Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 61
This episode shared quotes and thoughts from a range of creative folks—Einstein and Kahlil Gibran, Anais Ninn and Thomas Aquinas, and many more—and most especially from artists, across a range of topics related to getting creative work accomplished.
Let’s focus here on getting started.
I have always been an admirer of Paul Cezanne. I loved the raw look, the new perspectives it demands, his paintings engage me completely. So I was delighted to learn that my creative process is similar to his. He was clear about his process in letters to other painters: he would start each painting with very little idea about what he was going to paint. He wanted to learn what to paint as he painted it; the painting would reveal to him what it was.
When I have written my novels I have at a minimal or partial understanding of what each book is about and even less about how I will get there and what stories will be told along the way. I just get started, with the next sentence often a surprise.
Picasso wouldn’t start one of his major canvases until he knew exactly how he would finish it. That meant for paintings like Les Demoiselles d Avignon he made nearly 200 small sketches of what he wanted to create and started only once he was certain. “I do not seek. I find.”
As I am preparing to take on my next novel, my most ambitious by far, I find I am drifting into Picasso territory. I have paragraphs and dialogue and ruminations written as I try to picture the whole. As my Mississippi relatives would say “I’m sitting on ready and rocking on go.” I am close to beginning.
What’s your process when you’ve got a creative project in front of you? Are you are a Ready Fire Aim person, just getting started and enjoying the adventure along the way? Or do you deliberate, organize, re-consider, looking for a clear understanding before you begin?
All my books, in their e-reader format, are on sale this month for just .99.
The two novel series ‘The 53rd Parallel’ and ‘Worlds Between’; ‘Anung’s Journey’, a novella birthed in the center of the Ojibwa universe; and ‘Becoming a Creative Genius (again).’
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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