states, 5 weather patterns spanning nearly 50 degrees, much shedding and replacing of clothing layers - and now I’m home, just in time for the equinox, which is pretty great in Seattle - Happy Spring!

Is this my magic invitation into a wildly productive season of creativity? I hope so, but during my time away from home, I’ve been spending time with a character I’ve created who is simply cantankerous. And sometimes, despite the sun, SO AM I!

In the past week and a half, I got good news, mixed news, and bad news. I celebrated a birthday. I remembered a loss. The normal ebbs and flows of life can make anyone cantankerous. Which is why the true path to creativity, productivity, and keepin’ on with our keepin’ on is…

Grape Nuts ^TM !

I had the idea, once upon a time, that creative living meant daydreaming in the sunshine and magical bursts of insight.

Sometimes it does.

I also had the idea that creating was lonely, isolating work - living inside one’s head. And that can be the truth as well.

But the reality of most artistic work is that beauty emerges from regularity - those “good sleep, good habits, eat right” sorts of practices I’d have expected of disciplined military school cadets or left-brain accountant types.

You know, like healthy breakfasts. Good thing I like “back to nature” cereal.

Along with this stuff, I grew up with the belief that things that are good for us are boring. The drudgery of daily to-dos is classic kid wisdom. But it’s not quite true.

These days, a number of creative cheerleaders recommend regularity with something akin to passion. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, embraces the life-changing potential of small chunks of discipline so heartily, I can’t help but believe. He celebrates the thinking of visual artist, Chuck Close, who said:

"Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you…if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.” Interview (March 2007)

I recently listened to a podcast about innovation and ideas featuring best-selling inspirational picture book author, Kobi Yamada. The interviewer shared an anecdote from Jack Foster’s How To Get Ideas:

“George Ade was a prolific writer in the early part of the 1900s. I once read an interview of his mother by a man who was not an admirer of her son’s work, and he was indelicate enough to ask her about George’s alleged capricious style and wobbly structure and shallow characterizations. Finally, Mrs. Ade had enough. ‘I know that many people can write better than George does,’ she said, ‘but George does.’”

“Do the work” says fellow children’s writer/Substacker Julie Falatko.

Because, Margaret Atwood maintains, “A word after a word after a word is power”

Our ideas are definitely a kind of magic. Acting on them may be even bigger magic.

But what does it mean, practically speaking, to get down to it? What if it feels like drudgery? Sometimes, I’m turned off creatively. Often, I’m cantankerous.

I, for one, need a trigger. And that’s where the crunchy, nutty, boring, but nutritious daily habits come in.

With more than a nod to James Clear (who has a fascinating backstory by the way), my creative Grape Nuts ^TM looks more or less like this:

• morning pages - really, just one page of writing, releasing whatever’s on my mind

• a pre-set to-do list - this is actually two practices:

  • observing the 1st Law of Atomic Habits - “make it easy” by setting up work or creative space with a priority list and tools before the day starts.

  • “planning on the downslope” to decide priorities the day before - at the end of a workday, I let go of what doesn’t get done by building it into the next day’s list. This was critical for writing a dissertation during my kids’ nap times.

• “habit stacking” - pairing desirable tasks with ones that need nudging, i.e. dealing with email (ugh) while taking scheduled coffee/tea/treat breaks (yum)

• committing to goals I can readily achieve - if I promise a daily paragraph on my novel-in-progress, plus a half hour on other writing, I can guarantee regular progress. I’ll hope for pages on the novel, and hourslong chunks of other work, but if I achieve less, I’ll still have made my goal.

  So, here’s to a little magical regularity. It might just be the key to a blooming and productive spring!

  

  (a magical send-up to start the season by my daughter, Juliette)