Practice makes...presence

If you’ve been around here for for a while, if you have been one of my coaching clients, or if you’ve been one of my students over the years, you’ll know I am a big fan of approaching our creative work as a practice.

Perhaps you are sitting down this month to write 50,000 words in November, by participating in NaNoWriMo? If so, you may well be setting yourself some challenging goals and word count targets. Or perhaps you are using NaNoWriMo to help you establish a daily writing habit, a regular practice, rather than a word count to hit? What’s your preference, I wonder?

I was so interested to read Tara McMullin’s ideas about ‘practice’ versus ‘goals’ in her new book What Works that I wrote about it in last week’s email.

Creativity as a practice is a topic I have written about before, and I find it fascinating to see different takes on the subject. So I thought you might be interested to read (or be reminded of) a previous email on the same subject that I wrote earlier this year, this time drawing from Seth Godin’s book “The Practice: Shipping Creative Work.”:

CREATIVITY AS PRACTICE

Practice is a word that has so many useful connotations when it comes to thinking about creative work: learning-by-doing, a commitment to improvement, diligence, humility, regularity, habit, valuing process over outcome. The artist Tania Kovats also touched on this in her interview here.

There’s no mystery to practice, no muse to court, no inner child to placate. You just turn up and do the work, again and again.

I’ve been reading around creativity a lot recently, thinking I should familiarise myself with what ‘creative coaches’ actually say, write and do. Oh dear. There is a lot of magical thinking out there, lots of manifesting, and inner child work, and soothing cod-psychology. One book, by an author who is apparently one of the foremost ‘creativity coaches’ out there, was so exasperating I actually ended up burning it in my stove! It was so bad I just couldn’t bear to see it on my bookshelf.

There’s an awful lot of hogwash out there.

So when I heard about a book called “The Practice: Shipping Creative Work” my ears pricked up. I liked the straightforward, workmanlike sound of it. The author, Seth Godin, is known more as an entrepreneur and marketing guru than in creative circles, so this is the first time he’s come on my radar. I’m glad he has. Because there’s a no-nonsense, pragmatic and enabling approach to creativity here. It cuts through a lot of the unhelpful mythology that hangs around the work we do as artists and writers. And it resonates with other ideas I’ve been exploring, like the importance of ‘flow’.

Godin says:

“We don’t have to believe in magic to create magic.”

This, my friend, is music to my ears. And, I hope, to yours as well.

‘SHIPPING’ CREATIVE WORK

Godin emphasises the importance of not just making the work, but ‘shipping it’, getting it out there where it is tested in the real world, with real audiences, real readers, and learning from that. Making the decision to write this weekly blog post is, I realise, my own commitment to shipping creative work. I’d encourage you to think about yours.

Buckle in. Get it written. Rain or shine. Get it out there. Make those connections. Open those conversations. Keep learning. You can’t control the outcome. You can only trust the practice.

We find this hard to do because

“The industrial system we all live in is outcome-based. It’s about guaranteed productivity in exchange for soul-numbing, predirected labour.”

The moment we put our work in front of an audience and say ‘here, I made this’ is an incredibly vulnerable one. You have no control over how people will respond. Many creative people step away at this point, or avoid it and keep working in obscurity. Godin says that:

“Lost in this obsession with outcomes is the truth that outcomes are the results of process. Good processes, repeated over time, lead to good outcomes more often than lazy processes do.

Focussing solely on outcomes forces us to make choices that are banal, short-term or selfish. It takes our focus away from the journey and encourages us to give up too early.

The practice of choosing creativity persists. It’s a commitment to a process, not simply the next outcome on the list.”

Wishing you a creative week!

Sam