Share: Creative Challenges

Extracting my mind from the productivity monster

Everything I’ve ever heard or read about maintaining a creative practice is that a disciplined routine is the key to success and productivity. Recently I’ve been reading the audio book Daily Rituals: Women at Work, which I primarily picked up with the hope of hearing ideas about less obvious ways to build a creative habit into my daily life. I feel assured by the fact that while many creative women in history did maintain specific schedules, many did not.  I’m one-third of the way through the book and so far feel a particular kinship with a few writers profiled:

• Dorothy Parker hated the writing process and consistently missed deadlines, telling her editors that her piece was almost finished when she often had, in fact, not even started writing it.

• It took Katherine Anne Porter 20 years to write her sole novel Ship of Fools (1962). 

• Short story writer Katherine Mansfield experienced “procrastination, self-doubt and self-castigation.”

Reflecting on what this means for me, it’s a reminder that I set my own creative goals and that my projects have no deadlines aside from my own expectations; I define success for myself, and there are multiple ways to go about the same creative task. And no matter how I might be feeling today about my creative habits, I’m not the only one who has felt that way in the history of the world.

With that, I will tuck my productivity worries away until the next time they appear and will focus instead on getting outdoors and enjoying summer the best I can.