Make Your Creations a Meditation
“Creativity itself doesn’t care at all about results – the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless.” Elizabeth Gilbert
Yesterday during an interview about my writing career I was asked the question: If you had to give someone new to writing one piece of advice, what would that be?
My answer was immediate: Write about what fires you up and fills you with passion, not what you think you ought to write.
I truly believe that we do our best creative work when we come from the heart and we don’t overthink it. And now that my writing career spans 22 years I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the proof is definitely in the pudding.
Whenever I’ve approached my writing from a place of fear and need ie; trying to anticipate what a literary agent or publisher wants because I feel the urgent need to get a book deal, I haven’t done my best work and the process has felt laboured and heavy.
Conversely, whenever I’ve written from the heart about subjects that really matter to me, the words have flowed and those books have ended up getting the best reception – even winning awards.
A great example of this was my first novel for young adults, Dear Dylan, which I wrote after being dropped by my first publisher (after four books for adults). I truly believed I’d never get a traditional book deal again after being dropped so right from the outset I decided to self-publish the book.
It was so freeing to write without the constant nagging fear that I had to keep an agent or publisher happy. And, free from having to overthink things, it felt more as if I was channelling a story that was already fully formed and had just been patiently floating around in the ether, waiting to come through me. It was a truly fun and liberating experience.
The self-published edition of Dear Dylan ended up winning a national book award – beating books from best-selling authors and major publishing houses – and went to auction, with eight different publishers bidding for it. The whole thing was surreal, and beyond my wildest dreams, but I never forgot the vital lesson at the heart of it.
And it was a lesson I had underlined to me on my recent trip to Jamaica (see the previous two instalments of Wonderstruck for more details of how I came to be there).
A few days into our trip my friend and I had the opportunity to go for lunch with some Rastas on their farm in the mountains to learn all about the Rastafarian way of life and how they live off the land.
One of the guys we met was called Patrick and as we talked he sat carving a beautiful and intricate pattern into a calabash shell. For anyone not in the know (and I wasn’t until then) the calabash is a fruit that is grown not just for eating but for making utensils and containers from the dried out rinds.
As I watched Patrick work I asked if he did his carvings as a way of making money. He shrugged and smiled. ‘Sometimes I’ll sell them, if anyone wants to buy one,’ he replied, ‘but mainly I do it as a form of meditation.’
I loved this answer. Shouldn’t all creation be a form of meditation, if we allow ourselves to surrender to the process, to create with the zest and imagination of a child, and to switch off our fearful thoughts?
After I was dropped by my first publisher I made the conscious decision to redefine success in terms that made me happy rather than stressed. This meant no longer measuring success in numerical metrics ie how many readers or sales or pounds or dollars, but measuring it instead in terms of the joy I felt during the creative process.
Sitting in the middle of the Jamaican mountains watching Patrick carving a face into a calabash shell, the peaceful energy he radiated was infectious.
I bought the carving of the face pictured above, and it’s now on my wall back here in the UK as a constant reminder of a beautiful moment and a crucial lesson – to keep pushing away my doubts and fears and to make all of my creations a meditation.
3 tips to help make your creations a mediation…
First of all, when you sit down to create something you need to get in the zone and get out of a place of fear. Tell yourself that it doesn’t matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ your creation is – you can always go back later and improve upon it. But for now, just be in the present moment and let the creativity flow through you.
Remember how you used to create as a child and try to recapture that raw imagination and the unabashed joy of anything being possible.
Have some kind of ritual that prompts you to get into a meditative creative zone. When I sit down to write every morning I always have a cup of strong black coffee and some hardcore 85% cocoa chocolate. By doing this every day the first waft of coffee signals to my body that it’s time to write. Find a ritual that works for you. It could be playing a piece of soothing music, or lighting a scented candle, the trick is in doing it every time.