His work has included not just books but classic screenplays (e.g., the 1956 John Huston-directed adaptation of Moby Dick), radio plays, stage plays, and television shows. Bradbury has led an amazingly productive and successful life as a writer and human being. An illustration of this principle in action, and of its relationship to the muse, has just been handily provided by life via the Internet:ĬNN.com recently ran a feature story on Ray Bradbury that set off a billion Twitter alerts: Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury on God, ‘monsters and angels’. In The Artist’s Way – a really valuable book on creativity, despite the fact that some readers find it a bit treacly – one of the techniques that Julia Cameron recommends for overcoming creative block and maintaining a state of flow is the practice of gratitude. Inspiring Gratitude – and More Creativity It returns you to the state of relaxed receptivity that characterized your earliest efforts, when you were just playing around in a ‘beginner’s mind’ mode. It instantly removes that pressure and lets you breathe again. Offloading your sense of responsibility for creative work onto another self is like flipping a switch. The modern muse-less view of things warps our experience of creative work all the way to its foundations.Īll creative block is ultimately identifiable as a manifestation of performance anxiety or performance guilt. This goes far deeper than the distinction between ‘good’ stress and ‘bad’ stress, the latter of which paralyzes us and the former of which galvanizes us into action. We all know that the surest way to block creativity is to force it by insisting that you must be creative.
The muse or genius model automatically undoes this damage. No wonder post-Renaissance artists have earned a reputation as mentally unstable egomaniacs. On the one hand places too much responsibility on the individual, who feels a constant pressure to reach or live up to impossibly high standards and on the other, it leads to the temptation of narcissism, of taking too much credit for success. Mark here at Lateral Action summarized the situation thusly in his commentary on Gilbert’s talk: In the West, the abandonment or burial of the muse or genius model around the time of the Renaissance, in favor of the new view that instead of having geniuses certain heroic individuals are geniuses, kicked off a long-term, culture-wide cycle of creative stress and burnout.
Remember Elizabeth Gilbert’s historic 2009 TED talk? It was devoted to resurrecting the muse/genius model of creativity, and one of the key points Gilbert emphasized was the way this model can save a person’s soul by taking away the awful, paralyzing burden of responsibility for the outcome of creative efforts. An independent force in your psyche that directs your creativity, and to which you deliberately hand over ultimate responsibility for your work.” “You mean some kind of invisible spirit that dumps creative inspiration into my mind?”
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