W5 : Creatives, what are your core questions?

W5 questions on brick wall - Carole Jane TreggettThere is a wealth of blog posts out there giving creatives advice on how to align one’s values with their life work.

However, if you’re like me, you still struggle with what I like to call the yeah, but syndrome – the uncertainty and fear about the who-what-where-when-and how of progressing with your own creative projects and goals, even after reading many of them.

Like the popular Sesame Street jingle goes: “All of these things belong with the other, but one of these things is not the same!” So although most creatives grapple with similar issues and themes, we may also experience challenges or difficulties in dealing with those issues satisfactorily, given our own unique life circumstances.

While studying Communications in college as a youth, I spent one summer working as a  stringer, writing articles for the Canadian Press.  I was required to think fast on my feet and approach each person I interviewed, try and answer each angle of a story I was assigned, with the typical W5  journalist’s scrutiny.

That vocational experience was brief,  but the discipline was impressed upon me for life.

I’ve come up with a series of core questions I’m thinking a lot about lately to evaluate and effectively plan my creative career direction.

But they also seem applicable to help work out almost any decision or life situation someone may be facing, and so I share them with you in the hopes they might be useful.

Without further delay, here are my 6 core questions:

1. WHO are you and who are your people?

2. WHAT do you have to offer that no one else can?

3. WHERE are your people? (professionally, personally; online and offline)

4. WHEN will you regularly honour your creative talents and gifts and work towards achieving your goals and dreams?

5. WHY are you doing what you’re doing?

6. HOW specifically and practically will you get what you really want? (I can’t get that refrain from the Rolling Stones’ popular ditty out of my head thinking about this one!) If we’re lucky, we can get both what we need and want from our creative life!

I’ve come to realize as I think about them that they’re deceivingly complex questions!

They aren’t complex in the sense of complicated, but more like a multifaceted prism.  By holding each question in the sunlight,  you see nuances and colours depending on which angle you’re looking at it, but each discovery is a part that makes up the whole.

The longer I contemplate each question, the more information or relevant truth comes up for me and my unique life experience. So I’m expecting you’ll have plenty of valuable creative insight come up for you too.

As writers, as creatives, I think it’s imperative that we invest in the time to answer these questions for ourselves. Don’t just read other blogs and adopt some of the suggestions from them. Take the time to find out what hits the bullseye and fits your unique life and circumstances, and work towards designing the creative life you really want that is tailor made and right for you.

If the questions I posed don’t resonate for you, why not make up your own set of W5s ? Feel free to share what you discovered in the Comments below.

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Friday fudge:The power of encouragement for creatives

Bowl of Friday fudge - Carole Jane Treggett blogThroughout history, failures or setbacks have often led creative people to discover something greater or better than the original plan. At the very least, valuable lessons were learned. Friday fudge is about creatives persevering past the obstacles, and finding delicious rewards for their tenacity and effort that they could never have imagined or hoped for in the first place.

He was just polishing off his third Miller High Life Tall Boy of the day. Taking a last slurpy sip, he turned his head to check the time on the clock radio on a shelf on the paneled wall above the dryer.

It was 3:10 p.m and the crescendo of Free Bird by Lynard Skynyrd crackled through the tiny black speaker.

If he didn’t get a move on, he’d be late to teach his creative writing class at the local college. Letting out a loud belch, he crushed the beer can on his left knee, spilling a few remaining drops on his brown corduroy trousers.

“Ah, shit,” he exclaimed and stood up rather steadily considering the amount he had already consumed.

He pulled back his arm in an exaggerated arc,leaned back on one foot imitating a pro baseball pitcher, and hurled the crushed can into the open wastebasket by his desk.

“Strrrrrrike!” he hissed as he lifted his leather book bag by its strap off the back of a wooden chair, and fished in his corduroy jacket pockets for his car keys.

A moment later he was jostling them in his palm like a pair of dice at a craps table and exited the laundry room of the double-wide trailer, slamming the thin metal door closed with a jab of his elbow.

She was sitting outside reading on a plaid blanket in the spring sunshine with a sleeping baby and toddler beside her.

He didn’t notice how tired she looked for such a young bride.

“Honey, I’m on my way to school!” he said, waving the book bag in her general direction before he got into the clunky Buick with the bad transmission and drove away.

=========================

This is the vignette I  envisioned of Stephen and Tabitha King’s life their first few years together, after reading Stephen King’s brilliant memoir, On Writing.

As I was taking in some of the details about their humble circumstances in the early 1970s, it moved me to read how King recognized and deeply appreciated his wife’s unwavering support (and he still must after weathering 42 years together) :

For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie, I felt as if I were wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn’t pull off..Tabby had the pages. She’d spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them…”You’ve got something here,” she said. “I really think you do.”

I couldn’t help asking myself, What if Tabitha King had not discovered the three crumpled up written pages in the wastebasket? What if she had simply dumped the contents into a garbage bag and disposed of it along with the household refuge collection for the week?

Would Stephen King still have achieved publishing and commercial success as soon as he did – still be the prolific and hugely successful writer he is to this day – had he tried to sell one of the other two manuscripts he had in his filing cabinet instead?

We’ll never know that answer. The author trusted his wife and best friend (and fellow novelist) enough to persevere through the doubt and feelings of failure and uncertainty, and worked diligently to get that work finished and sent out.

Carrie was published by Doubleday in 1974, became a commercial hit with a movie adaptation, and the fateful climb to fame and fortune for horror-writing master Stephen King was set in motion.

Would Stephen King have become the popular fiction superstar he is today if his wife hadn’t steered him, motivated him so stalwartly? He admits himself he probably wouldn’t have gotten very far in his writing career had it not been for his wife’s relentless support:

My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden. If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories…was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or husband) I smile and think: There’s someone who knows.

The encouragement from a trusted loved one, be it your spouse, your friend, a relative or your pet seems essential for the artist to help them soldier on despite battling the demons of self-doubt and self-sabotage.  Another pair of caring eyes and ears can let you know your work is worth finishing and sending out into the world when you are unsure and faltering.

How about you? Do you have a trusted encourager who has made all the difference as you progress in your creative life? Please feel free to share in the Comments.

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Gentle is as gentle does: Go easier on yourself, creative person!

Beautiful bouquet of tulips

Try not to try too hard, it's just a lovely ride. - James Taylor

Editor’s note: This post was first published last spring.  Learning proper self-care for the busy creative is an ongoing challenge, so I thought I would share this one with you all again!

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time, sings James Taylor.

How right he is. I really love this song; it soothes me like a lullaby at times when I feel overwhelmed and my life is charged with strife and tension.

Maybe I should correct what I’m saying: when I allow myself to get overwhelmed when hardship and stressful circumstances challenge me in my life.

Gentle is as gentle does.

Be a kind friend to yourself and actually act upon the advice you read about and often give to other frazzled people in your sphere of influence.

As you encourage others to practice good self-care, realize it’s just as applicable for you  too.  Don’t just hastily shove the idea in the back of your mind with: This sounds really good and I’ll get right to that as a priority as soon as I/as soon as this…

Go easier on yourself today, in the midst of the storm.

I dare you to test this theory out: Make the time (let’s say 1 hour) to do something that is truly relaxing and something you want to do (housework doesn’t count!).   I bet you’ll discover that you’ll accomplish way more than if you didn’t take the break.  You might even be surprised and manage to get ALL of the ‘urgent’ stuff done.

Have you ever experienced that in your day?  Think of it as some kind of magical redemption of time.  Or what you believed was urgent turns out to be something you can put off to the next day without the world coming to an end.   And so it goes.

Case in point: I’ve been neglecting my writing and creative practice time lately.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been stressing and working long hours on a huge website project I have to finish on deadline for a client.

I’ve also been distracted over the past week dealing with (yet another) family emergency and it’s been difficult to stay focused and soldier on with my hectic work schedule.  I’ll be honest, this one is a bit of a heartbreaking situation and I’m sick with worry about all the consequences we as a family will now have to endure.   I’m pretty much exhausted at this point – emotionally and physically.

This morning, a friend of mine posted this moving quote on Facebook:

Gentle change leads to permanent results.  Don’t rush the changes you wish to see in your life, but gently make little tweaks of improvement.  Very soon you’ll see life beginning to unfold with more ease, joy and glory.  Be gentle. (source unknown)

I decided to follow this sage advice and my weary heart’s prompting and take the time for creative practice, for some writing.

I decided to do it right away, not put it at the bottom of my to do list as I regularly do.

Yes, I wrestled with myself for several minutes, but managed to push any anxiety aside that I should  be working on that big website project for my client first and then when things let up, then I could take the time to write and develop creative projects.

This is how I put into practice what I preach, my fellow creative. I share this blog post with you all in the hopes that you will honor your own creative practice, and not let another day go by neglecting it.

You and I are relentless slave drivers with ourselves.  It’s time to cut ourselves some slack.  Really.   Not just nod in agreement when your loved ones affectionately berate you for not doing so.   Don’t just give them and yourself some vague promise to look after yourself at a later time, when things settle down.

Good intentions won’t change your life.   Little steps will eventually yield big rewards.

Don’t you desire to have a life filled with more ease, joy and glory?  I know that my heart and mind leapt with a ‘hell yes!’ when I read the gentleness quote (ok, it was more or a wistful ‘oh how I really wish it were possible’).

Imagine how it would feel if you took care of yourself enough, really made it a regular habit, to allow the peace, joy and glory to replenish and energize you instead of overworking, over-thinking yourself into exhaustion, time and time again?

Imagine how productive, imaginative and prolific our creative practice, our lives, would be!

Guess what I realized?  I don’t have to settle for simply imagining the possibility, and neither do you.

You and I can decide, today, to regularly practice being gentle with ourselves and experience the wonderful unfolding firsthand.  You and I can discover peace, joy, and creative productivity even in the chaos that swirls around us.  You and I can also be more compassionate with others when we practice compassion on ourselves.

Gentle is as gentle does.

How do you – or would you – practice self-care and gentleness with yourself?  Please feel free to share in the Comments section.

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