Your Perfect Creativity Plan

ANNOUNCEMENT: BWW Classes start next week, January 12/ 14, 2016! Classes are almost full but sometimes things shuffle around at the last minute, so if you think a weekly dose of creative inspiration, support and productivity would move you in the direction of your dreams, check out the registration page: https://bookwritingworld.com/winter-classes-2015/ We’d love to have you join us.

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Your Perfect Creativity Plan

I love a plan. I want to know what’s next and in what order. How about you? Does a shopping list drive you crazy, or are you at such loose ends without one that you come home with a new orchid and a pint of kefir when you needed rice and beans?

When I was at the point of labor known as the ring of fire, characterized by the laborer’s being unable to speak, I kept saying, “What’s the plan? What’s the plan?” (My midwife finally said, “The plan is to have a baby.”)

I am not here to advise you to have a plan. The first order of business is to know yourself, to understand your true relationship to plan. This is a two-fold process:

1)   Look closely at what you already do. How you do anything, you’ve heard it said (by Buddha, I believe), is how you do everything. So start with how you grocery shop. Or how and when you do the dishes. Rhythm? Resistance? Routine or ranting? It all matters, all counts as the information you are mining.

2)   Accept what you do. Creative and intelligent people (and you are both) much prefer imagining themselves more efficient, more focused, clearer, than they do accepting the truth of how they operate. We spend inordinate amounts of energy trying hard to be what we are not. Shore up that energy because, post-self-acceptance, you can use it to support and fuel your efforts in your natural direction and get a lot further than you do struggling to reinvent yourself.

The second order of business, then, is to support what you already do in order to make it high functioning. My sister and I call this the Coatrack Approach.

In a book called Organizing from the Inside Out, about getting your physical space in order, author and organizer Julia Morgenstern urges people to support what they are already doing in their homes or offices. I’ve told this story so many times, it’s morphed, as folktales and myths do, into something perhaps different from her original telling, so if you want Morgenstern’s advice, get the book. It’s great. I’m going to tell the coatrack story my way and use it to get your creativity plan into action, okay?

So let’s say you come home each day and drop your coat, briefcase, and scarf on the floor by the door. You’re tired, it’s easy, it’s habit, but it creates a mess, and you want a clear floor. Most people take the approach of trying to train themselves to become the people who walk down the hall, open the closet, hang up the coat and scarf, put the briefcase into the home office. For a few days, the focus on this new self and the enthusiasm for the results may cause you to carry out the new actions, but sooner than later, you will come home tired, fed up with training yourself into someone new, and you will drop your things at the front door again. You know it’s true.

What Morgenstern suggests for home organizing in this case is simple: put a coatrack or a shelf right where you drop those items. Now you don’t have to change; you do what you’ve always done, but you’ve created a system to support what you do. No new self, but no mess.

It’s so much easier to write a book, compose a song, paint a picture, finish a report than it is to become a new person. Why set ourselves up to fail?

So once you’ve noticed what you do (step one) and accepted it (step two), the third step is to put those coatracks (supports) into place—the place you already are. Make what you actually do more efficient.

Finally (step four), do it sooner. Wish you hadn’t written five different versions of that story before you found the right one? Don’t get stuck in your head, waiting for the right version to appear before you put pen to paper. Instead, get started on those five drafts. Flail around a lot before you find the subject for your next series of paintings? Start flailing! Work flailing into your plan.

Coatracks?

• A commitment to write the five versions; number them.
• Notebooks in your car for when you get an idea.
• Someone to read aloud to so you get out of your head.
• An effort to write badly (yes, try), just to get something on the page.

Look closely at what else you did during that inefficient time of the five drafts. Did you lose one, write a new one, then find the first but love the second one more? Coatrack: write without looking back. “Lose” each subsequent draft? Coatrack: create a “lost drafts” folder. What else? You got distracted for a while with a job hunt, and when you went back to the story, you couldn’t even believe you’d written it, and that fresh perspective fueled you. Okay, coatracks: put it aside. Work on something else. Give it the space to gain perspective. Did you reward yourself, with treats or readers or items to cross off on a list or postings about your progress on social media? Coatracks: Use these rewards to motivate yourself again. On it goes: take your foibles and make them strategies.

Me? I make a plan for a book I’m going to write. I have seven steps, cause-and-effect lists, character studies and webs. Within that structure, I can relax, invent, play. It’s a coatrack for me. It might constrain you. So go back through the steps:

1)   Notice what you already do.

2)   Accept it.

3)   Support it in concrete ways.

4)   Start now!

You’ll be amazed what you can accomplish when you stop trying to become a different person and work hard at being yourself.

Story Makers Show:

This week’s podcast features Heather Boerner, freelance journalist and author of non-fiction “long piece” Positively Negative, an investigation into the changing story of mixed-status HIV heterosexual couples seeking to become pregnant. Heather gave us wonderful insights into the world of pitching for a living and the constraints and thrills of telling true-life stories.

Check it out at http://StoryMakersShow.com or on iTunes or Stitcher!