Blog - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant

May 29, 2013

You Were Born to Create

Calligraphy Art:

You were born to create!

Media:

Watercolor, colored pencil, graphite pencil, pastel, steel pointed pen on paper

Dimensions:

4 9/16″ x 5 7/16″

Creation Notes:

I spent too much of my life thinking only “special” people got to create, that other people were the creative ones, not me. It makes me so sad to think of all the years I walked around starved for creative expression, not knowing why I was so miserable.

The truth, is we are ALL creative, each and every one of us. The truth is, you were put on this planet to express the unique expression inside of you, and the rest of us will miss out if you keep it locked inside. The truth is, once you turn on those rust creative taps, your creativity will start to flow, your heart will open, and your world will change.

You were born to create.

In the Collection of:

The artist (that’s me!)

Want an original ArtSpark for your own collection? Watch my Facebook page, because I periodically auction off my ArtSparks there.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

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May 20, 2013

The Truth Behind “I’m Not Creative”

“Oh, I’m not creative,” she said. “I can’t even draw a stick figure right.”

We were chatting at a surprise party, waiting around for the birthday girl to appear. She’d asked me what I’d been up to since we first met — at another party for the same mutual friend five years previous.

There was a lot to catch her up on: starting Living A Creative Life in 2010, co-teaching a creativity workshop in Istanbul last October, leading a creativity retreat this coming weekend, teaching a six-month program in June… It really brought it home that my life has gotten a whole lot more big, bold, and creative in the past five years!

That was what prompted her “I’m not creative” pronouncement.

I smiled. “Everyone’s creative,” I said. And, “I’m not particularly good at drawing, either.” Then, “What have you been up to since we last met?”

She’d been laid off from her job doing legal billing, and was having a rough time finding other employment. “They say the economy’s getting better,” she said, “but I don’t believe it.”

I nodded. Because whether or not what “they” say is accurate, the truth is, if you’re unemployed, it doesn’t matter what the national unemployment rate is; for you it’s 100%.

She’s resilient, though. She’s using her unemployment as an opportunity to do things she loves: volunteering at the Humane Society, baking (she loves baking bread!), horticulture (she has a magical green thumb!), and lapidary work (her grandmother did lapidary as a hobby, and bequeathed her a large collection of stones and settings). She’s even found a lapidary club with a workshop just a half hour drive from her home, and she’s been taking classes.

Who knows? Maybe one of these things will somehow turn into a career path. She doesn’t know yet, but she knows she’s not going back to what she did before. Life is too short to spend eight hours a day doing something you hate.

I nodded and smiled again. A beamier smile this time.

“Not creative, you say? My foot.”

As I said before, everyone’s creative. Since when did “creative” become conflated with “can draw representationally”? Why is it that we all use the ability to draw in a “realistic” fashion as our yardstick for creative ability?

What about the writers, photographers, potters, weavers, abstract painters, wood carvers, fashion designers, quilters, book artists, film makers, poets (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.) who create in ways that have nothing to do with drawing “realistic” representational images?

Somewhere in school we learn to buy into this story, that “creative” equals “can draw representationally,” and even very clear evidence to the contrary (rock stars, novelists, movie directors, comedians, all up in our face in the media — Steve Jobs, for god’s sake!) doesn’t seem to loosen our hold.

I think of the ten-year-old son of my mom’s cousin who said he “hates art” in school. “Why?” I asked. “Because I can’t draw.”

And yet who knows, maybe he codes video games or writes slam poetry or carves ninja swords out of popsicle sticks like nobody’s business.

Even those of us who create in a visual realm are not immune.

People like me, whose primary skill is not representational drawing, feel inadequate and “not artistic.”

And ironically, those whose skill is representational drawing often feel inadequate and “not artistic” too, hard as it is for the rest of us to believe. “Sure, I can draw what I see, but I’m only a human copy machine,” those skilled drafters lament, “I’m not an artist.”

How about we all agree to start to notice and appreciate the unique gifts and propensities we have, rather than apologizing for the ones we don’t?

You have a green thumb, are exploring making jewelry, and can bake bread from scratch, making your own yeast? Damn, girl, that’s amazing! If that’s not creative, I don’t know what is!

Merriam-Webster’s number one definition for creative is this:

: marked by the ability or power to create : given to creating

And if you click on the word “create,” you’ll find this definition:

: to bring into existence

Hello! Do you hear that? When there was nothing, and now, through your efforts, there’s a garden, or a loaf of bread, or a necklace, that is your creativity being expressed.

The truth behind “I’m not creative” is that it’s a lie. A story we tell ourselves. A self-installed glass ceiling.

Time to shatter it, baby.

PS – Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Image by gedankenstuecke at Flickr

May 12, 2013

ChildFree By Choice On Mother’s Day

If you’re a mom, Happy Mother’s Day!

If you’re not a mom, Happy Day for Giving Thanks for Your Mom (or Whoever Raised You)!

I’m so grateful to have my mom a short drive away, and I’m grateful for the love and support and encouragement she’s given me my whole life. I know I’m lucky — not everyone got that kind of love.

Moms like that rock!

Me, I’m childfree by choice.

Let me assure you, before you jump to conclusions, that childfree by choice doesn’t mean child-disliking. I absolutely adore kids (did you know I taught nursery school and was a nanny in my 20s?), but I’m “mom” only to a fluffy diva of a kitty, who keeps me sane when she’s not driving me crazy.

ChildFree by Choice Isn’t Always an Easy Choice

I love my life, and would not trade it, but getting to a peaceful resolution to the question of whether or not to have children was not an easy journey. A journey intimately tied to my journey toward a Big, Bold, Creative Life.

Some of my friends knew from early on that they didn’t want kids. Childfree by choice from birth. I envy them.

For me it was a painful struggle for a long time, and although I finally got to clarity and peace and closure with my ultimate decision a number of years ago, that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes get wistful.

I also have friends who are childfree not by choice, for whom Mother’s Day must pack a mighty wallop. Even for those of us who are childfree by choice, though, Mother’s Day can tug at you…

Leaving a Legacy

Someone very intuitive recently asked me something about my children, and when I said I didn’t have any, she paused a moment, then nodded and said,

“Ah, yes, your work is your children.”

It was a very perceptive way to put it. In fact, I sometimes wonder if part of the reason I’m so passionate about making a difference is that my work is my way of leaving a legacy.

Would I be so driven to build Living A Creative Life if I had children?

Of course there’s no way of knowing, but I often wonder what my life would be like if I’d had kids.

Every Choice Spawns a Sister Life

I grew up assuming I’d be a mom

It was a given until I was in my 30s and newly divorced, because I love kids, and well, why wouldn’t I be a mom?

But life, as John Lennon put it, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

My life has turned out wildly different from the way I imagined it would be, in many more ways than ultimately being childfree by choice. It’s richer, deeper, definitely bigger, bolder and more creative than I even knew was possible.

I have an awesome life!

And yet I do sometimes think about the other life, the “sister life” that mine would be now, had I stepped through different doors and made different choices than I did. Had I landed at this age with a kid or two in tow (or maybe in college!), in addition to a fluffy diva kitty.

The Ghost Ship that Didn’t Carry Us

I recently read a wonderful book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed, a compilation of luscious, gut-wrenching, compassionate, and soul-baring letters from an online advice column. (Seriously, read it! I couldn’t put it down!)

One of the letters Strayed (as the anonymous Dear Sugar) wrote, was to a man in his early 40s, who was wrestling with the question of whether to have a child or not.

He asked many of the same questions I asked myself, as I wrestled with the “to kid or not to kid?” question for several years in my 30s.

Strayed refers to the “sister life” we didn’t choose as “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” It’s neither better, nor worse, just different.

Every choice you make in life means an infinite number of other choices that you didn’t make.

I choose to spend this moment writing a newsletter to you, which means I am not using this moment to paint, or check email, or walk by the San Francisco Bay with MB, or call my mom, or play my ukulele, or…

Had I chosen to be a mom, there is no question that I would have spent my time and energy very, very differently than I have over the past couple of decades.

None of these choices is inherently better than any other, but they are all different, and they are (with few exceptions) mutually exclusive. (Yes, I could call my mom while walking by the Bay with MB, for example, but it would make that walk a totally different experience.)

As Strayed puts it at the end of her gorgeous Dear Sugar letter,

“I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

I’m saluting now.

PS – Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

May 7, 2013

Fewer Prodigies, More Grandmothers, Please!

A street festival took over my town’s downtown this weekend. I met up with a friend yesterday afternoon to wander around and soak up the sights.

We strolled past booths of paintings, exquisitely crafted wooden toys, jewelry, gourmet olive oils, hammock chairs — the usual fare. We stopped for a full ten minutes to watch kids (and the occasional adult) tumble around in human hamster balls inside an enormous, inflatable pool of water.

And of course there was live music — the requisite, loud, rock & roll cover band on the main stage, plus smaller groups scattered every block or so.

We noticed a crowd gathered at one corner where a band was cranking out a blend of Caribbean-influenced blues, jazz, soul and funk. The music was good, but when we got close enough to see through the mass of people it became clear that it wasn’t just the music that had attracted their attention.

It was also the fact that there was a six-year-old at the drums, banging away quite expertly.

The six-year-old, whose name is Eagan, has been playing since he was three. He clearly has a gift, and a passion for the instrument, and crowd could not get enough.

I was as fascinated as the rest. One simply doesn’t expect a six-year-old to have these kind of music chops. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

Oh, how we love our prodigies!

In fact, sometimes it seems like the very young are the only ones that we (as a culture) love.

The Problem with Prodigies…

When this kid grows up, when he gets into his 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, should he maintain his passion for the drums (which I hope he does!), he’ll find it harder and harder to capture the attention of a wandering crowd. For his sake, I hope he keeps his focus on his passion for his instrument, rather than the attention he’s getting now, for being a prodigy. Otherwise it could do a number on his head.

Any woman growing up in Western culture understands this concept on a visceral level. The older we get, the more “invisible” we become, as attention stays firmly focused on the young and firmly toned.

I pretty much summed it up in the bridge of my song, The Last Five Pounds (jump to 39 seconds in to go straight to the bridge):

If your sense of your own value is tied to your youth, what happens when that youth is gone?

Nobody really cares about another drummer. But show us a six-year-old drummer and we ooh and ahh. It’s not really his musical chops, it’s the fact that he has musical chops at six that grabs our attention.

I’m as googly-eyed over prodigious youthful skill as anyone else — face it, it’s just plain fascinating! — but there’s also something about it that bugs me. Prodigies fascinate me, but they can’t ever really inspire me, because being a young prodigy is not something I can personally aspire to.

In fact, prodigies often have the opposite effect from inspiring us.

The truth is you don’t have to be a “natural,” or a “born genius,” in order to start up a creative pursuit, take on a creative challenge, or even to achieve mastery. Nor do you have to be young. But our cultural obsession with young prodigies has a way of distorting this fact.

I wonder how things might have been different if we paid as much attention to our older folks as we do to our youth.

I’m not saying we should diss the young — every age is a wonderful age to be and should be honored — but how about a little balance?

How about some Grandmother Power?

I think of someone like Gudrun Zapf von Hesse, whose name you may never have heard, but whose work might very well touch your life on a daily basis.

Zapf von Hesse is calligrapher, teacher, lettering artist, and bookbinder. She’s also the designer of several fonts, three of which (Alcuin, Christiana, Colombine) she designed in her 70s, and the most recent of which (Diotima Classic) she created at 90.

Now that’s the kind of role model I want more of in my own life! A woman creating amazing work well into her “grandmother years.”

My mom’s another model of Grandmother Power, picking up the harp in her 50s. That inspired my dad to pick up the flute, and now, in their 70s, they perform together all over the San Francisco Peninsula.

Take that, oh gremlin that tells me “Your only value is in your youth and appearance!”

For more stories of inspiring grandmothers, check out Tara Mohr’s Grandmother Power blogging campaign this week. While you’re there, sign up to share your own!

Let’s bring a little more balance to our youth-obsessed culture, please! I’m sure my head will always be turned by young prodigies, but I want more stories of older women making amazing things happen, older women creating, older women changing the world.

After all, I’m never going to be six again, but I sure hope to be an old woman someday! And I hope that the work I contribute to the world keeps evolving and blossoming as I grow older.

Will I turn heads in my (child-free) “grandmother years”? Probably not. But I hope I’ll open some hearts, which feels a lot more important in the long run.

PS – Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Image source: inspirefirst.com via BlickeDeeler Werbeagentur on Pinterest

May 3, 2013

How to Get Out of a Creative Rut

Have you ever been in a creative rut? (Yeah, who hasn’t, right?)

I’m in a bit of a rut right now. Watch the video for my off-the-cuff, “first thoughts” thinking about ruts and how to get out of them. Keep reading for a fuller story…

A couple of years ago I started making art again after a long, resistance-fueled “hiatus.” At first I had no idea what I wanted to create, but in keeping with the intention behind what later became rule number five of my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox (If you don’t know where to start, start anywhere – click to tweet!), I just started.

The first day or two was mighty uncomfortable. I loved the process of making messes with paint and ink, but the outcomes were less than thrilling.

Actually, I hated them.

Thankfully, one of the very first rules I set for myself was what would later become rule number two of my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox: It doesn’t matter whether you like it or hate it; what matters is joy in the process. (Click to tweet this!)

So I focused on playing and having fun, and did my best to let it go when I felt like the outcome was crap.

Just Do It

I figured this period of “cranking out crap” might take awhile, so I settled in for the long haul, but much to my surprise, within just a few days ideas started popping like popcorn. I started actually liking what I was making, and things began to flow.

Suddenly I was in a groove, and it felt great!

I couldn’t wait to start my fifteen minutes making art each day, and often fifteen minutes stretched out into much longer.

From February 1 to December 31, 2011, after over a decade of making almost no art for myself (except once a year at my calligraphy retreat), I made over 150 finished pieces!

In keeping with what was later to become rules number three and four of my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox (Think quantity, not quality, and Think tiny (and daily) – click to tweet!), I intentionally made these pieces tiny. I wanted to keep my investment small, so the fear-of-using-up-expensive-materials gremlin and the fear-of-“ruining”-a-piece-I’d-already-put-hours-of-time-into gremlin wouldn’t make me choke. And I wanted to get away from my usual M.O. of working very meticulously and slowly.

I wanted to be prolific, dammit, and I wanted to learn by cranking out a lot of pieces.

We get better by doing, after all, not by dreaming about doing. (Click to tweet this!)

I called the little pieces I’d made “ArtSparks,” and a couple of months after I started making them, I upped the ante by adding some external accountability. I knew being accountable to others would keep me on track way better than merely being accountable to me, so I started the Not Quite Daily ArtSpark Newsletter, which initially sent out a new ArtSpark every weekday.

It was great. I was more prolific than I’d ever been, and I was learning, growing, feeding my creative spirit, and having fun!

Time to Rotate the Pots

Eventually, though, other passions on my passion pluralite stovetop called out to me, wanting to get off the back burner. I wanted to spend more time writing and making music, and honestly, the time and energy required to scan the ArtSparks, prep the images, and create the newsletters was wearing on me. (I think that may have taken more time than making the art did!)

So I scaled back on ArtSpark issues, taking it from five times a week to two, then one. And eventually, I sent the ArtSpark Newsletter on hiatus.

Honestly, it was a relief not to have yet another deadline hanging over my head. But I was also a bit anxious that, without the external accountability, I wouldn’t make as much art.

I was right. My output went down dramatically. I was gentle with myself, because after all, I was still creating, just in different forms: writing or making music or making videos.

But still, whenever I got to my drafting table to make art, it made me happy. I felt better afterwards. Sometimes I was utterly delighted with what I made, and other times I didn’t particularly like them at all, but I reminded myself that this didn’t matter — what mattered was that I was doing it, and getting joy from that.

A Groove Deepens Into a Rut

Time went on. The periods of not “clocking in” at my drafting table got longer.

Partly I was busy with other stuff, yes. But partly, I realized, I was in a rut.

Actually, I am in a rut. As in right now.

See, what happens when you just start is eventually things start to flow, and you get into a lovely groove. This part feels great! We love grooves!

But when grooves go on for long enough, they can deepen into ruts, without you even realizing what has happened.

A groove is comfortable, but in a slightly uncomfortable way. That’s why it’s exciting and fun! You have a direction, but you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.

There’s still a bit of uncertainty, which keeps you on your toes.

When enough of the uncertainty wears away, when you know most of the answers, when there’s none of the sheen of newness anymore, it loses its excitement. You might hate to admit it, but you get kind of bored.

Rut City, baby.

Yep, I do hate to admit it, but that’s where I am right now.

The Key to Climbing Out

The good news is that getting out of a rut is really not that hard. It might be uncomfortable, but heck, we already know that the most important thing you can do to achieve any goal is get comfortable with discomfort! (Click to tweet this!)

The key to getting out of a rut is basically the same as the key to getting past a block: do something.

Tired of making the same old art/writing/music/whatever? So try something new!

Try a new medium. Try a new prompt. Try painting with your other hand. It really doesn’t matter — just do something.

You don’t get out of a rut or past a block by thinking about it. You’ve got to take action. (Click to tweet this!)

Really, that’s it.

I won’t get out of my rut by intellectualizing. I won’t even get out of my rut by writing to you about it. I’ll get out of my rut by planting my sweet self over at my drafting table and trying stuff.

I never know what I’ll create when I sit down at my drafting table, but for a couple of years I’ve had a bit of a rough idea — a small, spontaneous work on paper, an ArtSpark (as they’ve been defined up til now). Now I really have no idea what I will create, and that’s really exciting!

A bit scary, to, but with my Creative Sandbox Rules, I know fear’s not going to stop me.

Squee! I’m buzzing with anticipation for my next sandbox session!

I’ll keep you posted!

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Calligraphy Art:

Media:

Dimensions:

Creation Notes:

In the Collection of:

ChildFree by Choice Isn’t Always an Easy Choice

Leaving a Legacy

Every Choice Spawns a Sister Life

The Ghost Ship that Didn’t Carry Us

The Problem with Prodigies…

How about some Grandmother Power?

Just Do It

Time to Rotate the Pots

A Groove Deepens Into a Rut

The Key to Climbing Out

Would You Like Some Cookies?