30 Days of Creativity and Play

1  30 Days of Creativity and Play

The Talks Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius:  First off this is my all time favorite TED talk. She talks about the many anxieties that writers face and she also discusses how she dislikes the idea that all artists are manic depressive alcoholic pieces of shit. She spends most of the talk pointing out how frightening the prospects of being an artist can be. She tries to backtrack and uncover if previous generations had a less frustrating approach to being an artist. The big kicker is that the word genius only started referring to a single person in recent generations, the word comes from an idea that ‘genius’ is an entity of its own something that inhabits artists every so often, this is wonderful because there is significantly less pressure on the artists. The idea is not only that we have to take the chance and embrace our creative process and think of it that we may be inhabited by this daemon and most importantly it encourages us to check in with ourselves and talk out with our creative spirits. Creativity doesn’t have to be this shitty painful internalized thing.     

Tales of Creativity and Play: This talk is really a blast, for me it’s a little bit tough but it’s really just an invitation to screw around and have a blast with your work. The talk encourages the amount of openness we have as children and when you’re exploring it makes sense. There was the episode of Rugrats where the kids all get really excited about a box because they each imagine it as something else.

The Challenge: Sounds like a simple 30 days but make no mistake friends. This will be an odyssey that will test my mind body at spirit. There are two things to take away from my favorite talk, first is the idea that when people thought a genius was going to possess them they would go out and do their dance and even if they weren’t sure that genius was going to possess them they would dance anyway. So the idea here as beautiful as the whole the thing sounds is to….dance anyway MOTHERFUCKER!! To do your work regardless of the creative spark. The next bit is to check in with myself to reach out and talk to whatever elusive muse is out there and say, can’t you see I’m trying to sleep or just say hey I’m trying to masturbate here? Deal with your muse.

Then the other part should be simple right? Just play preferably something ridiculous maybe I’ll sit in a box or go to a pet store. Or draw some unicorns or take pictures of my dog that’d be awesome right? Just play. But the idea only starts silly it’s not meant to be mindless. It’s to build towards something.