Weeding Your Creative Garden
Image from Billy Cox and Unsplash
The greatest thing to come out of pandemic is my renewed love of an open calendar. Even now that some version of ‘normal’ is restored my son and I feel no guilt about saying No to things. I don’t even make up excuses, I just say “No thanks. We just want time to be free.” Surprisingly, most people get it.
It’s that mentality that gave me peace of mind when I decided to put Words Unbound on hiatus and go on a social media diet for a couple of months. By mid-summer, whenever I went into the creative garden in my mind the sun had become so blocked out by dark clouds of deadlines, commitments, worries, and lists that nothing would grow. The only solution was to clear my mental calendar. I focused on the essentials, dealt with some life issues, finished my second novel, and enjoyed some guilt-free time to simply enjoy the summer.
“Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
It sounds easy, but it was not. Being a writer today is no longer simply about slaving away at your keyboard in a quiet room. Well, it is about that, but it's also about having a social media presence, building up your writing credentials, networking, planning book events, having a marketing strategy, and a million other intangibles that help solidify your voice and identity and make sure readers can find your work. If you read about the business of writing online, you will always walk away feeling you are never doing enough to succeed.
The truth is if you try to cultivate all those things all the time with all your energy you will only end up suffocating the very creativity you love. Have compassion for yourself and your muse. If you need a break, the writing and the readers will be there when you get back. Go. Live life, instead of just tweeting about it. Give yourself permission to pull out the weeds for a few weeks . . . or forever.
When you come back you will bring the sunshine with you and then you’ll see how fast things grow.
Image from Sergey Shmidt on Unsplash
