The Artist's Way + Baby Steps

One of my dreams is helping other people realize their own creativity. I want to inspire other people to fully live, to take risks, and dream. It breaks my heart to hear people say, “You are so creative, I could never do that.” Now, I love a compliment, but I know that great creativity lies within each of us. Sure, we possess different outlets, but there are talents deep inside of us waiting to be discovered.

We often believe that these possibilities are anything but attainable, but I’m suggesting, along with the writer of The Artist’s Way, that this creativity is easier than we think. Here is an excerpt from the book:

“The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step.”

“What do I mean by filling the form? I mean taking the next small step instead of skipping ahead to a large one for which you may not yet be prepared. To be very specific, in order to sell a screenplay, you must first write one. In order to write one, you must come up with the idea and then commit it to paper, a page at a time until you have about 120 pages of script… Most of the time, the next right thing is something small: washing out your paintbrushes, stopping by the art-suppy store and getting your clay, checking the local paper for a list of acting classes… as a rule of thumb, it is best to just admit that there is always one action you can take for your creativity daily, this daily-action commitment fills the form. All too often, when people look to having a more creative life, they hold an unspoken and often unacknowledged expectation, or fear, that they will be abandoning life as they know it….

Blocked creatives like to think that they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop…. Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with the notion of wholesale and often destructive change….

Filling the form means that we must work with what we have rather than languish in complaints over what we have not.”

-The Artist’s Way, pages 141, 142, 143

How many times do we say, “I love to do this, but I don’t have (fill in the blank) or I would do this if I (fill in the blank). What is one thing you could do today? One small, attainable thing? I started this blog, because I wanted to write more. I had neglected it for so long, because I got so caught up in this disappointment of “I’m not writing a book…I’m never going to write a book… That English degree was pointless.” So, of course, I wasn’t writing. I started this blog, because I finally realized I just needed to write. If I write tonight, and tomorrow, and keep writing, then I’m one step closer to writing that book, maybe. Who knows, but at least I can say that I’m writing something.

I'd love to hear what steps you are taking...