I’ve been wanting to try my hand at some form of art lately, that’s what started this whole thing. If you have been reading this blog for at least a week, you know that I believe we all battle what I call the “Inner Judge”. This Judge is the reason we know we’ll fail before we even start, he exists to stop our creativity. When you’re facing this judge, the trick is to put the battle outside of his normal turf. How do you do that? You set up a Temporary Failure Environment. It’s amazing what mental blocks are removed when you make it clear to yourself and the Judge that everything is temporary. A page in a sketchbook is more intimidating than a loose page from the same sketchbook. Why? Because our minds see the page in the sketchbook as something permanent while the loose page is not.

Once that loose page is in front of you, it’s simply a matter of accepting that it can be trash at a moments notice. That piece of paper is at your mercy, you either keep it or you destroy it, nothing can stop you. You are free to fail in this environment and it’s completely temporary, there will be no sign of your failure unless you choose to keep it.

Failure is always talked about in the negative but as with anything, it’s not that black and white. When you’re so afraid of failure that you are unable to perform a creative task, you need to introduce failure on purpose. Once you’ve faced failure, it’s no longer such an intimidating foe. Your Inner Judge has very little he or she can say when you make it clear that failure IS an option. Naturally we don’t want to fail forever but the first step to beating the Inner Judge is embracing the failure that has kept your success at bay. Once you have done that, the hard part is past.

I feel this can be applied to writing as well as it’s quite similar to some writer’s block tricks that I’ve read. It’s a little different environment when you’re trying to work through a writers block or having problems with character development, but I still contend that there is some form of Inner Judge being applied that can be defeated if you take him to task outside of his normal environment. Put yourself in a Temporary Failure Environment and open yourself to failure. I have a feeling that if you drop your guard and embrace the impending failure, you will work your way through the blockage. The trick is always to move the fight onto turf where the Judge has no power.

Now… get out there and fail! And then start enjoying your success.

There are people who don’t fear this man, he has never shown his face to begin with. There are people who have faced this man and beat him, their lives now free from his interruptions. There are people who have faced this man, fought and beat him, only to have him remain. And there are those, like me, who have yet to face him but can feel his hot breath on our necks every day.

When I stand on the edge of a bright white empty landscape, writing utensil in hand, he is there. Somewhere behind me – I can feel his presence – he sits upon his black steed waiting to charge forward and gut what little belief I have in myself and what I’m attempting to do. He is a dark shadow in my mind, an ever present observer who will stop at nothing to make me feel inadequate and unqualified for whatever task I set out to perform.

Do you feel him behind you? The Judge stands behind me and I’ve yet to turn to face him. I am procrastinating, dreading the show down, putting off any necessary confrontation for tomorrow. Today I will say to myself “I need to pick up this pencil and draw something, anything!” and yet I’ll push it off with other excuses. I’ll watch TV, I’ll spend an hour on Twitter, I’ll read blogs,  I’ll suddenly remember that I need to pay some bills, anything to keep the standoff for another day.

I need to turn and face him, I need to lift my chin high and stare into his cold dark eyes and tell him where to go. This paper is mine, this pen is mine, what I create is for me and me alone. He need not interject his fear, doubt, loathing, and despair into my work, this isn’t for him, this is for me. I am the one in charge here, he lives in MY head. I am the master of this mind, he is simply an unwanted inhabitant who must be taught his place.

He doesn’t like these words, I can feel that. The Judge doesn’t want to be faced, he doesn’t want to be banished from my mind to leave me to my creative wishes. He wants to be in charge and the audacity that I would face him can be enough to send him on his way, back deep into the recesses of my mind to spend his days in a cave, waiting for weaker times. He’ll be back, he always comes back, but after you defeat him once, the power lies on your side and he knows it.

Don’t tell him, but I’m about to turn and shove a sword into his belly. For me, it will simply take the first stroke of this pencil to my sketchbook and the fight will begin. I do not intend to lose.

Here’s something I’d like to find an answer to: how to balance real life demands with our online demands and our creative demands. My life isn’t particularly filled with activities yet I spend 2 hours a day on the road travelling to/from work, 8.5 hours at work, then come home to a Fiance who wants to spend time with me, not to mention the preparation of dinner when I get home at 7pm. Toss in the draw of Twitter and checking out all the links that everyone shared throughout the day, and of course catching up on other computer activities like paying bills and stuff. Once you get all of that out of the way, when do you have time to do anything creative?

I’m writing this Sunday night. I like to write my blog posts as soon as the inspiration hits and then I schedule them. I spent all day Saturday out at a yearly gathering I throw for my car website and didn’t have a lot of time or energy to spend by the time I got home. I guess spending your day from 7:30am to 8pm on your feet running around and inhaling smoke from a bbq grill will do that to you. Needless to say, I had no interest in doing anything creative other than making a mental note to journal about the gathering so I’d have some solid notes for next year.

Now here it is, 11:30pm on Sunday night, I need to go to bed but I still haven’t journaled about Saturday. I came down to my office to do just that but instead this inspiration hit me and I sat down to type it out, then of course Twitter called and I was off checking links for the next 30 minutes. I still have to sit down to write and if I’m lucky, I’ll maybe get a page into it before I get tired and want to go to bed. I’m sure you’re thinking I could have started earlier and I agree, but I spent the day relaxing with the Fiance and then this NCIS marathon came on…

I wish I had an answer on how to cram all this into one day but I can’t. I’m starting to think the best thing to do is just ignore technology (very hard) and forge on with the “real” things in life. Granted, that’s not the real answer but there sure are a lot of devices in our lives that now compete for our time, be it creative or “real” life. I’m probably not the only one who falls victim to the technology bug.

I’m positive technology is doing us equal harm as good.

Besides my Rhodia hunt, I was there for another purpose. I decided that I was going to buy a sketchbook and some pencils or charcoal and then force myself to draw. If you’ve read my blog much, you know that I’m currently struggling to open the creative side of my brain which seems to have been walled off in recent years. I can’t seem to bring myself to doodle in my journals, so I purchased a 9×12 sketch pad with perforated pages so I have the freedom to sit down, sketch something, and always have the option to throw it away with nary a trace of it having existed. I also grabbed a 12 pack of Prismacolor pencils to draw with.

The Blick store in Dearborn is a tiny little place but the amount of artist materials on display is quite frankly overwhelming. I wandered down almost every aisle in awe at the sheer number of options an artist might have. Standing in the pencil aisle, I had to wonder how anyone could keep track of what pencil they need or want. I have a new found respect for anyone who has a good art supply collection as it seems like it might be a bit of work to amass.

I also picked up a 3 pack of Writersblok notebooks but upon arriving home, I see that Notebook Stories already reviewed them and found their paper to be very thin. Oh well, those can go in the drawer of unused notebooks for a later day.

Now, I must try to break in the new sketchbook.

To me, a journal has always been a continuous flow of text. Regardless of my age, that’s what my mind pictured when I heard the word “journal”. A 14 yr old girl sitting in her room writing in her journal/diary? In my mind I saw that to mean sentence after sentence of how she’s in love with (insert kid at school here) and nothing more. Someone of a bit more experience in the world who journals? I figured they must be writing about their day or taking notes on ideas they have floating in their head. A journal held a massive amount of words and nothing more.

About 2 years ago I discovered fountain pens and was suddenly plunged into a world of creative folk who used their pens for more than just scribbling notes on a 79 cent notebook. These are the people I always imagined would use a journal. I imagined them wielding a fountain pen and writing their innermost secrets on creamy ivory pages of their expensive leather bound journal. They spent their time chronicling their every move so they’d be able to look back on it in years to come and see the a portrait of their mind at the time, frozen in place on paper.

Then I started noticing people who weren’t using their journals as a boring line by line record of their life, they were writing poems, doodling, drawing, and painting.  Everything on their pages reflected something, whether it be a moment in their life or a picture in their head, they were journaling in a way completely foreign to me. I myself stayed locked in the line by line idea of the journal and, try as I might, could never get away from it.

I simply must experience this form of journaling. If you were to sit down and read my current notebook/journal, you would see a progression over 2 years (yes, one notebook in 2 years.. sad isn’t it?) where I fill the pages with sentences and paragraphs don’t deviate from that style. Then you’ll see a page from last week where I filled a page with nothing but random thoughts. It sounds simple yet it was oddly invigorating. I was breaking the “rules” of journaling in my mind and it was a whole lot of fun. I can’t seem to switch myself over to that method yet, but I’m trying.

I’d like my journals to be a collection of my current mood, feelings, pictures in my head,  etc..  I don’t want only sentences,  I want something visual that does more than bore you to death with poor grammar and spelling. I want my journal to be full of spontaneity and feeling, and one day I’d like to be able to sit down with my journal and doodle on it. I don’t know why that’s so hard to do, perhaps I fear the finality of ink on paper and not being able to correct the thing I’ve written or drawn. It’s as if my mind has set up a fence at the edge of boring journal entries and demanded I not cross it for fear of failure.

But what can I fail at? It’s my journal, it’s my paper, it’s by my hand. There should be no fear involved here, it should be organic and free, it should flow from my brain uninhibited by these crazy thoughts of failure. If you don’t want someone to see it, lock it up. If you’re afraid of what might come out, perhaps you shouldn’t worry until that happens and just let your brain go free!

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go try to climb this wall my mind has put in my way. See you on the other side!

Any suggestions on how to make this transition would be greatly appreciated!

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I seem to mainly whine about how I can’t find my muse and I’m a lousy creative person and I can’t do anything. Let me establish some proof.

Last night I spent all night fiddling around on Twitter and pen websites instead of doing anything constructive. In the back of  my head, I wanted to pick up my journal which I haven’t used in 7 months. But that’s sort of a daunting task for me and I think it’s because I feel pressure to be great.  How can one be great in their own journal? It’s just supposed to be MY thoughts and I can’t be wrong if I’m writing things that are in my head… right? Who feels pressure to perform greatness in a journal?

Finally I forced myself to turn away from the computer and grab my journal. I selected my Pelikan M200 filled with MB British Racing Green, put nib to paper,  and waited to see what happened. What came out of me was this odd list of things I observed about my behavior prior to picking up my pen. It was kind of refreshing because my journaling has always been very methodical; I sit down, write out several correctly formatted paragraphs, and put the journal away. This entry had nothing in common with my previous entries, it felt spontaneous and  very different.

Then I sat down with another notebook, this one is an idea book where I’m hashing out ideas for projects or just random thoughts about things. I wanted to perform a very simple task: draw a very simple registration screen for a website I’m fiddling with. It consisted of maybe 5 rectangles and yet I balked at the job. I sat there staring at the blank page with my Sharpie pen in hand and wondering where to start.

Where to start? Draw a frickin rectangle you dope!

Eventually I managed to scrawl out a very simplistic mockup that should have never even given me pause at all. Once it was done, I felt sheepish. It took that much energy to draw a few rectangles in a notebook? Why am I so crazy?

I think at some point I got the idea in my head that things on a notebook page need to be perfect, even if it’s just something I’m using for ideas. I’m a perfectionist with everything I do, yet I’m not capable of being perfect. See the conundrum there? I can’t be perfect because I’m not an artist, yet I won’t try unless it’s perfect, even when it’s supposed to be a rough sketch. There has to be a term to describe this level of insanity.

This week I think I’m going to force myself to doodle. Can you believe I won’t even doodle because I fear it won’t turn out right? That’s right, I won’t doodle because it might look stupid. Someone smack me in the head please.

Last night I was perusing my Twitter account and found an interesting article linked by @richardink. His tweet pointed me to a blog entitled “Write to done” which was new to me but now resides in my bookmarks of good blogs to read when I have time. In an article entitled “Are you a Writer? Really?“, Mary Jaksch touches on the fear of proclaiming ones self a writer.

The article’s message bounced around in my head all day. Am I a writer because I’ve had a few short lived blogs? Am I a writer because I scribble random thoughts into a notebook? Do my incredibly spotty journal entries make me a writer? What about the handful of short stories (for the lack of a better term) or that unfinished zombie themed novella I started writing last year? Does any of this make me a writer?

My thoughts seem to echo hers, she actually has a book published and still can’t consider herself a writer. In my case, I know I’m writing something but I don’t feel like I write.

I’ve had this fantasy of being a writer for a very long time. Despite this rather ambitious dream, I can rarely bring myself to actually sit down and write. Blog posts? Easy. Author something of substance like a short story or novella? Incredibly hard. My brain insists that a writer actually has to author something “real” like a book or be employed at a magazine or newspaper. Surely my pitifully small lifetime word count can’t make me a writer… can it? According to Mary, it sure does.

So if you write something, anything, do what I’m going to do. Find a mirror, stare into it, say “I’m a writer” and see if, with enough repetition, you start to believe it.

I can remember a time when I was very into photography. I never really produced anything that amazed me but I was experiencing creativity at some level. I remember looking at objects and trying to find the best way to convey it to my viewers. As with everything I had the flawed underlying belief that my level of progression came from the quality of the tool I used. When my hard earned $$ went into good equipment and the output didn’t increase accordingly, I bailed out of the hobby. I still sort of regret that.

I also remember being consumed by music, I had a palpable hunger for new music. I loved going to concerts, I was pumped by new albums, I basked in the joy of a new band. I became obsessed with Coheed and Cambria, they literally swept me off my feet when I started to listen to them. Such talent, not just in the instruments, but the lyrics; an amazing combination of darkness, evil, melody, and yet somehow poppy. Coheed took me away to a place I had never been taken by a band before. I suddenly understood why people got band tattoos, and I have their Keywork symbol inked between my shoulder blades to prove it. I literally hung on every word that Claudio wrote, I felt every beat of Josh’s drum, my heart quivered with the thump of Mike’s bass, my brain screamed with every riff that Travis laid down, every nuance of their music spoke to me. Where did that go? I still love them more than any other band I’ve ever heard so I can assume it’s not all gone, but it’s just a shadow of what it used to be.

Maybe that doesn’t technically have anything to do with creativity, but I think it does. The brain needs outside stimulation to be creative but mine sits numb these days regardless of what I throw at it.

Something inside of me wants to be creative, I know this. I love notebooks and paper, I have 2 drawers in my desk that are full of empty notebooks that I bought when the paper spoke to me. I have a ton of different pens and a rainbow of ink, yet when I’m faced with the blank page, I can’t come up with anything. Is it fear? Am I forcing something that doesn’t exist? Surely I’m not attracted to the blank page for naught?

So how do you spark creativity? Give me some ideas on how to stoke the tiny little embers smoldering inside my brain. At this point, I’m willing to try anything.

You know earlier when I said “I don’t know why it happened”? Uhm… I can probably thank the mixture of rum and faux-Dew flowing through my veins. I’d rather not, but I’m thinking that this is probably the source of my inspiration. Like Poe, Faulkner, and Hemingway, I seem to gain mental strength from the bottle. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I have a wireframe on my white board that wasn’t there earlier so I’m not complaining.

Yes, this is a basic principle of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” program but I don’t follow that. I’m so unorganized that I doubt I could follow his system for an entire day. However, I can vouch whole heartedly on the benefits of getting things out of your mind and onto paper. It doesn’t matter if you plan on acting on them or if they’re just crazy ideas, the brain likes to hold on to things unless it knows they won’t be lost. What better way to empty out your brain’s current focus than by putting it on paper where you can find it again.

Once you’ve got your ideas on paper, your brain is free to think about other aspects of that same idea, expound on it, or just move on to the next thing. That’s sort of what I do with this blog; this morning I had this idea of this very post and if I hadn’t come straight to work and typed it out, I would have been dwelling on it for hours. Now my brain is free to focus on work which is a bit more important at this moment.

Give it a try, most of us have a notebook and pen at our disposal all the time and if not, you can probably spend $2 and have all the necessary equipment needed to start your mind on the path of freedom to work with its ideas.