Navigation

Tag Archives | advice to writers

What is Disconnection, Creativity and Inspiration?

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?

APPLY FOR A RETREAT NOW

Continue Reading ·

How does coming to La Muse lead to Inspiration and Creation?

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.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871

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?

APPLY FOR A RETREAT NOW

 

Continue Reading ·

8 Basics of Creative Writing - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s Bagombo Snuff Box is a collection of short stories published in 1999. Most of the stories in the collection were published in the 50s, Vonnegut re-writing three of them.
However, the interesting thing about the collection is that in Peter Reed’s preface he writes about what Vonnegut called his 8 basics of Creative Writing 101. Here they are:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

He also had this to say about his basics:

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

 

Continue Reading ·

What is the link between Creativity and Inspiration?

Here’s the funny and inspirational Brazilian artist Vik Muniz talking about creativity and how getting shot helped him get to the US. He has a lovely clarity on the distinction between creation and creativity.

Creativity is how we cope with creation, while creation sometimes seems a bit ungraspable or even pointless. Creativity is always meaningful.

Muniz sees what we “see” artistically as creativity and what nature, the world gives us, objects etc. as creation.

Which explains inspiration again, in that it’s something that we “see” spontaneously, differently, when others don’t “see” it all.

The art critic and novelist John Berger talks a lot about ways of seeing in his book of the same name saying the process of seeing

is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe.

The book was based on a BBC 2 television series where Berger compares “the stillness and silence of a painting” divorced from the “religiosity” or what “people teach us about art.”

So, the link between creativity and inspiration is to make the distinction for yourself of creativity and creation. It would seem that creation is where inspiration lies, not creativity.

Next up, How does coming to La Muse lead to Inspiration and Creativity?

APPLY FOR A RETREAT NOW

Continue Reading ·

What is Inspiration and How to Get Inspired

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?

APPLY FOR A RETREAT NOW

Continue Reading ·

6 Rules on Writing

A lovely American photographer introduced me to Orwell’s essays many years ago in New York. It’s one of the few books I’ve ever re-read. In his wonderful essay “Politics and the English Language,” found in that book, Orwell talks about 6 rules on writing.

In the same essay he says “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” and that “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Here are his “rules” to avoid such madness ensuing:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell made many warnings about writing, like this bit, a favorite of ours, in his essay on Dickens, from Inside the Whale and Other Essays:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

You can get a lot of the great man’s essays for free from the Gutenberg Project. Enjoy.

Continue Reading ·

The Artist’s Way

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron at La Muse Living Library donated by Pam Carr!

“This book begs to be shared. Whenever a friend or family member expresses a ‘need’ for it I go into a second hand book store and there it is! I have done this three times and each time it has brought cataclysmic change into my life. Thank you Julia Cameron for creating this transformative work. A true gift to artists.”!

Pam Carr, Musician from British Columbia!

 

Continue Reading ·

Becoming a Writer

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande donated to La Muse Living Library by Olivia R.

“To Kerry, John, and all at La Muse! This book changed my approach to writing—and convinced me that just because writing is hard doesn’t mean it’s the wrong choice…”

Olivia R., January 2009

Continue Reading ·

Go into the arts

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.

American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

Continue Reading ·

La Muse - Get Inspired!