Brandon’s Reviews > Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity > Status Update

We must become creative about being creative.

By not reading this book on schedule, I think I might have missed something. I returned to it—specifically the chapter on encouragement—after finishing another book and found that it got me off the couch.

Doing creative work, “we need before, during and after friends” (190).

Ueland advocates for my liberation: “if you have a kind of cultured know-it-all in yourself who takes pleasure in pointing out what is not good, in discriminating, reasoning, and comparing, you are bound under a knave. I wish you could be delivered.” I have sniped.

Assignment: for restlessness, visit a church, wilderness or Louis Vuitton store. The friction between identity and place may be what “home” in the Odysseus sense is about (187).

“Fear becomes a cue for prayer” (183). As my worst fears become reality, I sent out a poem about it: “Seating Charts.” If a poem is like a prayer because it “confesses” the truth, we surrender to consequences, to justice. As a pine once told me, “we are both blessed/to have made it this far/with anything to lose.”

How can fear be a motive for creativity? Write your fear.

Everyone in the group liked the story of three blind men trying to describe an elephant. If an elephant wanted to become a painter, would it feel more like one if it cut off an ear? I think it was ***** who asked this and then went on to describe the suffering of not loving the temple where the artist lives. For her artist’s date she lay on the couch and ate a raspberry popsicle.

The desire to make love doesn’t correlate nearly with the act of conception (27). There’s something to be said about the preparation of practice and drafting before performance or publication.

“Begin [writing] where you are, with who you are.”