Week 5: Courage

Week 5. Day 7. In your element

How does it feel to be in your element?

 

In his book, The Courage to Create, the psychologist Rollo May observes that a crucial aspect of creativity is ‘the freedom of artists to give all the elements within themselves free play.’

 

Patti Miller’s memoir The Joy of High Places details her brother’s recovery from a paragliding accident. When Patti asks her brother if he will fly again, he says that being in the air is his element, so he must return to it. The element of air seems to call to her as well – and she finds it through hiking, often high in the mountains.

 

At my local beach almost every weekend there are scores of kite surfers flipping and soaring above the water. Although I love to watch them, I’m never really drawn to trying it. It’s the water that is my element. When I’m in or on the water, I feel reset.

 

The writer Sarah Sentilles speaks of holding rocks in her hands to ground her when she writes..

 

Remember the elements – the replenishment from water, the refreshing power of air. Call on the grounding power of the earth, and the burning energy of fire, a reminder of creative power.

 

These elements – water, air, earth, fire – are part of our physical lives, and we are made of them. As the poet Rumi says: “Do not feel lonely – the entire universe is inside you.”

So, I wonder if you could get out of your head today and connect with those elements which truly animate you?

 

Dive into some water. Sit on a hilltop or in a breezeway, feeling the air and wind on your face, lie with your back and your hands on the earth, or stand still and allow the fire of the sun to warm you. We are physical beings, and our creativity is lit by the body as well as by the mind.

 

Allow yourself today to restore and refresh your physicality by letting the elements in, and by letting yourself rest in their power.

Your prompt for today:

High above the hills….

Week 5. Day 6. Dare to fall

Who dares wins, according to the British Special Air Service (SAS) motto. We dare to try,
dare to win. Another dare is contained in the motto of the Enlightenment, Sapere aude. Dare
to know. In creativity and innovation, a better motto might be Dare to Fail.

 

Failure is crucial in creative pursuits. Without failure, we simply replicate the thing we did
before. We play safe and don’t take risks.

 

In 2019 a group of researchers from Northwestern University in the United States published
the results of a decade-long study on success and failure. The researchers compared scientists
who narrowly missed out on getting grants to ‘statistically identical’ scientists who had only
just succeeded in getting grants. They then followed the careers of each scientist for ten
years.

 

After narrowly missing out on a grant, ten percent of the ‘near-miss’ group gave up their
research field and changed careers. But by the end of the decade, the ninety percent who
didn’t disappear had achieved more in the field – more awards, more publications, greater
recognition – than their peers who received the early grants.

 

It’s probable, the researchers concluded, that the near-miss escalated drive and innovative
investigation. Something in that near-miss, over a longish period, trained those scientists to
understand that some things would work, and some wouldn’t. Sometimes they would win the
grant, and other times, they’d have to find another way.

 

How liberating it is, to dare to know that today’s effort might not be rewarded. That next
week’s attempt might get some applause, or it might not. It’s the liberation of daring to try.
The liberation of daring to fail. Of daring to fall.

 

I’m thinking as I write this of the mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who creates thrilling
videos of his rides. His behind-the-scenes videos, though, are even more thrilling. Mostly
made up of tumbles and falls, these show the real effort, the real risk, in his success.

 

When I was a teenager I competed in roller dance – like ice-skating, complete with little
dresses and excessive make up. During lockdown I returned to quad-skating, with a great deal
of joy. But I will never be able to skate the way I did as a teenager because now, I am afraid of injury. And in skating, in order to land a trick, you have to be willing to fall.

 

In fact, ‘Dare to Fail’ could be translated into Latin as Cadere aude, which literally means
‘dare to fall.’

 

Dare to fall today. If you have a project you’re working on, dare to write an ending for it. An
imperfect, messy ending. Or dare to write a beginning which might fall through the cracks,
which might lead nowhere.

 

Because in creativity success only comes through the possibility of failure. Today, in your writing prompt, dare to fail. Follow the wildest thought, the longest tack, the strangest non-sequitur. Cadere aude.

Your prompt for today:

Write about an unexpected delivery

Week 5. Day 5. Letter from the Future

Creativity is about making something from nothing. It’s amazing. Where once there was a blank screen, an empty canvas, a dry block of land, now there is a book, a painting, a house. Unsurprising, then, that this extraordinary act sometimes requires atomic force.

It amazes me, daily, this human ability to simply imagine things. To make stuff up.

It’s an ability that we use in the writing of words, yes, and the making of art – but we also use it, daily, in the making of ourselves and of our stories.

Yesterday I asked you to spend some time looking at the beautiful words you have created over the last few weeks, and to consider what qualities you admire about your own writing.

Today, I want to take that a little further, and invite you to imagine yourself into your writing future.

Take some time to get yourself into a meditative and hopeful state. Consider the kind of creator you want to be, and what you want your creative practice to look like.

Choose a date in the future – think 5-to-10 years from now. Imagine that you have travelled in time to this date and you are sitting down writing a letter (yes, it can be a long chatty email) to your writing buddy telling them how great your creative life is now.

When you write this letter, rather than focusing on the negative – the things that you want to be rid of – write about what you would like to have happening – focus on the solution, not the mere absence of the problem. Try to step into the skin of this future self.

What is your creative practice like now? What qualities have you developed in your creative work? What have you strengthened and celebrated? What are the outcomes? How are you supporting your creative endeavours – and how are they supporting you?

When you’ve written the letter, try to sit with it for a moment, creating that future memory. I hope that ‘future you’ will thank you for it.

Your prompt for today:

Arriving in a new place

Week 5. Day 4. The Courage to name what you want

What do you want in the next phase of your creative life?

 

Naming what you want is a brave act. But sometimes, it can be hard to be clear. Sometimes, what you want can look pretty fuzzy. 

 

Once, in my twenties, a therapist gave me a booklet full of ‘pleasant activities.’

 

 My task, she said, was simply to underline the activities I liked. Decades later, I can still recall the shock of reading through the hundreds of items in the booklet and realising that I could name what I wanted. 

 

It had never fully occurred to me that I could choose what I wanted. That I could look at an item on a list – for example: playing in a team – and allow myself to think, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’

 

I hope that for you this is not such a revelation.

 

You might, though, feel a little cloudy about what you want. A little woolly about your creative intentions.

 

I have a wall in my study which is almost entirely whiteboard. And on that surface I note down the things I want to write and the ideas that are nudging me. I use it to try and get clear about my own time and intention.  Sometimes I look at that list of scribbled ideas and forms, and I have no idea which one I want to work on. No idea where I want my attention to be for the next two or three years. No idea what I want.

 

I’ve seen this play out with scores of artists over the years. Competing desires, crowding ideas, a foggy future.  I’ve found that three steps can help with getting clear on what you want.

  1. Start with what you don’t want. When I think about that list of competing ideas, it can often feel clearer to know, for instance, ‘I don’t want to spend a year researching something bleak’. Or ‘I don’t want to be sitting here in a year having the same conversation with myself.’ What do you not want in your creative life?
  1. Notice tiny delights. What do you love? What tiny things deliver pleasure and inspirational flow? What do you love to read or watch or listen to? Begin small. Delight is a clue that can guide you to your creative purpose.

 

The third one is hard and takes real courage, because it involves envy.

  1. Observe envy. Envy is one of those emotions which can be troubling and harmful. An emotion which can also do damage if we don’t confess it to ourselves. Yet can also help us get clear on what we want. When I consider casting an idea aside, I imagine another writer publishing that book. Do I feel joy that the book is now available? Or do I feel a stab of envy that someone else wrote it first? If it’s the latter, I stay with the project. Or perhaps you notice that you envy someone their role as a playwright, or as an editor, or a creative consultant. Get brave. Tell the truth to yourself. What, precisely is it that you envy? Chances are, that’s the thing you want.

 

So now, name one action you can take towards that one thing that you want. 

Your prompt for today:

Walk through an unexpected door

Week 5. Day 3. The Full Dolly

When I was thirteen, I was sleeping over at my friend Jenny’s house. Her father was a musician. He played folk music, which Jenny and I considered boring and for old people. On this particular weekend, Jenny’s father had been given tickets for a performance by a folk guitarist who he had once played with. We were obliged to go to the concert too. This was not how we wanted our weekend to go but we were offered two options: go to the boring stupid folk gig or not have a sleepover. So we went to the boring stupid folk gig with some ancient guitarist and no singers. (I suspect, though I can’t properly remember, that we did a lot of flouncing and humphing.) Worse, when we got to the venue, Jenny’s father made us stay inside.

 

So when Tommy Emmanuel walked out on stage and began playing, I was listening. 

 

 And by the end of the night, I wanted nothing more than to be like Tommy Emmanuel. 

 

If you’ve ever heard Emmanuel play, you will know he is an extraordinary musician. Mesmerising. But at thirteen, it wasn’t only his artistry that made me want to be like him. 

 

It was the way he seemed to celebrate being utterly himself. I’d never seen anyone so thoroughly themselves.

 

I don’t know if Tommy Emmanuel is or was a fan of Dolly Parton, but in his performance that night, he embodied one of Miss P’s most famous pieces of advice: ‘Figure out who you are and then do it deliberately.’

 

Last week I talked about Jack London attempting to mimic Rudyard Kipling. But there’s another way of deepening your own writing voice, that I like to refer to as ‘Going the Full Dolly’. 

 

As Dolly says, there are two stages. First, figure out who you are. Then, do it deliberately. 

 

Could you take a look today at what you’ve written over the last few weeks? If you’ve written on a screen, print it out if you can. Then sit yourself somewhere lovely, with a candle lit if that makes you feel good, or a perfect cup of tea. In other words, get yourself into a welcoming state. 

 

Then, simply read over what you’ve written. Notice the concerns that come up. Observe the patterns. In particular, could you highlight in some way those sentences or pages or scenes that feel particularly pleasing to you?  Not to someone else, some imaginary judge – but to you. 

 

What do you love? 

 

Then, look again. What are those elements in your own writing that you want to celebrate? Those elements you want more of? 

 

Is it those flashes of wildly lush writing? Or the lines that so clearly and succinctly reveal a whole truth? Perhaps it’s wit, or playfulness, or outrageous imagination. 

 

Whatever it is, write it down. If you can land on three things, brilliant. 

 

So now you have a list of elements in your own work that attract you. 

 

Can you deepen those elements of your own writing? Can you dive into them deliberately? 

 

 Can you return to a previous piece of writing and ‘make it more like you’? 

 

 If you’ve decided, for instance, that you love those moments when you let the writing have stillness and space, could you pick up something you wrote earlier and now rewrite it, creating more of that stillness and space? 

 

You already know how to do it – because you’ve already done it. 

 

If you noted down that you love it when your characters behave foolishly, return to a previous piece of writing which felt perhaps a little stuck… and play. See how foolish your characters can be. There’s no one watching, so push it a little further. Let them be ridiculous. Mimic your own best writer self. 

 

I cannot promise that being brave enough to be fully yourself will give you the technical mastery or outrageous talent of Dolly Parton or Tommy Emmanuel. 

 

But I can promise that it will lead you closer to the artist that you are meant to be.

Your prompt for today:

Write a lie

Week 5. Day 2. Show up for joy

A few years ago, Liane Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies, was a little burnt out. Her books have sold millions of copies and been adapted for the screen by Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon – and with that wild success came a great deal of pressure. Liane found that the sheer joy of writing had all but disappeared.  And so she committed to a ‘year of joy’.

 

It takes a great deal of courage to press Pause on a very public career and declare your intention to listen to music, to read poetry, to play with words for their own sakes. But that was Liane’s commitment. During that year, her sister Jaclyn sent her a writing prompt: a fallen bicycle surrounded by apples. It sparked a story for Liane, a story which became Apples Never Fall.

 

But it was, she says, the commitment to her ‘year of joy’ which allowed her to find a new story.

 

Creating the circumstances for creative joy shows a determination to believe in your own potential, a commitment to show up for yourself.

 

Somewhere in the creative process, there is joy. It’s a crucial part of leading you, of training you, to be the artist you can be.

 

If you can breathe on that joy, you can fan it into a flame that will sustain your creative life.

  • Where has there been joy in these last few weeks?
  • What practices or reflections or writing prompts have allowed you to feel joy?
  • Was there a day, or a writing moment, when you experienced creative joy?
  • What were the circumstances? Were you with other people or alone? Was it quiet?
  • Were you outside, or snuggled on a sofa?
  • What other elements were in place?
  • What could you do to replicate those circumstances today?

 

Who isn’t afraid when embarking on something new? Who doesn’t quake at the thought of trying to feel differently about their creativity, or about the world? Why shouldn’t we be afraid?

 

But courage doesn’t require the removal of fear. It simply requires trying.

 

Could you commit to your own year, or month, or week – or day – of joy?

 

And if you need more exhortation, let me leave you today with Mary Oliver’s ‘Don’t Hesitate’.

 

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate.
Give in to it.
There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be.
We are not wise, and not very often kind.
And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left.
Perhaps this is its way of fighting back,
that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world.
It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.
Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Your prompt for today (After Mary Oliver):

I noticed it when…

Week 5. Day 1. Be open to courage

Each December, I choose a focus word for the following year. The process helps me centre in on where I want my attention to be for the year ahead.

This year, my word is ‘Courage’.

Courage is at the heart of writing. Trusting yourself, holding tight to hope, stepping out into the unknown – all of this asks for courage.

Creativity relies on courage. So does luck.

Social scientist Richard Wiseman spent a year observing and interviewing people who considered themselves lucky. The one common element he found was what he referred to as ‘openness’ – the courage to be open to new people or situations.

It kind of follows – a random person, a random moment, a chance encounter, can lead to a situation one might call ‘lucky’. The more of these you let yourself have, the ‘luckier’ you’ll get.

Chance encounters. Openness. Random occurrences. These are the makings, apparently, of luck. But they’re also the makings of creativity. They might be the spark of an idea that bursts out during a visit to a new place, the new understanding of a character that emerges while talking to a new acquaintance, or the perfect sentence that arrives while listening to a previously undiscovered piece of music.

Look, I’m not suggesting that if you’re an introvert (I am, surprisingly enough), you immediately change your own self and start going out to parties every night. The very thought is exhausting! (That line should be spoken while clutching at the closest thing you have to pearls…)

Rather than a temperament shift, I simply want to suggest this week that you allow yourself to be open to those elements of chance in your writing and in your writing life. Try putting something in your writing that seems totally random: an off-the-wall event, an entirely unexpected visitor, a strange, unlooked-for gift. Then start through your writing to make the connections.

Have the courage to be open to them, because if they connect to your own instinct, you might find gold.

By which I mean, you might find your own creative self.

Your prompt for today:

I have a confession to make…