Ep. 7 - Dealing with My Creative Killjoys

In this episode, I identify the killjoys spoiling my creative sessions and talk about what I did to defeat them.

Music Credit: 

Reflection Flow by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/58328 Ft: Javolenus, Rocavaco, Siobhan Dakay

 

Links mentioned in this episode:

Amy Isaman's Dear Creativity, Let's Play Podcast 

Ep. 52: To Get Creative, Own Your Weird with Jeff Harry

Brené Brown

 

Transcript:

I have to admit something to you. As much as I like being creative and making things, I struggle during my creative sessions. In my imagination, other artists are playfully splashing colors on the canvas, while when I get to the canvas or work bench, I just sit there and struggle to get something done.

Recently, I was in my studio working on an idea for a painting, and whole time I experienced delays and interruptions. It was late evening. It was after a full day of work and I was tired. And on top of that, I was listening to a podcast on politics and it was making me angry.

I just told myself I need to change something. I'm not being very creative and this just isn't working for me.   

My approach to creative time has been quite haphazard.  I usually try to fit studio time into the cracks and crevices of my schedule.  So my first attempt was to look for a regular time in the evenings.  I thought that shouldn't be too hard because I wouldn't be giving up much except maybe a few TV shows and a bunch of web surfing.

I thought I could just turn that after-dinner time into time for my art, but after a few tries it wasn't working. The evening is often our family get-together time. When I disappeared into my studio, I felt guilty about not spending time with my family.

And even if it wasn't family night, I was still getting interrupted by phone calls and text messages.

Also, I couldn't let go of being entertained in the evening. So I'd listen to podcasts. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was another more subtle form of interruption.

Also being the end of the day, I was tired. My work during the day usually involves programming creative solutions for my clients. So even if I wasn't physically tired, I was mentally tired,

Needless to say, my creative sessions weren't really satisfying.  They usually ended after about 20 or 30 minutes.

And that even put more pressure on me knowing that I had so little time to work with.

So I thought, okay, what about the weekends? I could give that a try. I could schedule some longer sessions where I could spend maybe five or six hours on a project. But that didn't work for me at all.  Weekends for me are unpredictable. We often go out as a family, whether it's  traveling or doing some errands or whatever.

There's also lots of cool stuffthat happens on weekends, so it was really hard to keep a regular schedule. Even if we weren't going out, there's stuff that needs to get done around the house. 

I ended up having so few weekend sessions that I wasn't creating anything at all.

So I thought, well, how about finding more focus for my evening sessions? How about committing to creating something every day and then posting it to Instagram?

I like Instagram, almost all the people I follow are artists, and it's inspiring to see their art. And it feels great to get likes, you know, and the more I posted, the more likes I got that really felt good.

But eventually I was noticing I was creating things that I didn't care about. Instead of making things that excited me, I was asking, what can I make that'll get likes?  My art was becoming performative in, uh, you know, "Hey, look at me" sort of way. 

None of these attempts at having good studio sessions were working for me.  I was really frustrated, and I was feeling stuck. I wasn't creating, and I wasn't learning anything new.

In the past few months, I've been doing some thinking and reading about the intersection of creativity and play. And I wondered if there might be some clues there about having better creative sessions.

I recently came upon Amy Isaman's Dear Creativity, Let's Play podcast.  It's an awesome podcast, and if you're wondering about the process of creativity, I really urge you to listen  to her podcast episodes. I'll put a link to her podcast and the website in the show notes.

In particular, you should listen to Amy's conversation with Jeff Harry. He's Vice President of Fun at Play. It's episode number 52 and