How do you live a creative life? Key ingredients—according to the authors of these inspiring books—are courage, discipline, faith, and an open mind and open heart. And it doesn’t hurt to have someone cheering you on.
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
In Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert poses this question: “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” If you don’t, she’s determined to help you develop it. “Because,” she says, “creative living is a path for the brave. We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it. We all know that fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.” Gilbert is compulsively readable—entertaining and encouraging as she delivers practical advice and preaches self-empowerment in the charming, personable voice she’s known for.
The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it For Life
Twyla Tharp’s instructions for creative living were gleaned from four decades of artistic output. A MacArthur fellow and Emmy and Tony Award winner, America’s preeminent choreographer is all about discipline. Her life is a model of the dedication and determination she preaches. Eighty-four years old now, she was in her early sixties as she wrote The Creative Habit, and as she had all her working life, she rose every day at 5:30 and headed to a gym where she’d work out for two hours. For her, creativity is all about preparation. “It’s vital to establish some rituals—automatic but decisive patterns of behavior—at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.” It’s advice that may be a little hard for people with ADHD to swallow as it revolves around habit and routine, which don’t come easily to us. But if we approach it without believing we need to be strictly adherent, there’s much we can learn from her about cultivating creativity.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin is a legendary record producer with an arm-load of Grammy awards. The co-founder of the hip-hop label Def Jam, he’s worked with everyone from Johnny Cash and Tom Petty to LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys. In The Creative Act, he goes deep on what it means to be a creative person and what creativity has to do with being human. He muses on the pathways that can lead to soul-enriching creative experiences, which, he believes, are our birthright—the reason we’re alive. “Attuned choice by attuned choice,” he says, “your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”
On Becoming an Artist
An oldie but goodie, Ellen J. Langer’s On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity, shatters the self-limiting belief that a creative life can be had only by some. A Harvard psychologist and one of the earliest researchers into the benefits of mindfulness, Langer is an artist as well, and she insists that there’s an artist within everyone who can find faith in themselves and avoid the pitfalls that sabotage our free self-expression, such as self-doubt. What’s necessary to be an artist, she insists, is to do art. That simple. But the book, a nearly two-decade old classic, is anything but simple. Langer draws upon her psychological research to explore the reasons we find for not doing the thing we want so much to do, the cost of failing to act, and the strategies that can help us go beyond our self-imposed limitations.
Encouragement to Keep on Keeping On
Writer, teacher, and cofounder of Writing Co-Lab, a teaching cooperative, Brian Gresko is on your side. They describe You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing and Creativity as “not a book about how to write, a book about why to write and how to keep at it in a world that wants you to shut the hell up.” Gresko’s tone here is like a friend or mentor—one who writes from the trenches and who’s truly invested in your persistence. They’re less interested in discussing success than in encouraging doing. There’s good advice here, but equally important is the boost you’ll gain from someone genuinely being on your side. As you’ll see, Gresko is rooting for you.