Deep Dive: nourishing creative habits
On setting up, sustaining and nurturing habits to help your creative practice thrive
Welcome, dear Bowerbirders, to the first of these Deep Dive posts for you, my wonderful paid subscribers. What I’m hoping to give you here are some insights and resources relating to a specific aspect of creative practice or navigating the creative industries (writing and publishing in particular!). I’ll include some experiments you might like to try in each Deep Dive. If you have particular questions or topics you’re keen for me to cover, I’d love to hear from you!
To begin, I thought I’d start off with something for the new-ish year - how to develop, nourish and sustain creative habits.
Why me? Why this? Why now?
I’ve been working on building creative habits since I first started seriously writing back in 2014 when I began the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing Course. I reckon my high school teaching background gives me some insight into this, too - helping students recognise and build up the habits that work allow them to do their best thinking and work.
Since my first book was published I’ve had really different rhythms to my years and the time I’ve had available for writing: some years writing has had to fit in around big caring demands and other work obligations, other years I’ve had much more time for writing. The factor that remains the same, for me, is the need to have clear habits that mean I can fit the thinking, dreaming, research, reading and writing in to the time I have available. My work talking to writers - for the podcast and festivals and ‘offline’ - and in the research for my PhD on creative practice, has also been hugely helpful in collecting ideas and resources on this topic.
From the feedback I get from writers I work with now (and a big hello to new subscribers who have arrived here by way of the Creative Resilience workshop I ran a couple of weeks back!); building creative habits is something many want to start or get better at practising as a way of nurturing their creative practice.
And I know we are already halfway through February, but for anyone whose creative year only kicked off properly when the kids went back to school - now is a great time to set up your creative practice for 2024. Begin as you mean to go on.
What are creative habits?
I can’t be certain where I first came across the phrase ‘creative habits’ but I know that I started using it when I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use It for Life. Tharp is an American choreographer with vast experience and this book was recommended by one of my fave writers and teachers Sarah Sentilles.
As she sets out in her introduction, Tharp is all about ‘creativity being augmented by routine and habit.’
It takes skill to bring something you’ve imagined into the world; to use the words to create believable lives, to select the colours and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavourful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding… If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit, p. 9
The book (and I highly recommend you get yourself a copy!) includes examples from her own practice and those of other artists, followed by exercises (‘Reading archeologically’ or ‘Build up your tolerance for solitude’)for creatives to have a play with.
So what creative habits do I (try to) practice, and what do these look like in action?
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