The Bloom — creativity

When I was a kid, more than one teacher said I was a daydreamer. They didn’t mean it as a compliment. It was their way of accusing me of lacking focus and having a wandering mind. And I did—it’s always been a little too easy for my thoughts to take off on a little meandering head trip of their own no matter what’s going on around me. I spent years worrying about it, convinced that I was a little too spacey for my own good and that I needed to really focus on focusing or there’d be trouble. After all,...

It’s hard to be creative. I don’t mean that some of us aren’t because absolutely all of us are. I mean it’s hard to find the time to really open up to that side of ourselves and see where imagination can take us. For that, I need room to stretch out in a place without clocks and phones and all their demands. And most days, I just don’t have it, which is not okay with me.  I believe we should shoot for personal creativity in little ways throughout the day as a way to build a creative life when that life...

I am not a morning person. I am a creature of the night. When the sun goes down I wake up. Which is great except that when the sun comes up, I just can’t and conflict ensues—between me and my alarm, me and my job, me and the world. It’s hardly on purpose. I’m reading or writing away, deep into a Netflix run, zoned out on a new project, and suddenly it’s 3:00 am. Or worse. How’d that happen? I have no idea. But there I am. Facing another much-too-brightly lit morning coma which I’ll slog through like it was...

I’ve been focusing on my writing. I have it in my head to see if there’s maybe a novel in there somewhere, so my laptop and I have become one as we wait to see if anything worth anything comes out. So far that’s mostly meant staring at a blank page. Except for those moments where I’m deleting the horrible few and far between paragraphs I actually manage to write. It’s pretty frustrating. I’m blazing a trail straight to failure as fast as I can. But I think that’s the trick. Last week I found a book called Art &...