I’ve been feeling this urge to connect with creative people.  Not because we all have the same interests, but because we dream big and place a certain value on creating new things.  My creative thing is writing, but I find inspiration in music and photography and design. I love to see people do whatever they do really well.

I challenge you (and myself as well) to pick a creative project and spend the month of July working on it.  I mean for “creative” to be defined broadly and your project is completely of your own choosing in both content and size.  It can even be something you have already started.  The point is to spend a month focused on doing whatever it is you do and share that with other people.  That’s the other part of the challenge: you have to share your creative project to some degree.  You don’t have to share your finished product (your challenge might just be to get started), but you have to share your process, because I think that’s how we can best inspire each other.

My project will be to write the first part of my new novel, Some Other Air to Breathe.  Your project might be to write a new song, design a new blog layout, write a novella, sew a new dress, try some new recipes, take some new photographs, make some new products for your etsy shop, or film a new video.  You set the parameters of your challenge, whether it’s to start a novel or finish one, try one new recipe a week or five, write one new poem  or write one new poem every day.  The point is to focus on pursuing your creative interests and not to burden yourself with an impossible task.  Find something that will push you, but not overwhelm or defeat you.

If you’re interested, here’s what you should do:
1. Leave a comment on this post or email me at writetoreach@gmail.com letting me know you want to participate.  I will list everyone participating here.  Help me spread the word to other people you think might be interested.
2. Decide on your project and write a post on your own blog sometime this week letting us know what you’ll be working on.  Feel free to apply whatever additional rules or parameters you want to be part of your challenge.  If you think your readers might be interested, try to get your post up earlier so that they’ll have to time to prepare as well.  Please send them over here so that I know everyone who is participating.
3. Periodically throughout the month, blog about your project and the progress you’re making.  You may choose to share what you’ve been working on or just talk about the process.  There is no precise schedule, so you can share as much or as little as you want.  Like any challenge, you’ll get as much out of it as you put into it.
4. Connect with other creative people participating in the challenge.  Cheer people on, ask them how it’s going, and give them feedback if they ask for it.
5. Write a post at the end of July with your thoughts on the project, whether you judge it a success or failure, whether you will be continuing with your project or not.

More than just challenging ourselves to be creative, the point of this for me is to connect with other creative people.  I could use your ideas for how we can best do this.  It’s my secret hope that we emerge from this at the end of July with at least a small group of people who will continue to support each other creatively.

It took me a long time to figure this out, simple as it is, and maybe I never would have if a favorite philosopher hadn’t described the phenomenon in words that I could not find on my own.  Lately, I am boiling over with creativity. There are so many things I want to do and I want to do them all right now!  But, the kicker is that I have so little time.  I know I know I know we always seem to find time for the things we want to do, but I don’t even find enough time for sleep and I love sleep.

Of course it’s no coincidence that now that I don’t have adequate time to pursue them, I am full of interests and giddy about them all.  In fact, it’s because I don’t have endless hours free that scenes for the next novel are taunting me and there are so many blog posts to be written and wouldn’t it be fun to take up design as a hobby?

It’s called contrast.

When I don’t have time to blog, but I sneak it in between other priorities, that’s when I enjoy it most.  It’s a break, a release.  It’s simply different.  Not that I want to make this point too strongly, but it’s the contrast of different things that makes them exciting to me.  It’s the urgency, the never having all the time I need.

I think this is true for everyone, but I see it particularly in the way I work.  I need structure and places to be and things I have to do in order to develop my creative life which stands in contrast to so many of these things.  I don’t live for one and not the other, but together they make up a productive and enriched life.

Much as I love to write, the idea of that being the only thing I need to do in a day removes all the creativity and motivation I have.  I don’t think that would be a happy life for me.  It’s not what I want.

And in a more practical sense, when I’m out living in the world, spending my time here or there, that’s when I experience the things that make up the content of my creative life.  That’s when I get inspired.

It’s frustrating to always be working with limited time, but I have never been busier and I have never been more excited about all the opportunities open to me.

I had a lot of friends as a kid, but I guess because I was the youngest in my family and never had to take care of anyone else, I was still left with a lot of hours to fill by myself.  I didn’t mind.

I spent a lot of time with imaginary people.  I always knew they were imaginary.  I didn’t make my mom pour a glass of milk at the dinner table for my imaginary best friend or yell at my sister for sitting on my imaginary little brother.  I didn’t see them as if they were real people.  When I asked them questions, I didn’t expect responses.  But still I could spend hours with them, which is saying a lot if you remember how slowly time passes when you’re a kid.

Mostly I taught imaginary students, assigning them pages to color and reading out loud to them.  There’s this picture of me that was taken at day care when I was probably 4 or 5, and I’m facing rows of empty chairs (occupied by my students, of course), and I have my head down so all you can see is my bowl-cut hair.  I was pretending to read to them and then I would lift up the book, so they could all see the pictures.  When I was a little older and in school myself, I would sometimes set up my classroom under our dining room table at home and there I would teach to imaginary versions of the kids in my own class at school.  That, I knew, was a little creepy even as I was doing it.

I was recognized at a young age for having quite an imagination.   That’s how adults always put it.  I also had a habit of basically zoning out, distracted by that imagination even when I was in the company of others.  My friends would make fun of me for that.

I would write stories and revel in anything creative my teachers could think of, but I didn’t produce anything special.  I was just a mediocre student–a girl without a lot of ambition.  I think we have this expectation that creative people are necessarily talented, and I really wasn’t.  It was much more true that fiction and imagining things was a way of life for me.  It was how I experienced the world.

And it still is.  I’ve grown up, developed some goals in life, and earned some degrees.  I am a grounded and practical girl.  I spend my time studying things that are sometimes so technical you wouldn’t recognize them as theology.  But my mind wanders more than it stays in place and I think of the stories I’m writing.  The characters I’ve created seem to have lives of their own.  I have no idea how other people think, so at the risk of sounding crazy, I’ll admit to all the time I spend imagining the lives of people who are right in front of me.  It’s mostly projection, fueled by observation and scant facts.  I assign to them motivations and histories and thoughts.  That thing people do where they walk away from a situation, thinking of all the things they should have said but didn’t, I take to an extreme, imagining the many other ways things could have gone.  Some times I do it consciously, but usually it’s just where my mind goes.

If I never write a brilliant piece of fiction, I will be disappointed, but all that time spent imagining won’t have gone to waste.  Fiction, whether in literature or movies, has this way of enchanting the the world I live in.  Combined with good music, it’s sometimes enough to make me think this life is full of magic.

I know everyone loved the new blog design, but it just didn’t feel right to me.  It was too busy and too pretty.  I didn’t feel at home, so I was at a loss for what to do or post. And, the tone of my posts felt off too. I know this is mostly in my head.

It’s just that I’m very particular about my spaces and places. I once read a description of my personality type (INFJ), and it said that I’m intuitive and a dreamer, so the thoughts in my head are all over the place, and the way I deal with that internal chaos is by obsessively ordering and trying to control things in the external world. Obsessive might be too strong of a word, but let’s just say that I’m known for my organizing.

I have a hard time even concentrating when I’m surrounded by clutter and disorder (subjectively defined). At work I have my own cubicle, but I spend a large portion of my shift working at a shared desk. The first thing I do when I arrive is clear away all the clutter and arrange things just the way I like them.

It’s not that I’m rigid. Things don’t always have to be the same. They just have to feel right.

When I was growing up, I would reorganize my room several times of year. I liked the change. It seemed to open up new possibilities and ways of thinking. Plus, I liked the challenge of getting things just right.

My external environment has such a strong impact on the way I think about things. When things are orderly, I feel more comfortable with the crazy, random, abstract, ungrounded thoughts in my head.

So, I’m going to try this design on for size, and see how I feel.

I watch this video all the time. It reminds me of things I need to hear.

The thing about being creative is that you don’t just need the ideas. You also need to execute the ideas. That’s the hard part. That’s the draining part. But, amazingly, the more ideas you actualize, the more ideas you throw out there, the more ideas come to you. That’s why you can’t wait for inspiration.

Being creative means thinking or producing something that wasn’t there before. In that way, everything is creative to at least a small degree. You don’t have to write the next great American novel. You don’t have to paint the next masterpiece. Blogging itself is incredibly creative. Just look at all of the original content you’ve produced.

Knowing all of this, a couple weeks ago I was still hit with this massive panic that I’d run out of things to blog about. I’ve continued to produce very regular content, but I haven’t been able to shake the panic. I guess it’s just that I was riding high there for a while with more blog posts than there were days in the week, and now I’m not sure what I’ll post from day to day.

I try to remind myself that sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes it’s not, but you have to keep putting your ideas out there.

This American Life fans will recognize Ira. I love what he has to say about taste and creativity. You have to keep at it, even if you are fully aware that you suck. It’s the only way other than quitting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE