The greatest part of the work I do as a coach is to help people excavate their authentic creative voices.
The biggest issue I see is that we've been taught for so many years to use our brains and our wills to create that we've lost the ability to just "be" on the page or on the canvas.
Answer these questions:
Who are you?
What do you love?
What inspires you?
What juices you?
What brings you deep peace?
What brings you hope for humanity?
Then put yourself daily around the answers to the above questions. Do this for three months, and watch your world and your writing/art transform.
Let yourself create from the center of your being.
I'm working on a middle grade novel formerly called Maisie Grace, now called Blue. It's about a deeply empathic girl named Maisie whose best friend is a tree named Blue. Maisie and the tree are psychic. The novel also explores art and bullying and death and connection.
It's a novel about reconnecting with nature, one tree at a time. Our disconnection from nature and each other didn't just start with the pandemic. Our reconnection must be a conscious act.

Surrender
I'm sure the writers reading this know about how the characters can take over and tell the story, as if you, the writer, has no control. Well this seems to be happening with this novel. Not only are they writing it, they came in my dreams and asked to be painted. As I create their images in acrylic ink, marker, and acrylic paint, even here they won't let me have the control. They paint themselves through my hands.
In many Eastern spiritual traditions they speak of "surrender". Surrendering to a higher power is the hardest possible thing for the Western independent in-control mind to accept. Many of us were given religious training that didn't sit well with us, so the concept of spiritual surrender feels like surrendering to a white male vengeful god. I get it. I was there, too.
Spiritual surrender, though, will give you everything, absolutely everything, you want out of life. We align our wills with a higher creative power and nothing can stop us.
For any type of artist, surrendering is the most powerful turning point in your creative career. Surrendering spiritually is just the same as channeling the muse.
When you let go into this higher creative force, what you create is far beyond your personal gifts and talents and skillsets. Your art becomes greater than the sum of its parts. What you create becomes magical and full of spirit.
Caroline Allen, author of the award-winning Elemental Journey series.