The Creative Mind

the inner workings and challenges of life as a creative

sari and

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s the best advice you could give anyone: make what’s missing

Billy Oppenheimer • SIX at 6: Swiss Cheese, in the Heights, Wylie Dufresne, STORY, Owning Your Style, and the Fallow Periods

ssari

make what’s missing, from lin manuel miranda

alex

A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may... See more

andrea

The self is not something you can set out looking for; it reveals itself gradually through the choices you make.

We must cease to concern ourselves with our unique suffering – whether we are happy or sad, fortunate or unfortunate, good or bad – and give up our neurotic and debilitating journeys of self-discovery. Art of true value requires, like a

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz • Two Kinds of Introspection

ssari

you don’t need to know who you are to become an artist. art molds us into the shape it wants us to be and the thing that serves it best.

The trick is having this help us, by creating a creative tension that makes us want to be better, instead of discouraging us. We must be OK with never arriving, and crave the work anyways.

-Austin Kleon

alex

phoebe

From Franz Kafka’s letters (inspo for when the going gets tough, just do something/anything):

Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.

sari

“You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art.

Do what’s personal... See more

aandrea

create for yourself first, via Rick Rubin

When I watch a Miyazaki film I can’t help but think about his attunement to the world, the presence it requires to transmute the real world into a fantastical one. That’s the interesting contradiction of writers and artists, I suppose: alienation is a necessity, but so is participation. The point of getting better is to be more in the world.

sari