How to write your book, regardless 

But what if I’m crap?

That’s the question that so many of us worry about when embarking on a creative life.

So what if you’re crap? Everyone starts somewhere, and more to the point: creativity isn’t about always being the best, or the shiniest, or winning the award. That’s your internalised capitalism and patriarchy talking. It’s about exploring what makes us human, and for that to work, we need to be willing to take creative risks and then regroup and keep going when they fall flat.

There are super talented creative geniuses out there, of course there are. But there are also a lot of people who are working in their chosen medium, figuring out how to get better and giving themselves time to do so. And that brings us right back to the original point: working on your creativity is not immediately productive in a capitalistic sense. 

The choice to spend your time not being productive is the choice that matters. Many of us turn away from this choice, because we don’t like feeling uncomfortable. And SO many of us feel uncomfortable at the thought of feeling like we’re letting someone down – and taking time to write, paint, speak or draw necessarily takes us away from the time we’d spend serving others or attempting to make them happy.

When you commit to exploring your creativity, you’re bound to get uncomfortable. It’s not all sunshine and fluffy bunnies. Annoyingly, creating something takes work. More than that, your creativity isn’t the same as taking time for leisure. Capitalism teaches us that anytime we’re not working or productive is ‘leisure time’, and leisure has become synonymous with pleasure.

Creating isn’t always fun or pleasurable – just ask any author of a published book. Quite often, it’s a bit of a drudge to sit at a keyboard or edit or stare at a blank page. Writing doesn’t feel good a lot of the time, and that’s where so many of the authors I work with get stuck. Unconsciously, we expect it to feel good and when it doesn’t, we assume something’s wrong with us or that we aren’t doing it right.

You need to be sure you’re able to sit in discomfort, whether that’s because of the act of taking time for your creativity is uncomfortable because you’re going against expectations of what you use your time for, or whether it’s because the creativity itself (the subject matter) is taking you to places you’re not sure you want to go.

That’s where mindset comes in.

Tending to your mindset to make sure that you’re able to give yourself that time and not sabotage yourself or suddenly find yourself doing other things for other people? Noticing that is the magic trick to really getting into your creative flow.