Creative Combat
By Dawn Allcot, N2Arts Correspondent
Pros offer tips for staying inspired as an artist
 

reativity. It’s the driving force behind art. It’s improvising on your violin and entering that “zone” in which you become one with the music. It’s a painting that comes alive on the canvas, a poem that flows out in one sitting.

But where does it come from? And what do you do when it abandons you?

Every artist faces what Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Baggar Vance and, more recently, The War of Art, calls, “Resistance.” He defines resistance as the difference between the life we live and the unlived life within us. It is procrastination at its worst. It is laziness. It’s activity, but not activity related to our goal.

Pressfield says resistance is often experienced as fear. “The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it,” he says. He advises would-be writers and artists to steel themselves against resistance each day, to be prepared to fight it head-on. “[T]he most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying,” he says. “When we sit down each day and work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves.... Ideas come.”

LaRae Brim, freelance writer and Editor of Claws in Creativity, the e-zine for creative spirits, understands how awful that feeling of resistance can be. When she’s trying to write, scents, sounds, and even the room’s temperature can affect her creativity. She sets a particular mood to inspire herself and invoke her Muse.

Rituals allow her - and many other people - to set a certain frame of mind that makes creating easier. “Some people sharpen pencils, some light candles and ring a bell. Some people put on a certain type of music. Anything that makes you feel good about whatever it is you’re creating can become a ritual.”

A multi-faceted artist, Brim also plays clarinet, saxophone and sings. She offers tips for getting inspired for music-making. “I try to mentally prepare myself by listening to music, reading something that inspired me, or thinking about someone I wanted to aspire to.”

You can create a constant aura of creativity around yourself by staying in touch with your surroundings. Look for inspiration around you. Observe the beauty of small details in nature, the emotions they evoke, and try to carry those emotions with you during your performances, practices, or writing sessions.

Writers have hundreds of sources of inspiration right at our fingertips, including software designed to kick start our plots, books filled with writing exercises and an Internet full of word games. Brim uses many of these. “I’ll find a web site that offers writing prompts, go back over my old writing or notes and see if something reaches out and grabs me, or I’ll pull up images on the Internet that will steer my creativity in the direction I want it to go.”

Whatever field of the arts you work in, don’t be afraid to stretch - or even break - the rules during these early stages of creation. Just let yourself go.

Brim says, “If my six-year-old wants to paint a purple cow, I don’t tell her, ‘Cows aren’t that color!’ If she wants to use toes or feathers or pine needles to paint with, she can. If she wants to draw a zebra with a trunk, she can. You’re not required to follow rules when you’re being creative.”

Dawn Allcot, journalist, editor and music education advocate, has enjoyed school music performances in venues from New York to Australia. As the former editor of Band & Orchestra Product News and a frequent contributor to School Band and Orchestra magazine, she strives to inspire young musicians and their teachers through her writing. Find out more at www.dawnallcot.com. She can be reached by email at dawnallcot@yahoo.com.