Rules and habits of creative practice

Some thoughts on getting out of my own way

Back in August I decided to take an autumn break from all other creative projects in order to focus on writing my book. This meant no sewing of clothes, weaving of cloth, spinning of yarn, making bad sketches, or playing my fiddle - all ways I spend my precious non-paid-work time - from September to December. Instead, I planned to enter my studio every night after dinner, and dedicate my evening hours to writing. The goal was to make some significant headway in terms of concept and word count on a book I started eighteen months ago.

For the month of September, I was diligent in my practice and started to get the vast map inside my mind into Scrivener (the manuscript application I use). Fortunately, I wasn’t sitting down to nothing; I had 16,000 words plus a significant amount of background writing from 2022. Reading it over fresh after a year away from it helped bolster my confidence. Some of the writing isn’t half bad! The book pitches sound professional! I can do this!

Engaging with the content again was a reminder of the way connections get made and then re-made over months of reading and paying attention to other things. Everything ultimately speaks to everything else; the question is what subjects take precedence over others in a finite number of pages. Though I always find writing a bit of a slog, I did manage to re-structure my book project and added several thousand words more to it in the first month back at the writing desk.

In October, my routine was disrupted by a trip to NYC, and then another trip to the interior of British Columbia. I kept up as many writing sessions as I could, while getting less and less out of them, continuing the pause on all non-writing creative work. But by the middle of the month, these other creative attentions were starting to nag at me. My fiddle, locked away in its case, wanted to be set free. The fabric project on my small loom cried out for one little repair so I could finish weaving the cloth. The bobbin on my spinning wheel just wanted for a couple of dedicated hours to get filled with finished yarn. I started to feel anxious about it all, which distracted me from writing further.

Last week, the feeling of missing out got to be too much, and I found myself re-tuning my fiddle, finishing my cloth, and plying my yarn, all within a couple of days. I finished sewing a jacket and paired a pattern with some fabric to start sewing a new tunic. I made some brush and ink sketches, dyed some fabric, and agreed to sing two songs on an album my husband is making. Basically, all that tamped down creative energy, exploded into a half a dozen (or more) new projects, and so for the last ten days I’ve done no writing at all.

I have always believed my “problem” as a writer, musician, and maker of functional textiles is that I’m too diversified to excel at anything. Because I don’t focus my time into a single pursuit, it takes me a long time to complete projects, and I don’t put the dedicated hours in to practice one craft to its highest standard. This results in not taking myself seriously, or being afraid to identify as a writer/musician/maker of things, for fear I will be seen as fraudulent because I don’t dedicate my unyielding attention to any one discipline.

For example, I hate it when other players ask me what kind of fiddle music I play. In the world of serious fiddle players, most people specialize in one or another kind of music (Irish, old-time, Cajun, blues, gypsy). But because I really only play music as a happenstance of my life (I was raised from toddlerhood with it), my tendency is to play with whoever comes along and whatever music interests me at the moment. I have no focus. I am not a great “fill-in-the-genre” fiddler. I am not obsessed with technics or performance. Therefore (in my mind) I am not a real musician at all.

At least I have played in bands and recorded albums. My ability to identify myself as a writer is even more fraught, because I am not “published,” therefore externally validated. Likewise, I do not sell my textiles, so I have not tested my handwork skills in the market of public valuation. You get the idea.

It’s an ongoing identity problem. On the one hand I believe I am not a real artist/writer/musician. On the other, as my recent writing experiment revealed, I cannot silence any of these creative parts of myself in order to focus on just one.

I have tried to manage these tensions over the years by engaging in time management strategies, dedicating specific weeks or days to particular creative pursuits, participating in creative accountability groups, and so on. Through all of this, I have learned some excellent approaches and found positive habits that really work for me:

• dedicated and routine studio hours

• breaking work into manageable chunks so that even when I only have 30 minutes I can make progress

• using music and other ritual to build mood containers when writing, and

• making detailed notes on projects in case there is a gap of weeks or months between sessions with them.

Some other making/breaking of habits I’ve been working with lately to create more space for my work include:

• saying no to myself and others, putting an end to overscheduling myself

• allowing my own work to be a priority

• removing social media apps from my phone to both remove distractions and make myself less vulnerable in the world, and

• engaging in regular therapy with a focus on self-determination.

These practices have wedged free a lot more external and internal space for me, opening up time where I didn’t have it before and giving me license to take different approaches to starting, sustaining, and finishing creative projects. What I keep learning in all of this is that my real “problem” is not that I am too diversified in my pursuits, but that I have a great predilection for setting up artificial constraints and boundaries which don’t further me in any way.

When I simply trust the flow of my life to carry me between ideas, projects, and finished outputs, it does all work out in the sense of overall progress and completion. When I get in my own way with restrictive rules or get overly caught up in how I want others to perceive me, I become inconsistent in output, frozen in indecision or fear. At the heart of all of this is the central lesson of non-attachment, which is another practice that I seem to be slow to learn (but that is a post for another day).

Because I think some of this discomfort comes from a sense that I do not progress in my work fast enough, or complete projects on a better timeline, I’m very curious to know out of all of this, what metrics others use to determine their success in creative practice. Is it number of hours spent? Finished work? Just the satisfaction of doing the thing? Let me know, because I’m in the pocket of breaking/making new habits at the moment and new insights into creative work are most welcome to me.

In the meantime I am halting the internal rule-making, to allow the work impulses to come as they do. “Following the heat” as my creative coach Jill Margo terms it. The trick is not turning this into a variation of “waiting for the muse to strike,” but instead making room for the whole spectrum of expression so I can better focus when I do sit down to the manuscript. It will be so much easier to write, if I don’t feel like I’m silencing other parts of my creative self in order to do it.

An October rainbow over Link Lake in Bankier, BC.