I'm friends with this very creative soul. Her name is Rachelle and she is known to us as
Magpie Girl. Over at her blog she coaches us on whimsy, maintaining art through
chronic illness and finding spirituality that fits. She's pretty great at it. This month is her birthday and as a present to herself she set the ambition goal to tell
30 Stories in 30 Days (a la Ira Glass). She decide to let fellow bloggers ask her questions and she answers them on their blog. (She has a few spots left if you're interested!)
And so on my blog, the thing which most publicly depicts my resistance, she's going to tell us how she meets resistance head on and give us some advise on how to overcome it.
Without further adieu, I present Rachelle...
Q: How do you overcome resistance in your art?
Ironically, I’ve been staring at this blank page for two hours now. I checked Twitter. I renewed my driver’s license. Paid a few bills. But have I written this post? No. No I have not.
Resistance is the artist greatest enemy. Full stop. And it comes from within.
Yeah, it bites.
Here are some tips and techniques for dealing with resistance:
Set Yourself Up
The number-one thing I do to break through resistance is to set myself forced deadlines. My son-adopted-by-affection is a big fan of self-directed education. He was unschooled in high school and spent his first year post-graduation self-educating. That works for some people. But others, like ..ehm...me…need a deadline if anything is ever going to get done. So set yourself a deadline, and make sure others know about it. Sell seats in a class before all the materials are done. Set a hard date that the next project will be available by. Tell someone you are going to write 30Stories in 30Days. Jolie Guillebeau promised 100 Paintings in 100 Days. Julie Powell pledged to cook through Julia Child’s entire French cookbook in a year. Sure, it would be nice if you were more mature and could get it done without someone breathing down your neck. But if deadlines are your thing, you might as well roll with it. Why fight functionality?
Know Your Cycle
At what point in your creative cycles is resistance most likely to strike? Make a note of it. You may not know how to keep resistance from striking. But if you know when it’s most likely to occur, then you can tell yourself “this too shall pass.” Think of it like your period. Sure you feel little nuts for a few days. But you level out eventually. If you aren’t aware of the stages of the creative cycle, or where yours gets all resistance-y, this might help. Set the Timer
Get a kitchen timer and just start working. Put paint on the canvas, write words on a page. It doesn’t have to be a part of your finished product. You just need to get started. I usually set mine for 20 minutes. In 10 minutes I might not be in the groove. But if I set it for 20 and just start working, by the time the bell sounds I’m usually on a roll and don’t want to quit.
Personalize Your Gremlins
Resistance is definitely a gremlin. You might as well name it. (Mine is called Pinkerton.) When resistance raises its annoying little head, follow these tips. Pinkerton would also like to give you this. (He’s being a very good boy now.) Become Pavlov’s Dog
I said this before about getting through administrative tasks, and it also applies to breaking through resistance around making your art. This technique works regardless of your art form. It involves picking a favorite “working song” or set of songs and playing it every time you sit down to work. Eventually you pattern your brain to twig into working as soon as you hear the familiar refrains. I still use a disc of trip hop that a friend made me eight years ago. When resistance is at its strongest, I break out those tunes and the muscle memory of typing takes over. Show up at the Page
Any number of writers will tell you that the key to their success was to show up consistently to the page (or the easel, or the blow torch…you get the idea.) Most of them advocate for showing up at the same time every day. That’s nice if you are a full time artist. But for the rest of us, it’s more catch when catch can. If you can pick just one day/time of the week that is your time to make art, and hit it every week for 10 weeks, you will have gone a long way to establishing a working ritual for yourself. When you pick your time slot, keep functionality in mind. It would be lovely if you could write every morning at 5am, but will that work for you? I spent a lot of time feeling wimpy for the fact that I cannot write before noon. Finally I stopped resisting, planned my day around the fact that I would get the bulk of my work done between 12-3, and went with it. What’s your most functional time? Save some of it for your art if you can.
Read This Book
If you do nothing else for your art, read this: The War of Art by Steve Pressfield. Ignore the unrelentingly male warmonger-y title and just buy it. You art is worth fighting for.
P.s. After two hours of resistance to this post, I wrote the whole thing in three songs. You can do it. Be a resistance fighter.
Rachelle Mee-Chapman, specializes in customized soulcare for spiritual misfits. She works with clients at Magpie Girl to help them find a spirituality that fits; and hosts Flock, an online soulcare community. You can learn more about her creative approach in her free ecourse, Magpie Speak: a new vocabulary for soulcare.
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