To stay creative you have to be defiant

Advice on fighting demons and the dishes in the sink

Mar 6

Abstract painting with a black background, 2 ghostly abstract figures and splashes and swirls of orange and yellow paint. — Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

How many of us have a memory of being told by a parent, teacher, sibling, or friend that we just weren’t very good at some kind of creative activity? Or of being actively discouraged by someone who said that being creative was silly, girly, pointless, and a waste of time?

I remember hearing as a child that I didn’t have a nice singing voice and couldn’t really carry a tune. This early message is so firmly imprinted that I almost never sing around other people, not even during karaoke. The splinter of shame that lodged itself in me still irritates; I feel too self-conscious to even take a singing lesson.

The other memory that comes up for me is all the times I failed my ballet exams. Classical ballet schools bring in examiners every two years to evaluate students, even very little kids. I think I passed the first couple of times, but as the years went on and my body changed out of its childhood form, it seemed impossible to pass. Luckily, my teacher didn’t care too much about the exams, although she spent months preparing us for them. She would advance us along with our age group so long as we could keep up, even if we weren’t excellent technically. Still, it was hard to know that I wasn’t considered up to standard. I stuck it out because of my teacher’s support and a very stubborn love of ballet.

Anyone who sticks with a creative pursuit has a defiant streak. It’s inevitable that along the way, someone will put you down. Society will tell you art is worthless. You’ll fail your piano test or fall on the floor. People will misunderstand your intentions. Life will get in the way, sapping your creative energy and stealing your time.

Think of all the successful musicians, artists, writers, designers, and other creative folk who all say some version of this: “Thank goodness I didn’t listen to that violin teacher who said my fingers were too short/the teacher who didn’t put my painting on the wall/the director who said my plays were too weird.” For every story of making it in a creative life, it seems there’s someone who put up a roadblock that the artist had to find the resolve to push past.

Self-improvement advice about creativity needs to help the reader nurture their defiant streak. After early childhood, it takes a tremendous effort to keep creativity in our lives, yet some kind of creative outlet is essential to our well-being. Creativity self-help is often about learning how to fight for the space and time to be creative, and to push past the feeling of being stuck, afraid, and vulnerable (all of which are inevitable, unfortunately).

Creativity is given a broad defintion in the advice world, perhaps because so many of us were taught that our traditional, childhood creative pursuits were subpar or embarrassing. People feel afraid to try anything labeled as creative. I see this in my university students. When I include something called a “creative assignment,” students panic. They think I want dances and poems and paintings and that they’ll be judged on what they perceive as their non-existent creative talents. I had to rename the project as a “communication project,” where they’re able to do a wide variety of creative things, and they do, but the fear vanishes.

So it behooves the creativity advice giver to open a big umbrella, because a lot of potential readers will turn away if they think the book is about unleashing your inner songwriter. Thus, creative activity is really anything that allows a person to feel like they’re expressing themselves. Baking, woodworking, knitting, decorating, putting outfits together, journaling: all of it counts.

Fighting for creative time

If they’re successful at convincing everyone that they are, indeed, creative, advice writers have another hurdle to clear: convincing people that they can and should make time for creativity and that it’s not frivolous or disposable.

Creative pursuits are the first thing to fall off the schedule when career, kids, and all the responsibilities of adult life seem to eat up every minute of the day. This is especially true for women, as Eve Rodsky argues in Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World. Women give up more of their free time to take on caregiving work. Rodsky suggests this a major reason why resentment builds up in heterosexual relationships. When women don’t have time to do something creative, they start to lose themselves and wonder who they even are anymore.

Men can experience this, too, although studies show that men have more leisure time even after marriage and kids. However, the confines of traditional masculinity might prevent men from following or sharing their creative interests, because creativity often involves the expression of emotion, which men aren’t allowed to fully embrace.

Whatever the reason, abandoning creativity is likely to lead to or contribute to crises of the soul at some point. You can get divorced, leave the kids behind, move to an old farmhouse and write sonnets all day. Some do just that. Eve Rodsky is a little more hopeful that couples can work it out, but she knows that what she suggests isn’t easy.

It involves actually communicating your creative needs (for time, space, money, support) and then standing up for yourself when other people's needs inevitably try to take priority. You have to be a little bit defiant about it.

Whether your partner or kids are making it difficult or not, you also have to contend with societal expectations. These might be telling you that your most important duty is to your family, or community, or faith, or career, leading to feelings of guilt and the belief that you’re selfish for making time for creativity. Hell, people might even tell you this to your face. Even worse, you could get passive aggressive blowback: “Oh, I just couldn’t possibly make time for a hobby like that.”

It takes a strong spine and an f-you attitude to keep creativity in your life, when institutions like the family and work under capitalism and heteropatriarchy are conspiring to keep you from your workshop. This all comes before you even think about the challenges of the creative process, like your inner critic, shame, self-sabotage, getting stuck, and failing.

Defying the inner saboteur

If you’ve ever watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, you’ll know that Ru loves to ask a struggling contestant about her “inner saboteur.” Ru knows that we all have a voice inside us telling us what we can’t do, shouldn’t do, aren’t good at, and should stay away from. This voice stands between you and your ability to truly express yourself. Ru also knows that you never get rid of this voice. But you can learn how to tell it to shut up.

The inner saboteur is the personification of fear. Advice writers on creativity know that you can make all the time in world for your chosen pursuit, but it won’t matter a bit if fear gets the best of you. In Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, writer Elizabeth Gilbert says that the central question is this:

“Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?”

Finding that courage means defying a pretty epic list of fears, some of which Gilbert enumerates: that you’re wasting your time, you’re a hack or a fool, you’ll have to deal with your demons, people will see the real you and not like it, you’re too old, and on and on. Sometimes your inner critic is articulate and speaks these words; sometimes it just makes you want to puke.

Gilbert’s advice is not to try to become fearless in general, but to make space for fear on the “road trip” of creativity. If fear’s going to show up (and it pretty much always is), it can sit in the backseat - never the driver’s seat. Gilbert says:

“I allow my fear to live and breathe and stretch out its legs comfortably. It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes too. In fact, I cordially invite fear to come along with me everywhere I go.”

Making a friend of fear, getting really comfortable with it, learning all about it: somewhat paradoxically, these are tools to use to defy fear.

If you prefer a more practical approach to taming fear, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has you covered. In The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, Tharp shares the methods and practices she’s developed over decades of professional creativity. She understands the fear of the blank space. For her, a powerful antidote is found in ritual, habit, movement, and trusted exercises.

Like Tharp, I’m a big fan of habit and ritual to get ready for creative work. When I’m working on a book, for example, my very simple pre-writing ritual involves opening the document and updating the table of contents. I don’t need a fresh TOC at that moment, but it’s one of several tiny steps that cues my brain to know it’s writing time. These little steps aren’t creative per se, but that’s the point. The preparation eases you in, and before you know it, you’re doing the work.

Of course Twyla Tharp has more enchanting suggestions than refreshing your document headers. There’s “Egg,” an exercise where you curl yourself into a tight, seated egg, and then gradually change your shape into new configurations of Egg. “Do A Verb” has you list ten verbs and then act them out with your body. The intention is that you activate the ideas part of the brain in a low-stakes way before you start to tackle your actual creative task.

Tharp’s suggestions imply a different way of saying screw you to fear. Instead of befriending it or inevstigating it, you can just sidestep it by engaging your mind and body in other processes. You’re “in” the activity before fear has a chance to show up and takeover.

As devoted to ritual and practice as she is, Twyla Tharp also sometimes combats her fears “with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout.” She makes a list of her top five fears and then systematically and brutally dismantles them as unfounded, irrelevant, or egotistical.

Want to bring more creativity back into your life? Get ready to fight

What I’ve learned from reading advice on creativity, and of course from the daily struggle of being a writer, is that if you want some form of creativity in your life, you’re probably going to have to fight for it. Twyla Tharp notes that she was lucky: in giving her the name Twyla, her mother seemed to set her on a creative path from the day she was born. Still, she fights the same demons as the rest of us: fear of being laughed at, being irrelevant, being unoriginal.

Maybe your creative pasttime doesn’t bring up those kinds of demons. Instead, your demons might be about two feet tall and prone to screaming when they don’t have your undivided attention. I don’t know which fight is harder: the internal one against fear and doubt, or the external one against the enormous demands everyday life places on us. Either way, it’s unlikely that creative time is going to come easily.

The books I mention in this piece have a lot of quality advice on these issues. If nothing else, it’s comforting to read that wildly successful people like Elizabeth Gilbert and Twyla Tharp deal with the same demons and disruptions as everyone else. At least for most of us, there’s no pressure to follow up the last hit with an even better one. The freedom of low expectations is not to be underestimated.

Reading about creativity isn’t the same thing as being creative, but it’s not a bad place to start if you’re wondering where your ability to express yourself took off to. Unfortunately, none of this reading has yet convinced me to start singing around other people. But maybe it’s not too late.

Perfectly Cromulent

To stay creative you have to be defiant

Advice on fighting demons and the dishes in the sink

Fighting for creative time

Defying the inner saboteur

Want to bring more creativity back into your life? Get ready to fight