Tag Archives | advice to artists

In our Orientation materials we give people just before they get to La Muse we talk about how you have to disconnect in order to get connected.

Today we’re so connected to machines, computers, TVs, phones, email, the Internet, the news, other people on Facebook… we hardly have any time to ourselves as individuals. Our attention is always being pulled outward.

Our attention needs to be drawn back in. It is this intention, this connection we are talking about.

Connecting with yourself, with your creative self, is what we believe in. This can be through writing, inventing, crocheting, singing or painting, to name but a few of the creative outlets people have worked on while at La Muse.

We believe being inspired and connected to yourself is one of the most important things there is about being a human. It makes life bearable.

As the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said:

Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Connection, or “flow” as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it in his book of the same name, is the experience every creative person who has ever come to La Muse has talked about in some way or another. Indeed, it was a German writer who donated Csikszentmihalyi’s book to our living library years ago and talked about flow at the Book Break we have in the first week of every retreat.

Next up, How, literally, does Inspiration happen at La Muse?

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Intention, then space-time.

You bring your idea, your talent and your intention. We give you space-time away from the real world, and a support system to make the most of your stay.

Then, you do the work. You do the work just like you would for your job back home.

You give that two hours every day Stendhal talked about, or whatever amount of set hours you want to give every day. You start at nine o’clock every morning like Faulkner, or even earlier in the morning as Auden did, or late at night like Dostoyevesky. You get up at the same time every day as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it and you “sweat and labor.”

The thing with La Muse though is that you will be doing this “work” with a group of people who have come here for the same purpose, a group of people who understand what you are going through.

As John Cleese says, you have to find a “space” where you can give yourself that “time” to connect with that flow, that genius, that inspiration.

Yes, this space can be created in your home or office, but what about what Cleese calls the “interruptions”: phone calls, ticking things off on lists, racing around all day? If we are talking about a sustained amount of time to really get into your project without interruptions then a retreat is far more productive.

And as Cleese says in another video on creativity if you are interrupted during your “creative state” then you lose the flow of what you were working on. Unless you create what he calls an “oasis of space-time” where there are “boundaries” of “space” and “time” then you can’t tap into creativity.

Ultimately you have to have the right conditions to be able to make the effort to get inspired. Inspiration and genius are in all of us. However, we are not all truly receptive all the time as it takes a huge effort when surrounded by the vicissitudes. It takes courage to be receptive and to create.

La Muse is a space designed to reduce these “interruptions.” Our Quiet Hours and the natural, tranquil setting allow for creative ideas to seed and grow.

Sure, you can optimize those conditions in your own life whether it’s with meditation or a non-negotiable writing routine, but it does help to get a boost, to say the least, by going on a retreat. Just creating those conditions at home can take years. Establishing them in a place like La Muse and then bringing them back home with you would be even better. As opposed to having to fight through your routine to form a creative schedule you can come here and be encouraged by the example of other creative individuals in addition to having no excuses to not do your work.

La Muse has created those conditions for you to step into and the space helps you establish creative momentum which is then easier to maintain back in your own life.

Next up, What is Disconnection, Creativity and Inspiration?

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Whenever there is inspiration, which translates as “in spirit,” and enthusiasm, which means “in God,” there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

The Oxford English Dictionary sums it up this way; as a noun inspiration is:

the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative; the quality of being inspired, especially when evident in something; a person or thing that inspires; a sudden brilliant, creative, or timely idea; the divine influence believed to have led to the writing of the Bible; the drawing in of breath; inhalation; an act of breathing in; an inhalation

Literally, from the Latin, inspiration means “to breathe into” from the verb inspirare.

So, breath is life and the creative life comes through inspiration. Carl Jung writes about this in his autobiography when he remembers carving wood in the 20s:

Only while I was doing this work did the unconscious supply me with a name. It called the figure Atmavictu - ‘the breath of life.’ It was a further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream, which was now revealed as the ‘breath of life,’ the creative impulse.

The artist breathes in the inspiration. The “breath of life” then goes into a wood carving, musical instrument or invention or onto the page or canvas.

This kind of talk about inspiration makes some writers and artists want to thump their head off a wall. A lot of the time they see it as anything but a magical process, calling inspiration only part or even irrelevant to the creative process. As William Faulkner once said:

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.

You can go online and find countless writers, articles and creative people commenting the same way, saying that the creative process is almost mechanical, like a mechanic greasing your car (E.B. White) or an engineer thinking about an engineering problem (Doris Lessing).

So, yes, getting to that inspired point is work. But if it is then that means we can all get there. But couldn’t it be both at the same time, work as well as allowing “spirit” to come into us?

Stendhal says something along the same lines:

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration.

Easier said than done.

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how frustrating this process can be. Instead of using the word inspiration though, she replaces it with “genius”:

That’s not at all what my creative process is — I’m not the pipeline! I’m a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?

Elizabeth Gilbert

So, we need to make time, find space, be consistent, and have the intention to find inspiration by working.

Next up: What is the link between Creativity and Inspiration?

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