Releasing your inner artist: Week 10 Podcast

Whether you’re a seasoned artist, a business person trying to innovate, or a creative novice, join us in learning from Mandla's fascinating experiences and insights. This podcast, aptly titled "Releasing Your Inner Artist", sheds light on the liberating journey of embracing creativity, inspiring you to challenge your boundaries, dare to dream the impossible, and ultimately, unveil the artist within.

In this vibrant episode of the Conquer Your Mountains podcast, hosted by Amanda De Witt, Senior Editor of the Luca Faith and Inspiration Imprint of Penguin Random House, we delve into an intriguing exploration of the power of creativity. Dr Mandla Moyo, an accountant turned science fiction writer, describes his inspiring journey from the world of numbers to the world of words. Mandla offers fresh insights on transitioning from a traditionally non-creative career into the much more uncharted territory of writing novels.

Bringing a unique perspective to the table, Mandla discusses the importance of moving beyond the linear, box-like way of thinking that we often find in more analytical industries, such as accounting. They discuss how a professional shift can lead you to engage with the creative part of your brain more fully, revealing a unique perspective on creativity as an act akin to painting or creating a mental image that develops into a story.

We then delve into the creation of Mandla’s captivating novel, "The Fallen Angel", a sci-fi book written following the release of his previous devotional work, "Conquer Your Mountains". Mandla shares the deeper intricacies of his creative process while explaining that writing science fiction demanded a more magnified version of creativity than his previous work.

The pursuit of creativity often presents its own unique challenges. Mandla discusses the intricate balance between creativity and potential rejection. He also share their thoughts on vulnerability, emphasizing that the act of opening oneself up to critique is an inherent part of any creative endeavor. In his view, the world of TikTok serves as an apt metaphor for how creativity is perceived: an algorithm may decide what type of creative material will thrive, but that should never deter us from our creative explorations.

Click here to access the podcast in a platform of your choice, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts https://tr.ee/Kz8U7B2wiq 

 

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
How can you unleash creativity into your world?
Welcome to the Conquer Your Mountains Week 10 podcast titled Releasing Your Inner Artist.
And in today's episode, we will explore how you can release creativity into unexpected places.
If you are following the Conquer Your Mountains reading plan,
you are in Week 10 that has the name One Kings, Be My Guide.

(00:28):
My name is Amanda DeVette and I am Senior Editor at the Luca Faith and Inspiration
Imprint of Penguin Random House, South Africa.
We publish books that provide readers with engaging, high-quality reading material,
both fiction and non-fiction.
I'm excited to be joining Manda's podcast today, so let's kick off.
As a writer, what does creativity mean to you?

(00:51):
Thanks, Amanda, for hosting me today. day.
My career as a writer is fairly recent, and a lot of my career was in the accounting world initially.
Then I moved into consulting and then ultimately business.
And in all of those industries, I never thought that creativity was a key thing of my attributes.

(01:19):
Yes, I had to be creative in in terms of creating strategies,
finding new solutions to problems.
But in becoming a writer, I felt that I shifted to another part of my brain.
And I've realized that when you write books, it's really like painting.

(01:41):
You come up with a picture in your head.
That picture becomes a series of pictures, and that becomes a story.
And the creativity is imagining that and converting it into books, into paper.
Well, you have recently released a new book and it's a fiction titled The Fallen Angel.

(02:06):
Talk to me a bit about the creative processes that led to you writing a science
fiction book after finishing your previous one, which was a devotional.
I think I really stressed my creativity to the limit. in writing The Fallen Angel.
And at times I felt like I was breaking rules. You know, when you create.

(02:30):
An imaginary vehicle or something with
science fiction and you're like oh can you really
create that and i think that's part of the joy of being creative you flex the
muscle that all of us have in terms of being able to think fully outside the
box and i think it's a skill that we don't often and nature.

(02:55):
And what I found with writing The Fallen Angel, delving into science fiction,
part of the creative process started from what is already known.
So, for example, I looked up information around what scientists and other learned

(03:16):
people think the future may look like.
And there's versions of that out there that if you search hard enough,
you'll find future alternatives that you can base a story on.
And having started from the unknown, I then had to move into new worlds.

(03:40):
Which I had to imagine along the way.
And for me, it was really taking time,
whether it was doing walks
or running taking time to allow my mind
to drift into a world
where imagination doesn't know any bounds and it's not an easy process initially

(04:02):
but as you allow your mind to open yourself up to new possibilities you start
to really be so creative and in the book the fallen an angel.
It is about this mysterious being that is found, that has been trapped for thousands of years.

(04:24):
I found that once I got going with that storyline, so many other possibilities started popping out.
And in fact, I actually had to hold back and package more into a sequel because
the list of possibilities was really mushrooming.
It's definitely a very intriguing book. I must say, I read it from the beginning

(04:48):
to the end in one sitting. I was hooked.
Would you say, or in which way would you say your creative process has differed
when writing this novel compared to when you were writing Conquer Your Mountains, which is so devotional?
So with Conquer Your Mountains, there was an element of being creative.

(05:10):
If you look at just the book title, it's themed around mountains.
And in that book, the knowledge of a mountain really symbolizes something that
you need to climb up, and that's the conquering.
So there was an element of creativity in terms of coming up with sub-themes

(05:32):
around how many ways you can conquer a mountain.
And I actually ended up with 12 ways.
So you'll see that that book has 12 themes, all linked to different types of
mountains that you can face in your life.
The main difference though with The Fallen Angel is that the extent of creativity

(05:57):
with science fiction I think just got more magnified.
I spent about three months just working on the research parts of the book. Wow.
And yeah that was a fairly intense process of getting enough information that
would would enable me to create new worlds in the science fiction realm.

(06:22):
So often when you read a really good science fiction book, you find that they help you to escape.
They create a whole new world. It's got its own rules, its own way of things being done.
And that's part of what makes a creative science fiction book.
And some authors really take it to extreme levels.

(06:48):
I know if you look at a lot of the rings where Tolkien actually developed new
languages for his characters.
So I think he's probably right up there in terms of how far you can go in being creative.
And I think that process for me was initially challenging Because with my root

(07:13):
career being trained as a tarot accountant, we are not naturally empowered to be creative.
We are trained to actually put things into boxes.
And once things are in neat boxes, then we believe life makes sense.
It must have been quite daunting when you decided to completely embrace your

(07:36):
creativity and step into it and put it in a book and then put it out there for the world to read.
How do you embrace vulnerability to be creative?
The thing with being creative and ultimately releasing your inner artist is
that you need to open yourself up to all forms of rejection.

(08:00):
So in the non-creative world where one plus one equals two, there's a lot of safety in that.
If you are given a task and that task is to take a certain box and carry it
and put it in another part of the building.
That's a very linear task. And when you complete that task, you already know

(08:24):
that you've been successful.
But when you are creative and someone says, sketch me something.
Draw something that represents a mountain or a particular scene in a book,
you could put in huge effort

(08:44):
and people might still not like it
and I think that's the part of the challenge with releasing
your inner artist I think you need to realize that
in being creative there'll be things that some people will like and there'll
be things that other people don't like and I think that's the same in most creative
industries so if you use TikTok you can spend been a whole day working on short form video,

(09:14):
but TikTok has got an algorithm and that algorithm decides whether what you've
created will be liked or if it should be liked by other people.
And if the algorithm says what you've created is not what it wants, then it rejects it.
So I think when we open ourselves up to be more creative, we just need to accept

(09:39):
that there'll be more opportunities to be rejected.
There'll be also a lot more opportunities to actually do something that is so
transformational that you'll be so proud that you stretched yourself.

(10:01):
Reminds me of Thomas Edison when he was creating the light bulb.
And after 10,000 tries, he said he didn't fail 10,000 times.
He just found 10,000 ways not to create a light bulb.
Anyways in your journey how did you discover your inner artist,
so if I answer that from a writing perspective I first discovered it when I was at school,

(10:28):
entered an essay competition and I didn't think I would do anything useful out
of it but I entered It was a 1,500-word essay.
And then to my surprise, I won a prize in that essay competition.
And that was one of the early signals that told me that I could create,

(10:56):
that there was an element of having an inner artist that could be unleashed.
But it's not something that I developed much more than that until more recently
when we started working on the two books that we've released in the last year.

(11:17):
Speak to the listener who is facing big hurdles in being creative.
Where and how can they start?
I think the starting point is to be vulnerable.
Yeah, once you decide to be creative, you need to feel comfortable playing with

(11:39):
different things, experiencing different things.
And I think that's our default state. If you look at little children,
they are really creative.
And the reason why they're creative is that they don't know any limits.
And I think limits are conditioned into us as we grow.
But if you look at yourself through the eyes of a child, that childlike innocence,

(12:04):
you might start to realize that you could shape things totally differently.
And some examples of that, if you look at new inventions in terms of transport,
and that is the notion of hyperluxano,

(12:25):
where vehicles could be transported at hundreds of kilometers per hour,
and planes that could maybe fly out into space.
These sort of concepts start with a very wild imagination where someone is childlike
in thinking, oh, maybe this could be done.

(12:49):
And once you've stretched your mind that way, it becomes easier actually to
then speak to engineers and say, I've dreamt that I could do this or that I
could design something that looks like this.
What are the limits? and then you learn about the laws of gravity that could
bring you crashing back to Earth.

(13:10):
But I think that exploration is the very beginning of being creative.
And I think in everyone's life, I think you need to have a few key moments in
your life where you really stretch yourself beyond the barriers that you thought
were going to hold you back.

(13:31):
I love that. and the principle that everything that we see today that exists
once existed first in someone's mind as a thought.
That's wonderful. That's very, very inspiring.
We will end the podcast with an extract from Mandla's book, Come to Your Mountains, Week 10.
Page 45, there's a sentence that speaks powerfully, which says,

(13:55):
so many situations in my life were dead, And yet, God came to show me a better way.
Music.