THE HECTIC WRITER VIDEO SERIES – WEEK 5: COURAGE FOR THE ROAD (PARTS 1 AND 2) – GETTING PAST YOUR CREATIVE FEARS

In this week’s two short videos, I’m here to tell you that YOU GOT THIS and to help you see what a badass you are so that you can get past the creative fears that may be holding you back from being as productive and inspired as you might like. By looking at how we’ve been brave in the past – and we all have as that’s part of life! – we can gain confidence in our ability to begin to make the gentle changes our Ideal Writing Day may have been prodding us to make. We also may start to feel more playful about our writing as we realise that ts challenges are actually nothing compared to so much we’ve already conquered! If you want to start to dissolve your fears around your creativity, this is a good place to gain courage for the road.

If you’ve lived any number of years on this Earth, you’ve probably already survived a range of bumpy and downright unpleasant experiences and lived to tell the tale. It’s life.

Creativity maven, Julia Cameron, has a great exercise in The Sound of Paper where she gets people to write down things which they feared would never work out, but which did, despite their lack of faith in their ability to get through it, or for matters to end well.

I’d like you now to trawl back through memory lane and think of stuff you have survived, even if it was tough and you thought you’d never make it out in one piece. The times when you showed courage.

It doesn’t have to involve the darkest times of your life (though including them is just fine too) – it could be you were brave when picking up that spider last month and showing it the door or when you went to the dentist! It all counts!

It can be tricky to look at your own life, so treat yourself with gentleness and kindness as you watch the first videos and do the exercise – maybe have a favourite warm drink, cocoon yourself in a blanket, light a scented candle … you get the idea. Treat yourself like your own best friend.

 

 

 Well done for doing this! Now check out the second teeny video where I explain why this exercise helps us become creative rock stars!

 

 

Now, does writing – that thing you lurve so much – look so scary now in comparison to the big and bad stuff you’ve already got through? So what if the story idea is a dud, you get rejected or the critic doesn’t like it? That’s all laughable compared to wrestling with giant spiders, right?

Elizabeth Gilbert very accurately points out in Big Magic that creativity should be taken seriously – and also not seriously at all.

I’ll talk later in the series about how we need to take ourselves seriously as creatives (dahling!), but, the thing is, writing (and all art) is also not a very serious matter at all. No one is going to die if we stop writing or if our poem doesn’t rhyme, so we can loosen up!

The courage to live (especially in dire circumstances), always greatly exceeds the courage needed to make art.

So we don’t have to be afraid of writing, of starting, of making changes to create our new artistic life.

It’s just writing.

It’s everything and it’s nothing.

You’ve already done stuff which was far scarier than picking up a pen or opening a laptop or mailing that submission.

I repeat: YOU GOT THIS.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

See you next Friday for the next installment – if you’d like to download the free workbook to accompany this video series, click here. 

You can also book a complimentary 30 minute ‘Writing Breakthrough‘ session with me, if you’d like to discuss how to become more creatively courageous. Please feel free to use the contact form to tell me how you’ve got on with this exercise as well.

If you want to get your creative juices flowing again after a long winter, please join my new writing challenge,  #writingmojomarch, starting on March 6th. Sign up here!