Projects Morphing
In the eighth episode of the "creative obstacles" series, we examine the idea that the anxiety produced in us when our creative projects shift and change can cause us to flee the encounter. It is in the nature of creating that the project in front of may change countless times as... Read More
Feeling Individual
In the seventh episode of the "creative obstacles" series, we look at the idea that a creative person's sense of individuality is a special sort of challenge. Born individual into a conventional world, a creative person begins to grow oppositional as he fights to retain his indiv... Read More
Minding Your Emotions
In the sixth episode of the "creative obstacles" series, we examine the idea that there is a difference between having emotions and being a slave to your emotions. It is necessary that a creative person have and express her emotions, but that is a very different thing from being ... Read More
Responding Defensively
In the fifth episode of the "creative obstacles" series, we look at how our psychological defenses can get in the way of authentic creating. Why do we deny--to ourselves and to others--that we are having difficulties with our current painting or our current novel, when if we admi... Read More
Chasing Ghosts
This week's show is the fourth in a series called "Overcoming Obstacles to Creating," a series about how our personality can get in the way of our creating. Today, in a show adapted from an essay in my book A Writer's Paris, we look at the negative effects of looking too ardently... Read More
On Being Too Nice
Today's episode is the third in our series about overcoming obstacles to creativity. In today's show I focus on the problem of self-censorship and how too many people, wanting to be "nice," fail to find the internal permission to say, in their life or in their art, what's really ... Read More
Fearing Difficulty
In today's episode on the Joy of Living Creatively, the second in a nine-part series on "creative obstacles," I chat about how writers who take my nonfiction book proposal writing workshops start with such enthusiasm and quickly lose that enthusiasm as the largeness of the task i... Read More
Doubting Process
Creative people start each project hoping to do excellent work. That makes perfect sense; and yet, side by side with that hope and wish, needs to be the deep and real understanding that only a percentage of their output (maybe a large percentage, maybe a modest percentage) will a... Read More