“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

Pablo Picasso

“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

Paul Valery

How do you measure your creativity? How do you make sure you are being as effective as you can be in expressing your inner creative? If you are anything like me you’ll have projects and ideas all over the place, most of them interweaving and overlapping each other. You may be quite good at juggling your writing, art and music and by the end of the day have something you can share with the world, but have you been effective in your creativity?If you want to improve your effectiveness, these simple tips may help you:

Being a dedicated creative isn’t all fun, frivolity and artistic fecundity – yeah sure. Sometimes you have to deal with disappointment. This can come in a variety of ways, the piece you have spent hours on is actually quite crap, or you pitched for a commission and someone else got the job or you’ve gone for a promotion within the creative department you work and you didn’t get it. How we deal with disappointment can be the difference between later success and continued failure. Here are are a few thoughts to help you overcome and come back fighting.

• Why did you fail?Whether in something you created, or something you have strived for, you need to ask this question.
• What can I do to avoid this in the future? Once the first question is answered you can then list things to do to avoid following the same route.
• Be direct in who you ask. To find out exactly why you didn’t win the pitch or get the job, don’t be afraid to ask direct questions to those who made the decision. Quite simply you need to now why you didn’t succeed and what would you need to do to succeed at the next opportunity.
• Don’t give up.It is all too easy to see yourself as a failure and give up, we can do this in a big camp way or we can wallow in despair. There is nothing wrong with being upset, but we shouldn’t let it control our destiny. Keep going, find out what went wrong and work toward succeeding next time.

So dry your eyes, and go create.

As you may have noticed by the lack of posts I have been a little busy of late and I don’t see any let up in that in the foreseebale future. However, I will be pressing on with things here.

One thing that often happens with creative poeple is that they get engrossed in what they are doing. The focus is total on the creative task at hand. Whilst this is great for that task, the more routine and mundane tasks that life often demands get left to one side. [Please note that I am not suggesting for one moment that !maginality is a mundane task.] It is no wonder that creative poeople can be hard to live with as they focus on what they are doing rather than the relationships they have.

The danger with such a strict focus is burnout. Creatives will seek the to stay in the zone and the more they cling on the more it can damage. It is all too easy to then look for external stimuli to stay in the zone, excess caffeine and even something a little stronger.

What any creative needs to do is make sure they take downtime, this doesn’t mean they can’t be playing with ideas, taking notes and doodleing, but they should take a break. The batteries need recharging. There is more than one masterpiece in us all.

Just a quick note to wish everyone who has entered NaNoWriMo 2007 the best of luck. I too will be attempting to write at least 1,600+ words each day to complete a 50,000 word novel by the end of November.

And for those who don’t know what it is, you can find out by following the link.

The real reason for writer’s block can be found at the very amusing Savage Chickens’ site. All you have to do is follow this link and all will be revealled.

So you have lots of ideas, your creativity has gone into overdrive and you believe you can be a successful writer, and why not.  The next stage, unless you are going to publish yourself (and that is not a bad idea, check out www.lulu.com), is to get your ‘book’ into the wide world. With this in mind I thought I’d share a few tips with you.

1. Research your publisher. It is no good sending your ideas off to any and every publisher on the list. Find a publisher who has published similar books and also, if possible, ask them what their publishing policy is. What books do they publish, just in case you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
2. Grab the publisher’s attention. A plain brown envelope, with a neat resume and outline is very fucntional, but believe me, you need to do a little more in order to get noticed. But remember subtlety works very well too.
3. Send in a synopsis and two chapters. A publisher needs to know how you write, what you write and a little about you (only because they are nosey). Send in a couple of chapters but they don’t need to be the first two, perhaps the best chapters are hidden away within your tome.
4. If you haven’t finished the book, estimate the time it will take and double it. It is highly likely that you’ll miss your estimated deadline and so build in some time. Then when you send it in ahead you’ll be loved and the you’ll know how long it really takes you to write without any added pressure.
5. Write about what you know. It is no good writing about the history of voles if you know nothing about them. So research what you write. There is nothing more annoying to an editor than someone writing about something and getting it all wrong.

And remember, all these tips come from me, a publisher, so get going.

It happens to the best of us (me) and it can strike at any time. We don’t know what causes it to happen (well perhaps someone, somewhere, knows the reason but they are not telling the rest of us) and the resolution is often drastic. I am, of course, talking about a windows fatal error. Windows won’t load, it crashes, it gets stuck in endless loops. You follow all the rescue tutorials, (printed out from work as you now have no access to t’internet at home) use all the rescue disks, (even the installation disk that claims it will either rescue the OS or overwrite any corrupt files) but still no joy. When this happens there is only one thing to do… reinstall. Well this, as you may have guessed, has just happened to me. XP went AWOL and so I had to bite the bullet and say goodbye to a hard drive crammed with… actually a lot of rubbish, which leads to this post.

Having started the process of getting the family PC back in working order there were one or two things that I had to do, or think about, which could help us all in our creative journeys. So hold on tight and let’s take a look.

• Rip it up and start again. Sometime what you have isn’t working, we shouldn’t be afraid to simply let it go and say ‘bye, bye’, however long we have been working on it. If it isn’t working, sometimes it needs to be thrown out.
• Reassess what you have. My PC was full of many programs that I really didn’t use. They had been loaded with the intention of using them ‘someday’. Although diversity is needed within creativity it can sometimes hinder. Too much choice is as damaging as too little. So, do you really need to ‘waste’ time deciding the medium for your creativity?
• Do you really need it. Similar to above but more of a ‘clear your head’ attitude here. I had backed up certain files and folders but not everything. A reinstall would mean that I would lose anything that wasn’t backed up. There were one or two things that I would need to work on again but… there was a lot of junk and clutter that was simply sitting there, gathering dust and clogging the creative cogs.
• If you need it, keep it safe. We all know we should back-up the important pieces of work we do, but how often and how well do we do it? If you are a writer do you have your work in hard and soft copy and in several locations should one be destroyed? If you are a painter where are your canvases kept, are they safe from fire, flood and theft? Of course, we are limited by our resources but we should be as careful as we can be, or afford to be.

Well, I am going back to reinstalling the software that I do need, speak soon.

PS Yes I know I could also do the following:

• Use a different OS
• Not change the file system from FAT 32 to NTFS without reading all the small print
• Stick to pencil and paper

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Here’s the sob story. As can be seen from my previous post I haven’t been too well, in fact, all-in-all, I have been under the weather for about three weeks. Even when I posted the apology I wasn’t fully over the virus. Also, you can see by the lack of posts that I haven’t really been in the ‘zone’, or have I?

I currently have a document with ideas for posts that contains a good thirty or so embryonic concepts. This document is where I turn to in my process, it forms part of my preparation to create content for imaginality. This process has worked fine since the site started, and is, in fact, the underlying thesis of creativity that I propose here. However, that is not to say that you must stick rigidly to a process. The issue I was having was not with the thesis but with how I was applying the process. I was leaving all my creativity, with regard to imaginality, to one process. When I turned to the ideas document I loved them all but was not well enough to sit down and work them up as complete posts. The amount of perspiration I could expend on creativity was very little.

I was still having ideas, and the preparation had, and was, being done, so what could, or should, I have done?

One option would have been to store up the ideas and keep them safe and bubbling away until I was able to give them the effort they deserved. However, some ideas could have been expressed simply and quickly.

Recently I have got involved in Twitter, where you can post up to 160 characters via instant messaging, mobile phone or the web. The creative aspect of Twitter is wonderful, especially with regard to ‘less perspiration’. You are limited in what you can say; you can prepare it, have an inspirational idea but you can’t go beyond the limit of the expression. I have seen similar ideas on both facebook and the new Zooomr iteration, and the net buzz around Twitter is considerable.

So next time you have an idea, think about how it needs to be expressed. Does it need to take ages and a lot of effort, using the best materials and top software, or can it be handed over to the rest of the world in a short, simple and less strenuous manner. Sometimes it may be a good idea to think like Twitter.

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