Reminders for myself

Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance.

“Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what? Vonnegut said, ‘When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth’. So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to BE an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

Leap, and the net will appear.

- The Artists Way

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

There will be many times when we won’t look good - to ourselves or anyone else. We need to stop demanding that we do. It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.

"Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things."

- Ray Bradbury

The refusal to acknowledge our creativity had its payoffs. We could wonder and worry about our arrogance instead of being humble enough to ask help to move through our fear. We could fantasize about art instead of doing the work. We could proceed to righteously ignore our creativity and never have to take the risks of fulfilling it.

Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

- Bird By Bird