Bits + Pieces 021
3 inspiring thoughts from writer and interviewer Madeleine Dore, who explores creativity and our everyday stumbles
I’ve never identified as a creative person. In school creativity meant art, and art was in the category of drawing, painting etc. I was pretty bad at that, so I put myself in the “not creative” category.
This past year I started The Artist’s Way. Writing morning pages and carving out time for creativity helped me awaken this dormant part of me I didn’t even know was there. It’s helped me learn about myself, feel more confident in expressing myself and move through fear and vulnerability.
Enter - Madeleine Dore. This past summer we spent lots of time paddling in the Hamstead Heath Ladies ponds chatting about life, creativity, expression and anything in between.
Madeleine is a writer and interviewer who explores creativity and our everyday stumbles. As a labour of love, she spent over five years asking creative thinkers how they navigate their days on her popular blog Extraordinary Routines and podcast Routines & Ruts and the lessons culminated in her first book, I Didn’t Do The Thing Today. She’s also contributed to columns and features in Sunday Life, BBC WorkLife, ArtsHub, 99u, Womankind, Kill Your Darlings, The Design Files, ABC Life and more.
This week I’m sharing 3 things from my conversation with Madeleine while she was away in a tiny village in France for a writing residency. I’d like this conversation to serve as the seedlings, fertilizer, and water for the plant patch which I call our collective creative brain!
Enjoy :)
On windows
I’ve been thinking a lot about how life is a series of windows—one after the other, we step into an interval of time that is marked by certain conditions and opportunities. Whether it’s a career change, a new romance, or the early days of parenting, each window is ephemeral. During challenging times, it can be a comfort to know this too shall pass. But sometimes we want to linger by a particular window a little longer and ask ourselves how we make the most of an opportunity.
I’m currently in France at the beginning of a writing residency and I’m aware that I have this fleeting opportunity to write in a way that I’ve never written before—that isn’t tied to a deadline, or distilling other people’s thoughts. It’s exciting, and I don’t want to waste it—but I’m also all too familiar with how opportunities can slip by because of a lack of courage, or distraction, or second guessing. So I have to constantly remind myself that this time isn’t about an outcome, or a goal, or a guarantee—this is a brief window to simply play, experiment and explore my own sense of creativity. And maybe the reward to figuring out how to make the most of each window is in the very process of figuring it out.
On creativity
I spent a long time searching for the secret to being more productive only to find that this relentless optimizing might be the wrong goal. The way we view productivity can be rigid and unsustainable. It narrows how we judge our days and ourselves, when I think we need something more expansive. So in my book I talk about being a “day artist”—which is to say I think we can all borrow lessons from the creative process, even if we don’t view ourselves as very creative, or have a creative profession. How we approach our days, our relationships, our conversations, our careers, incomes streams, or homes can be creative expressions. We don’t need to assign creativity to a select few because creativity is a human trait.
One thing that really stood out from interviewing artists is that just like the creative process, our days, work and energy have a cycle that ebbs and flows. We live in this linear world that expects perfect, consistent output from us, but we are not perfect or consistent. Identifying your own seasons, be that in a day or even over the span of years can help us better understand our own patterns and allow us to find what we need as they shift.
On writing into the gush
Something I’m practicing during this window is doing away with ambitious writing schedules I know I won’t stick to and instead “writing into the gush.” It’s something Walt Whitman once said, and it’s essentially about following threads and ideas as they come up, and not overthinking whether they are any good or useful.
Previously, I kept a long list of ideas and then by the time I returned to them they’d feel stale and I wouldn’t feel like writing about them, so I wouldn’t. Now I’m learning how to write into a stream of something that’s caught my attention. This approach is really about writing or creating in the moment something presents itself—if you feel an emotion, have a thought, or overhear something, use it while it is still alive in you, even if it means just writing into your phone. I used to think you needed a big expanse of time or the perfect space, but really it’s about writing in little pockets where you can. A little bit a day doesn’t feel or look like anything in the moment, but when you look back, it all adds up to something.
Thanks for being here :)
Tish
For more Madeleine bits, check out the below