Novels, Poetry & Creativism
The key to creative success is excess, suggests Anais Nin, because creation comes from overflow.
“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings.
“… Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness.
When you set out to create something, the conventional, conditioned part of you sets off fear alarms, in the form of resistance and self-sabotage.
Stephen Pressfield's book Turning Pro, talks a lot about this tendency, which he calls resistance, in terms of the “shadow self” of Jewish Kabbalism.
“The [conventional] self doesn't care about you. It doesn't love you. It has its own agenda and it will kill you,” says Pressfield, quoting rabbi Mordecai Finley. “It will kill you like
Novel Excerpt: “Sometimes, not too often, really not often at all, I allow myself a small imagining. Not a why-oh-why, or a what-if; something closer to a dream.
“It is dusk in summer and we are walking towards the lake. The fading light has greyed the water that we can glimpse through the trees. The wildflowers are out — wood avens, honeysuckle, greater bladderwort — and on the lake’s eastern shore, a cluster of white water lilies.
How I would have loved these to have been available when I was researching my first novel. In those days, I had to hunt deep – in the National Library, museum of military history, University College Dublin Archives and other archival sources, for accounts of what had actually happened. So much myth and legend surrounds those times in Ireland, with so many commentators having
One of the best events I've been to this summer was Hop Farm Music Festival, headlined by Bob Dylan, who delivered a fun, high-energy interpretation of his classics that I thought pure genius.
Even more exciting, though, was the heart-clenching set delivered by one of my all-time artist-icons, Patti Smith.
It got me reading her autobiographical prelude to fame and fortune, Just Kids, and I wanted to share this great passage, about how she handled creative doubt when she was becoming an artist.
She is writing about painting and poems here but what she says applies to creating anything, including the rock career and happy family she went on to have.
“In my low points,” she writes, “I wondered: what was the point of
Creatives have always known the value of community and that ideas – and the people who have them – attract each other. Just ask any writer or artist who left home for the big city.
“The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material … Read more
In his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, author Daniel Pink describes the change we now experiencing in work and education, as we shift from information-shuffling to creativity.
“We progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers,” Pink writes. “And now we’re progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.”
In this new economy, manual labor and knowledge work become so mechanized that they don’t require much human input. And, suddenly and unexpectedly, the most profitable products and services are not high tech but
The best skill you can teach yourself as a creative is how to find the space between your thoughts, at will.
Your thinking mind is best understood as an instrument, a tool. Yours to be used for a specific task and when the task is completed, laid down. We do that by entering the space of ‘no thought' as often as possible.
We haven't been taught how to do this. So for most of us, most of our thinking is either
#writers #amwriting #writetip
Writers! There's what your mother, your publisher, your friends and society at large think you do.
There's what YOU think you do.
And then there's what you really do (see below).
I wish we could flow as oceans tide,
swelling with joy at our urge to unfurl.
I feel we should roll as planets turn,
dark days and seasons held level with light.
I sense we can grow as mountains rise
from stresses rock setting, solid and free.
I intend to go as children run,
arms wide, smile plunging, into full stop.
—
We've become a modern day menace, apparently. Spreading our laptops and smartphones across tables and sofa, turning our local Starbucks or Costa into an office.
Marketing professors Merlyn Griffiths, from the University of North Carolina, and Mary Gilly, from the University of California, claim in a new study, Dibs! Customer Territorial Behaviours, that we cause rows with other customers and
#GoCreative.
I'm a bit sceptical about brain training and #creativity. Brain training works best in getting you used to jumping through particular mental hoops and improving your ability to do a specific brain task. 
But creative thinking is different.
The brainwaves that distinguish creative leaps, great ideas and inspired thinking have been shown by neuroscience to be
Closing a week of posts about the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors at London Book Fair, this (long) post offers:
[That's me in the photo on the right, getting a tad
[#ALLIA #writing] Maybe it's because I'm Irish but every book I've ever written has had a lot to say about freedom — even my very first publication, a nonfiction book with a small
feminist press in Dublin (Attic, now part of Cork University Press), called BodyMatters For Women.
That was a health and exercise book – the day job then was fitness instructor – but the most important chapters, for me, were those dealing with ways to break free of our society's messed-up messages about women's bodies.
From there to the book I'm working on now – a novel about