Eric Maisel - Unleashing the Artist Within: Breaking through Blocks and Restoring Creative Purpose

Copyright

Copyright 2020 by Eric Maisel

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

Unleashing the Artist Within: Breaking through Blocks and Restoring Creative Purpose is a new work, first published by Ixia Press in 2020.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maisel, Eric, 1947 author.

Title: Unleashing the artist within : breaking through blocks and restoring creative purpose / Eric Maisel, PhD.

Description: Mineola, New York : Ixia Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017265| ISBN 9780486831862 (alk. paper) | ISBN 0486831868 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | ArtistsPsychology.

Classification: LCC BF408 .M2327 2020 | DDC 153.3/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017265

Ixia Press

An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

83186801

www.doverpublications.com/ixiapress

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2020

Contents

Preface

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Coaching the Artist Within, in which I presented a dozen lessons of interest to creatives along with vignettes from my creativity coaching practice. This book, Unleashing the Artist Within, is a sequel to that book.

Many of the subjects presented hereIm thinking particularly of tolerating the creative process, cracking through everyday resistance, healing from trauma, managing the daily grind, and completing creative projects and getting them out the doordeserve book-length treatments. There is a lot to say about these challenges! I hope that the discussions in this book, while not comprehensive, nevertheless help you.

I have been toiling away as a self-directing, selfemployed creative for many years. It was fifty years ago that I started writing my first novel, a picaresque of my Army days in Korea, and thirty years ago that I started working with creative and performing artists, first as a therapist and then as a creativity coach. I recently did an interview and discoverednot to my chagrin but to my amusementthat I was grouped among the elders of the creativity community. So I guess I am officially an elder.

Ive seen a lot during that time, firsthand and also through the eyes of the creativity coaches I train, the clients I work with, and the folks who attend my classes and workshops. The headline is that I have never met one creativenot a single onewho had it easy. Yes, a portion of that hardness was regularly self-created and self-imposed, for instance, because of unacknowledged performance anxiety, a stubborn resistance to dealing with the realities of the marketplace, or an unwillingness to maintain a regular creativity practice. But that it was self-created and self-imposed didnt make the hardness any less painful. I would say that it is axiomatic that every smart, sensitive, creative person is having a rough go of it.

The why of that Ive discussed in about thirty books, this one included. Thats a lot of books, a lot of challenges, and a lot of advice! The good news is you have an opportunity every day to choose an authentic life. I hope that the lessons contained in this book make your journey as a committed meaning-maker a little bit easier.

Chapter 1

EMBRACING THE REALITIES OF PROCESS

The creative process is harder to tolerate and therefore harder to embrace than most peoplethe majority of creatives includedimagine, for a variety of reasons.

Only a percentage of the work that we do turns out well. And only a percentage of that percentage is really excellent. This means that we have many failed efforts to endure, including countless mediocre works that may pass muster in the world but that dont thrill us much, internally count for much, or do such good a job of keeping the meaningfulness of creating afloat.

The creative process involves making one choice after another. (For instance, Should I send my character here or should I send him there?) and the activity of choosing provokes anxiety. Just about every decision we makesay about buying this car or that car, changing our day job or staying put, accepting this not-very-fair gallery contract or rejecting itproduces anxiety, and the creative process is nothing but and exactly an endless series of choices. Given all that choosingand given that, as a rule, we do not really love the experience of choosingits easy to see why you might not want to turn to your novel or your symphony as soon as you wake up.

The creative process involves going into the unknown, which can prove scary, especially if where we are going is into the recesses of our own psyche or to the place of reexperiencing trauma. Say that you are certain that you want to set a play during the Holocaust, but do you really want to spend hour after hour writing about Nazi torturers and their victims? Do you really want to be in that interrogation room? Your play may demand that you go there, but how likely is it that you actually will go there or be able to tolerate the experience once you are there?

The task we are setting ourselvesunraveling this scientific knot, creating that full-scale operamay be beyond our intellectual or technical capabilities or may require information and understanding that we dont currently possess. Each individuals creative process is constrained by what he or she knows or can know.

The thing called inspiration, which is one of the great joys of process and without which our work would prove lifeless, comes only periodically and cant be produced on demand. We must show up for what may prove days, weeks, months, and even years of slogging along with our creative project before a single brilliant ray of sunshine enlivens it and illuminates what were doing. That is an idea that is very hard to tolerateand even harder to tolerate as a reality.

The above is a fraction of the longer list of reasons why tolerating the creative process can prove so daunting and why fully embracing the realities of process can elude us. Most creatives do not grasp the extent to which this demanding process is itself stymieing them. They chalk up the fact that their novel remains unfinished to personal weakness or to their unfortunate circumstances and do not credit the reality of process as the real culprit.

The creative process can feel so daunting for a variety of reasons: not everything creatives attempt will turn out beautifully, many efforts will turn out ordinary, and a significant number will prove flat-out not very good. A composer writes a hit Broadway musical, and the next one is abysmal. No one can believe its the same person! A novelist pens a brilliant first novel, and the second one is unreadable. What a disappointment! A physicist comes thisclose to a breakthrough but doesnt break through, rendering his several years of work worthless. How demoralizing! These are everyday occurrences in the lives of creatives and the rule rather than the exception. How to stay calm in the face of this?