creativity + art + design articles

world-changing writing, creativity, and ‘tude: an interview

Earlier this year, Pace + Kyeli Smith of Connection Revolution invited me to participate in their World-Changing Writing Workshop. It was a grand success, with contributions from Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Fields, Colleen Wainwright, Jennifer Louden, Johnny B. Truant and other literary and entrepreneurial hotshots.

The E-Goddesses were smiling down, because I was given the esteemed vote of "fave speaker of the series." My reward? I get to share my segment with the masses — for free.

An Excerpt: The Nitty-Gritty of World-Changing Writing

Kyeli: Ellie asks, “How do you share the idea you have with people who don’t already agree?”

Danielle: Don’t bother.

Kyeli: Yeah, that’s a good answer. That ties into someone else’s question. Jane says, “How do you stop holding others’ expertise or credentials in such high esteem that it prevents you from believing that you have something new and different to offer?” I feel like those questions are related.

Danielle: Yep, they are. You don’t want to work with people who don’t have the same worldview as you. It’s always a disaster. You are going to burn up a lot of energy trying to convince people to see things the way that you see them. It’s a waste of time; it’s a waste of energy that you could be pouring into your authenticity and expressing yourself, and being of service to your tribe. Letting other people’s expertise eclipse you, or scare you, put you into a place of insecurity – that’s just the deep, ongoing human exercise of believing in yourself.

Kyeli: Right.

Danielle: I’ll use myself as an example for twenty seconds here. I was executive director of a DC-based think tank, and consulted to the Pentagon on the dynamics of social change, and I never went to college. I graduated from grade 12. The reason I tell you that is that yay, it can be done, but also, I learned to leverage my “lack of qualifications”. When you work in Washington, DC, you’re going to be asked on a daily basis where you went to university, and someone’s going to ask you some tricky question to figure out if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, and so whenever I got that question, I just said, “Nowhere.” It was impressive, at the time. They think, “Wow, you must be really smart.” I worked with a client earlier this year who was an interior designer who was making over $100,000 a year, and still thought that she needed to go back to school to get certified in interior decorating. And I said, “You know what your bio needs to say? That you’re self-taught.” You can wave the self-taught flag. And this all goes back to waving the flag of your passion. Your passion is your qualification. It’s your leading qualification.

Pace: Yeah!

Kyeli: That’s awesome.

Danielle: Next question!

Many thanks to Pace + Kyeli for their revolutionary grace + rock-solid content.

Grab the audio file right here, and the transcribed version over here.

Want to dive in, full-throttle? You can purchase the entire workshop, and get on with the business of changing the world. While you're at it, revel in the rest of the offerings from the Connection Revolution store.

. . . . . . .

CREATIVITY COACHING
And speaking of world changing writing, creativity and attitude, Creativity Coach, Bindu Wiles has a few spots open for her New Year clients. She was instrumental in helping me keep it real and high-minded in The Fire Starter Sessions. Dig deep and get productive, check out Bindu Wiles here.

 

abundant grace. and gifts to match.

This holiday season, skip the singing / blinking / glitter-dusted nonsense, and choose the world's most stylin' note cards.

Classy meets sassy. Flat cards on heavy weight stock. Clean fonts. Bold love. Abundant white space to write something that counts.

Revive the art of hand-written love - because e-cards suck and everyone knows it. Order plenty for yourself, or send a gift-wrapped set to a friend. Profoundly worthy of your stamp and signature.

Order a set of note cards this week, and they'll be in your mailbox by Christmas (or, we can send them straight to your giftee.)

OR: for a biz-savvy, eco-friendly, no-trees-were-harmed-in-the-making-of-this-production option, how about gifting a copy of The Fire Starter Sessions?

$150 for the full-tilt love. And! $5 from every copy goes to the charity you choose: The Acumen Fund or Women for Women International.

No gift wrap. No postage. No "aw, you shouldn't haves."

Email [email protected] to purchase your gift copy of The FSS, and we'll send you a magic download code to deliver to your giftee.

They'll be awfully grateful and jazzed. Kinda like these people.

Happy everything, and Merry always...

 

the epic 72 hour smart stuff sale

Adam Baker, aka, ManvsDebt, has done something rather, epic: he said "hey, want to put some of your best stuff in an Epic Mix of smart stuff? And I'll sell the mondo collection of goodness for just 3 days and it will be ... awesome."

I said, "Smart ass idea. And you know I adore you, so, what's mine is yours, baby."

Baker wrangled a dozen or so high-selling e-products (Leo Babauta, Jade Craven, Chris Guillebeau...) and is offering the kit n' kaboodle only for 72 hours, for only $97 bucks. So the value is a no brainer. It's enough knowledge and how-to for strategizing your 2011 from business to lifestyle. In summary:

23 Business Courses From 23 Successful Entrepreneurs. Normally $1,052, On Sale For $97. For Only 72 Hours

Go get 'em. Only72.com

Enthusiastically,

 

transparency. when it works and when it bombs.

Someone recently made my Transparency Barometer go ding-a-ring-hell-yay-ring-RING! Baker. Adam Baker. An introduction:

Adam Baker is ManvsDebt.com He's been here before (read our interview.) He recently posted this: How to Suck at Launching a Product. Whether you give a toss about launching info-stuff on the internet doesn't matter. What matters is Baker's thoroughly honest account of his tribulations, emotions, and learnings of being an entrepreneurial human. He bares it. All. And he does so methodically, and with an intention: to be useful.

And this is how I think you truly serve.

First, and primarily, you intend to teach; and then you do so with very thorough and relevant honesty.

(Malcolm Gladwell said it. "Authenticity is the new cool." Uh-huh. Interesting times we live in, eh?)

At it's worst, transparency without the intention of teaching can amount to a lot of diarist wanking. Which has it's place, of course. Voyeurism and art are great lovers, and there's a deep translation of shared humanness that happens when we get all bloody and exposed in our creations -- and when someone else is provoked by our outpouring, or even more profoundly, relates to it, then, well, it's a divine kind of wow.

But I'm not talking about that sanctity of pure art and self expression. I want to talk about peddling your expertise -- the place where plenty of art meets plenty of commerce, in which case:

You need to keep your art focused.
You need to have a point to your story.
If you're going to get naked, it better be relevant to your mission.

TRANSPARENCY AS A TEACHING TOOL

1. Be on the other side of the dark side. Which is to say, be on the light side, the logical, happier place when you tell your story.
Do not, I repeat, please don't "teach" about your personal learning when you're in the hell of it. Keep your pants on. Get through it first, THEN turn it into a "10 Steps To Survive Hell" presentation. It's better that way because it's less about you and more about what you're offering. If you want to bleed, gather your inner circle or paint it out. If you want to teach, do us the favour of walking us through your steps to awareness, from beginning to end.

2. Share the actual Big Emotion Moments
If you read Baker's I-bombed-so-hard story, I bet you'll walk away with this image that he shares: "On no sleep for three days… at the moment that was suppose to be one of the best for my business… I put my head down and cried." THAT registers. When I speak to audiences about the day I got canned from my own business, I describe driving home, and having to clench the steering wheel because I was shaking so hard with rage. It doesn't get more truthful and illustrative then those Moments. If it's a moment you'll never forget, it's a moment that carries resonance for someone listening to you.

3. Give details
In the drama of sweeping life lessons (which can range from a pet dying, to a fender bender, to bankruptcy) it can be easy to lose sight of the wee nuts n' bolts that unhinged along the way. But we need to hear some details. Anchor your transparency to some facts and sequencing.

4. Name names
Talk about the other people involved in your learning (anonymously if necessary.) We fail and we succeed together. We want to see how the people around you were aiding your inevitable wipe out, epiphany, or overnight success. Give us their opinions, their hesitancy, their reasons.

4. Give yourself credit - unabashedly
Claim your license to teach. You've been around the block and you're hear to tell the tale. You know a few things. In this matter...you are wise.

5. Go to the trouble of spelling it out
Go to the extra-refined mile not because you're writing Three Days to Enlightenment for Dummies, but because you care deeply about your audience and you want to be of as much service as you possibly can. Fine points, and how-to's, and summaries are incredibly respectful and loving.

A metaphor to close out with: A playbook is not the same as a journal. Journals evolve into playbooks. Playbooks are tried and true and have victory and loss to back up each play. Tried. And TRUE. And we all wanna peek at THAT, brothah.

. . . . . . .

Vancouver, Seattle, New York, Portland, and online... check out my upcoming speaking gigs.

 

saying yes to your dream: frank gehry + devotion

Even great artists sell out. Sometimes it happens post fame and fortune. Other times, as in the case of architect Frank Gehry, you sell your soul in the beginning of your career, on what you hope is your way up.

It's better to sell out early, if only because time is merciful and you can blame so much on youth and learning curves. You have time to recover and re-invent. It's exceedingly harder to redeem yourself once you've let your hit song be used for a burger commercial, or you've turned your personal touch into a factory franchise. So for all of you grinding gears in a day job while your heart is spinning bigger dreams, consider this:

One of Frank Gehry's first buildings, was a shopping mall, The Santa Monica Place. It was rigidly geometric and pale pink. He played it safe for investors and went LA-style. He hated it.

Meanwhile, as a more direct and personal creative outlet, Gehry went full out "Gehry" on building his own home. Sloping roofs, curvaceous windows, jutting peaks. Wacky and wildly organic.

The night of the grand opening of the Santa Monica Place, the president of the real estate company that had hired Frank was at Gehry's home for a dinner party.

Real estate Exec: What the hell is this?, he said to Frank, looking around Gehry's house, awestruck.
Frank: Well, I was experimenting, you know, playing with it.
Exec: Well you must like it if it's your house. You do like this, right?
Frank: Yeah. I'm happy with how it turned out.
Exec: So then...the building that you just did for us...the shopping mall...you can't possibly like that.
Frank: You're right, I don't.
Exec: Then why'd you do it?
Frank: Because I need to make a living.

Pause.

Exec: Well stop it. Don't do that kind of work anymore.
Frank: Yeah, you're right.

They shook hands that night and decided to quit everything they were working on (they were employing forty people at the time.)

"It was like jumping off a cliff," Gehry says. "It was an amazing feeling. I was so happy from then on."

Devotion can be that easy.

The moment you say yes is the beginning. It's not when you give your notice or when your novel is off the press. It's when you say yes to the desire.

"Maybe" clogs up the dream machine.
Do you want a career that amazes even you? Then say yes. Do you want a love life brimming with adoration and the sweet stuff? Then say yes. If you start to tell me why it's not possible or how bad you want it but you don't know how to get it - then you don't want it bad enough. Maybe isn't going to cut it.

And if someone great calls you out on your own greatness, consider it a sacred moment. Those opportunities are precious. To have your 'yes' witnessed is magic-making.

Even after his big yes moment, there were failures for Frank. He was supposedly cash-strapped more than once. He bid on projects he never got. He had to can staff. He questioned is own judgment.

But he never did another building that he didn't absolutely love creating.

Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack is one of my favourite documentaries. (The late) Pollack features in it and the interaction between the master director and master architect is inspiring and charming.

 

traffic, tears and tenderness: lessons from 5 years of on-line hustling

Before I launched WhiteHotTruth.com, I was a partner in an on-line "lifestyle media company." I wrote about the soulful side of style. The stakes were high, we'd raised over half a million dollars to make it all fly. And thus, the site became...a content factory (insert sound of fizzling fire cracker.) I had 15 writers working for me. More writers = more content = better search engine ranking = more eyeballs = potentially more ad clicks-thrus = money...or so one hopes. It was a creative nightmare that I let happen. I got ousted left that lil' empire. The company folded and the site was auctioned off as a remaining asset. The new owners started running articles on cellulite cream and pregnant brides. End of story.

I learned a lot. Grateful for all of it. And when I went renegade about two years ago, I took my SEO smarts, vetted it through my artistic soul, et voila! WhiteHotTruth and more learnings...happier kind of learnings. Here are a few:

17 lessons from five years of on-line hustling, in no particular order:

1. Stories are effectual.
When I wrote about my meeting with the Dalai Lama, I thought it would be a flop. Same for my First Spiritual Heartbreak. Yet those articles elicited some of the most heart-felt responses I've ever received. This is a repeating lesson for me: TELL your story, tell YOUR story, tell your STORY. And when you tell your story...

2. Talk about how you feel.
Some people told me they pre-bought The Fire Starter Sessions just because of the admission I offered before blast-off: "launching in a few hours. hope it doesn't suck." The posts in which I'm most emotionally transparent or vulnerable have ended up being some of my most valued material.

If you're doing more the publishing data or facts, then the "real" story behind what you're teaching is how you feel about what you're teaching. The feelings are the magnetism...the white hot truth. Yep -- SOUL SELLS. Transparency is all too rare and we're all craving to relate.

3. There's nothing Tweeters like to tweet about more than Twitter.
Write about the Twitter itself and it WILL get re-tweeted.
Case in point: 3 Keys To Un-Branding and Why I Changed My Twitter Name

4. Some people have way too much time on their hands.
I've received three paragraph explanations as to the etymology of a particular word. READ: an email about a typo. If you're alerting me to a typo because you care and don't want me to look like a dork, thank you! It's energy well spent! If your alertng me to a typoh becuase your just plumm anoyed ... than like, reelly?

5. Overly sensitive types need not apply.
If you're going public with your opinions, and especially if you want to wear your heart on your sleeve on a big stage, you better: a) know what's driving you and be convicted in that; b) be just slightly arrogant enough to think you deserve your place on that stage; c) be tough enough to not let the turkeys get you down. The internet is a massive landscape, and the turkeys have email access. You need to learn to chuckle when they squawk.

6. When you cry while writing an article...it only means something to you.
Just because you're have deeply cathartic experience crafting an article, doesn't mean it will be a transcendent piece for the reader....but it may be.

7. Know the metrics that matter most to you.
I recently did an interview with Pace Smith for the Engaging E-Course program she's co-creating. She asked me all these great questions about stats for The Fire Starter Sessions and my readership. Doh! I didn't have a lick of data for her, because, I don't really do much data. I went two months without checking my Google stats and just about fell off my chair when I found out how much my traffic had increased. Do I care? Hell yes! But I keep my eye on what matters most:

I care about email subscribers. Because I hope my stuff is sweetly useful and you'll give me the privilege of getting into you in-box just twice a week. I care about the quality of emails that I receive - the nature of gratitude and opinions. I care a lot about how my exposure relates to weekly sales of The Fire Starter Sessions.

8. Give yourself three to six months to find your voice.
When I started WHT, I created categories for "fashion + beauty," "wellness + healing", and "relationships + sex". I've written maybe five articles in total that fit those categories. Within a few months of launching it was clear to me that I was most passionate about "inspiration + spirituality," and "business + wealth", with "creativity" making an frequent appearance.

Your true interests will surface if authenticity is your priority.

9. Your blog could be your book. Just maybe.
Six months into WHT, I stood back and saw the outline of a book proposal. Which then morphed into TWO books. One of which is The Fire Starter Sessions, the other is my next book, tentatively called, DESIRE. Yay!

10. When you are always intending to be of service, you will never run out of ideas, or content.
I could break this post into a series. I'd rather pack it all in. There's always more where that came from.

11. Change.

Things I've tried here:
: Burning Questions Interviews. I featured some fabulous people.
: Comments (I'd like to take the opportunity to say here, since the debate of blog comments on or off is still in the air - I think that leaving comments on until you "get big," with the intention of shutting them off at such a time is...sleazy.)
: Posting daily. Well that just about killed me. I post about twice a week now.
: Hot Songs (I may resurrect the tunes...I kind of miss them.)
: Inspirational quotes. There are hundreds of them buried in this site. They started to feel like filler. Nixed.

12. Schedule or no schedule? Your call
One of the reasons I adore Chris Guillebeau is that he is so damn reliable. If he doesn't post every Monday or Thursday, you can rest assured he's been kidnapped. Me...I post when I'm pumped. And I know there are "ideal" times of the day and days of the week to post for readability, but...I publish when I publish.

13. People will use you and you'll use them.
This is life. Favours, climbing, sincere friendship and fanship. It's up to you to keep your intentions straight up and clean. Kissing ass to build traffic gets tired really fast. Genuine interest is much more sustainable.

14. Your best stuff may not be your most "viral" stuff. Write it anyway.

15. Generosity makes for a great party.
Every time.

16. You are having an effect on people, even if you don't know it.
People may write you months after an article went up, and tell you that your words are taped to the fridge for encouragement, or that they read your piece at a banquet to a round of applause.

One line - honesty delivered, might motivate someone to do what they've needed to do for years, or to be more audacious, or more gentle with themselves and the world around them.

17. Just write it.

. . . . . .

Check it: New Vancouver + NYC gigs.

New HOT SHOP! Shop it! xoxo

 

4 righteous bits on art + interactivity…

[a follow up on "making space for creative credo" / and turning off blog comments]

Debates are wrenching for absolutists and purists; thrilling for the open-minded questers; and neither here nor there for what Lao Tzu calls, those "with no preferences...for whom the way is fluid and light." I'm an open-minded, strongly particular, highly tolerant, purist. I love and hate debates. I have a tendency to break the Rules of Debate. (That's a foreshadowing. Read on...)

I am deeply digging the current discussion about social media conversation, specifically whether to have comments on or off on blogs. When I turned off the commenting function on WhiteHotTruth last month, here's what happened:

Quick measurables:
: 3 blogger friends with large sites each told me that week that they would love to do the same thing, but it wasn't quite right for their business model, or they were too chicken shit. But it's tempting...
: 30+ people emailed me to say, "respect, love, way!" No one emailed me directly to call me bad names - I expected a few nasty emails, not one.
: 8 people unsubscribed. 20 more subscribed.
: A bunch of The Fire Starter Sessions programs sold.

Inner status:
I felt deep peace and artsy-honouring. The vibe in my live-work space shifted. I had three sizzlin' creative ideas the next day that were keepers.

Rumbles in the jungle:
Charlie Gilkey, who is dependably thoughtful, wrote, "Why I Leave Comments Open" and generated plenty of convo:

... Why even have a blog if you don’t want to interact with your readers?
... A blogger refusing to take comments would be like an artist refusing to take part in a critique.
... It just seems to me that an artist’s existence is entirely based on audience… without an audience we are nothing.
... Although I logically understand, there’s an emotional disconnect to bloggers that disable comments. To me, it’s a very subtle way to say, “Your thoughts are not worth my time.”

Mark Silver (another high-minded dude,) wrote:
... In making risky choices, one often tries to find comfort by moving in packs. But sometimes that’s not possible, and making the risky choice means going it alone- or nearly alone. The risky choice can be completely right for the person making it, and completely not right for anyone else.

InformationJunkies posited, "Why close comments when they can provide an insight into what our reading community is talking about?"

Not related to my announcement:

Everett Bogue turned off blog comments while he was on vacation, and decided to leave them off.

Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation wrote a piece called, The End of Conversation in Social Media.

He dug up this music-to-my-ears, from Dave Winer, who PC World calls the "The father of modern-day content distribution" and The NY Times deemed the "The protoblogger."

I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don't. I think they're publications. (You can read Winer's full article here.)

I'm with Winer.

re-Conclusion:

PRIMARY INTENTIONS...are EVERYTHING

4 righteous bits on art + interactivity

1. Don't be glamoured by the medium.

"Blogs beg to be interactive," someone said in this no-comment debate. Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon. In the years to come, technology is going to wire us together in so many seamless and sweeping ways that the novelty of interactivity will no longer eclipse what's most important, which is the content.

Imagine six+ billion people having their own holographic "micro-blog" (Twitter, anyone?) When we are all uploading our thoughts and wares into the space, we won't be talking about who's got "comments" open or not. We just ALL be opinionat-ing and publishing EVERYWHERE. Like we do on Twitter and Facebook and...and...

"Blogs" are nodes in The Global Brain. Blog as a term (shortened from web-log,) is limiting in and of itself. When you're clear on your primary intent, this medium becomes a powerful tool, instead of the tool working you over.

I want this space to feel like a temple, a publication, and a prayer, not a town hall meeting. I hope you'll feel a bit secluded and protected here. Spacious. Intimate. Mindful.

2. You can serve the collective without being community-centric.

... just ask any eccentric painter, or reclusive writer, or monk.

My primary intention is to inspire individuals to be conscious individuals so that they can...serve the whole. Community is a positive, unintentional consequence of publishing in this globally-wired medium. If my primary intention was to create community and forum, I would invert my whole business model and take a back seat to watch the system self-organize, and I'd respond to what was emerging "out there." It's a beautiful way to foster change, but it doesn't fit with with my true strengths, or the fire in my heart.

3. Pure art is not about pleasing your audience.

It's about getting the art out in it's true form, which is no small undertaking. And therein lies the service.

When you do what you do solely to be loved, or buzzed about, your rudder will start to crack. If your esteem depends on being liked for your beliefs or opinions...whoa.

Respect...I want it, of course, of course. I want love, connection, and the joy of admiration, but the art has to come first, or I'm just not that interested in the commerce. If I start writing philosophy "for" an audience, I'm fucked. This ain't no fiction novel. This is my life.

Anticipation can be deadly to art:

Why I Don't Have Comments, by Seth Godin:

... I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.

4. Everything is energy.

Comments. Links. Thoughts thunk or tweeted or sent in bytes. Data files. Crowded in-boxes. It's all energy being moved around. Call it society, culture, universal consciousness, intelligence, or the morphogenic field, we are constantly depositing and withdrawing and otherwise distributing stuff from the cosmic space.

So I can't, as some have suggested, leave comments on and "just not pay that much attention to them...let people talk amongst themselves." That's like having people over for dinner and hiding out in your bedroom. I hear stuff. I'm "compelled."

But more than that...I'm devoted, primarily, to keeping it real 'round here.
That's the best I can do.

Intention
is
everything
is
energy.
Real
is
virtual
is
real.

Honour the intent. Master the tool.

Respect.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

psst...Bindu Wiles' SHED PROJECT starts September 14.
Check it. Shed.

 

what do you call yourself?

Are you...
girlfriend, or lover?
husband, or partner?
teacher, or trainer?
leader, or director?
decorator, or designer?
advisor, or counselor?
blogger, or writer?
crafter, or artist?

What you call yourself matters.
Words send signals, labels are magnetic.
Your soul deserves accuracy.

MedicinalMarzipan recently asked me:

You distinguish yourself as a writer vs. blogger, can you elaborate on that point? And I said:

I loath the word blog. It’s not pretty. But we’re stuck with it. That’s an aside, really.

Most specifically, I philosophize, and I mostly do that in writing, and I mostly present that on the internet. That’s the Big Real of what I do, and what so many of us do. We’re bigger than our “posts” and “tweets” and when you keep your eye on that, when you let your definitions of yourself be deeply accurate, it influences your creative approach.

I'm a philosopher, which for me, is more accurate than teacher, because "philosopher" connotes both sagacity + continuing exploration.
I'm a strategist, 'cause I sure as hell am too opinionated to be a coach. (Not that brilliant coaches don't have mighty opinions. And BTW, I think everyone should have a coach.)
I'm a mama, which is just mo' fun and sexy than mother, and it's more specific than parent, because my parenting is distinctly, pronouncedly feminine.
I'm a writer. It doesn't matter where my stuff is published - pixelated on the internet, printed in books, or stamped on notecards. I write. For a living/loving even.

I'm as fascinated by what someone does as by what they say they do.

Like this sweet guy at a workshop, "By day I'm a Refuse Manager, which is just a fancy title the city gives me for Garbage Man. I actually prefer Garbage Man, you know? By night I'm a stock trader and student of eastern mythology. I'm a seeker, really. Yeah, a Seeker." Clearly, he's seeking treasures, not garbage.

Labels are a necessary and unavoidable function of most cultures. We need them like we need traffic lights and handshakes.

Recognize if you've outgrown your "title".
Deepen your claim, or lighten it right up.
Carve out your own personal lexicon. Snug, and radiant.
Educate people in who you are.
We want to know, for real.

. . . . . .

INTERVIEWS

Read the full Medicinal Marzipan interview here.

COOL STUFF!
Missed the live version of the World Changing Writing Workshop? CLICK HERE, because now you can get it In-A-Box! And pssst...I got voted the #1 Speaker from the series! Yay!

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making space for creative credo

My palms are a bit sweaty. I'm taking deep breaths. I feel a bit misty, and, I'm smiling. This is a monumental decision for a bloggity being like me…here goes:

I'm putting the comment function on WhiteHotTruth out to pasture.
Comments are hereby closed.
Gulp. Sigh. Namaste.

I need to heed my own creative credo:
1. Keep it pointed to where you want it to go.
2. Pay close attention to your creative fantasies.
3. Keep it lean and keep it clean.
4. Art involves risk.
5. Form informs feeling.

1. Keep it pointed to where you want it to go.

If we've had a beer or walked the Sea Wall together (I know, only two of my friends are putting their hands up - I'm reclusive,) then you've heard me say, "All I want to do is write and speak. Write and speak. Write and speak." Pretty clear. For flavour, I've been adding in, "You know, I just wanna work like Hunter S. Thompson, but without all the bad drugs. Or guns. Or ex-wives. Or..." Okay, the point is, I neeeed to Write and Speak.

And live -- and living means making up stories with my six-year-old magic boy. And eating fresh food with friends. And interviewing Rabbis and Lamas and waiters about the nature of desire...So that I have more stuff to write and speak about.

When people start calling you a "power blogger" (I love the label, don't stop, seriously,) you're tempted to think that power = blogging. And it can. You just need to keep your eye on your real power source, or you get all fancy and you start wearing sunglasses when you sit down at the computer.

And here's the thing with being "in touch" with thousands of people everyday: it can fuck with your head, not in a Howard Hughes go-looney kind of way, but in a "there are a whole lotta of people in my living room, and my bed, and my car-kind of way." You see, I THINK about YOU a LOT. I want to be the best damn hostess on the Internet. I want everyone to know that I read every word that is sent my way. I want to be loved, darling, loved!

Which brings me to…

2. Pay close attention to your creative fantasies.

I've been romanticizing the old days of authorship. You bled on typewriter keys, couriered your six inch-high stack of manuscript papers to your editor; and your book came out four years later. If someone wanted to send you love letters or hate mail, they wrote to your publisher, and your publisher asked you if you wanted your mail forwarded to you that year.

That Jurassic and gruelling process is everything I work counter to. I take publishing into my own hands and ship my art ASAP. Howevah...this imagery (I can even smell the dusty dust of old paperbacks, and the ink of typewriter ribbon,) has been surfacing in my thoughts these past weeks and it's telling me to make the space I need to create more.

If I have more psychic space, I can write more, and write mo' better. And THAT's where I want my vocation to go. All good things (like affluence) will come from honouring that core desire. (Quicky clarity on that: affluence = fluid ideas + influencing positive happenings + cash flow.)

3. Keep it lean and keep it clean.

I was reading the Communicatrix's latest newsletter (Colleen Wainwright slams down the wisdom on a monthly basis and I take in every word.) "Everyone now knows that social-media creep is just as dangerous as TV-creep..." And she advises us to "review your landscape, trim your reel...so I we can be…100% available to the moment."

And then it hit me: Let go. More. Which is scary, but…

4. Art involves risk.

Seth doesn't have blog comments. Havi doesn't even do email. When Leo at Zen Habits asked some of his blog-migos what we thought about him closing comments on his site, I was like, "Dude, 'Zen' connotes comment–free, you need to let go and let it flow." But it's different when it comes your turn to "burn down the barn so you can see the moon" as the poet, Masahide put it.

You start fretting about people calling you a narcissist (wouldn't be the first time I've been misunderstood,) or your readership plummeting (which, uh, couldn't possibly happen because my material is just going to get HOTTER…promise,) and about being lonely (I still have those two friends to drink beer and walk the sea wall with.)

And…I worry that my new artistic format might come across as ungrateful. And that would suck hard, because I am so deeply, madly, appreciative of every heart that clicks my way and gives some extra meaning to all of this. The value of being recognized as useful cannot be overstated.

5. Form informs feeling.

I want to foster a quality of spaciousness here. Like sitting around a campfire, under a big sky. We need room in order to hear, to be with our thoughts. We banter and converse and show up enough "out there," don't we?

I pray that the new spaciousness is appreciated, even savored. Like a paperback book that you can hold close for a few minutes while you make your way through the world.

Ever true and always grateful,

 

embracing creativity + our longing for narrative: Francesco Clemente with Charlie Rose

Charlie: How do you find your voice as a painter?
Francesco: You have to make room.

This interview reads like a meditation -- at least it does for me. Clemente's longing for a sense of wholeness and completion; the struggle to find his voice and break away from the order of things; the surrender to one's desire. "Painting is not so much about decisions, it's more about acceptance." Ahhh...

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INTERVIEW ON CharlieRose.com

thanks to Natasha Lakoš, one of my favourite graphic designers, for sending this to me at just the right time. xo