The last few months have definitely been a creatively explosive period for me, in ways I didn’t expect and I’m not accustomed to.
It started back in September when I was flying back from a friend’s wedding.  For whatever reason, ideas for a musical spontaneously popped into my mind.  Thankfully, I had a yellow pad with [...]

If I see myself as a burden, I probably won’t talk to you.  When I see you, I’ll most likely think “oh, they must have so many interesting and fun people around them — they don’t need me taking up more space in their life.”  To make sure I don’t bother you, I’ll avoid [...]

I’ll start by thanking everyone who’s checked in with me during my month-long absence from blogging — that really brought home to me that I’ve made some genuine connections in the blogging world, and it’s not all just about “one hand washing the other” and “you scratching my back and me scratching yours” and collectively [...]

I do something kind of unusual when I’m writing.  (I know, shockingly enough.)  I keep a journal of what I’m feeling and thinking when I’m faced with writer’s block.
To an outside reader, this journal would probably seem painfully repetitive, because it talks about the same worries again and again.  Some common themes are:
* “I think [...]

(This piece was inspired by one of the many heart-opening conversations I had with Robin in the comments to an earlier post.)
There’s a lot of advice out there about “how to be creative.”  On the surface, this sounds great — everybody wants to come up with useful and profitable ideas, right?  But when I look [...]

I used to believe that I shouldn’t sit down to write unless I had a compelling vision of what I’d say.  Unfortunately, this attitude was the reason why, for many years, I didn’t do any creative writing.  Sure, I wrote a lot, but only when somebody else (1) gave me a subject to write about [...]

To help us find a compelling direction in life, self-development writers often tell us to ask ourselves “what we’d do if we couldn’t fail.”  For example, we might ask, what kind of book would we write if we knew that whatever we produced was destined to be a #1 bestseller?

I’ve taken to asking myself basically [...]

I’ve written before about how it’s helpful, when you’re facing writer’s block, to just sit with that sense of creative emptiness, and allow it to pass away on its own — rather than beating yourself up for being uncreative, or distracting yourself from the emptiness by playing Minesweeper.  When we learn to just let the [...]

In the last post in this series, we talked about how developing the ability to say “no,” and protect our time, is important for making the kind of progress we want in our creative work.
In this post, I’ll discuss how it can help our creativity to set another kind of boundary — to stop blaming ourselves [...]

If someone told you that a piece you wrote is garbage and you’re a moron for writing it, could you object to their behavior?
When I work with people who are having trouble starting a project, this is often an area where they feel blocked.  They don’t trust their ability to protect themselves against mistreatment.  They [...]