The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp)

Personality is a skill.
Perfect practice makes perfect.
In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
You are never lonely when the mind is engaged.
The more you know, the better you can imagine.
Challenge the assumptions. Act on the challenge.
The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
You do your best work after your biggest disasters.
You filter the world through your particular prism.
An artist’s ultimate goal is the achievement of mastery.
If I stopped reading, I’d stop thinking. It’s that simple.
In theory, the only perfectly clean room is an empty room.
Never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.
Questioning what’s gone unquestioned gets the brain humming.
You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.
Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
You can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all.
You can never spend enough time on the basics.
Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future.
Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
By acknowledging failure, you take the first step to conquering it.
Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start.
Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.
You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
To force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence.
The willingness to take directions is a skill noticed mostly when absent.
As Freud said, “When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”
It’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.
The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.
In the words of T.S. Eliot, you’re distracted from distractions by distractions.
Japanese sword fighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.”
Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
There’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.
The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking Where do you find the air you breathe?
It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.
Mark Twain said, the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
My heroes are those who’ve prevailed over far greater losses than I’ve ever had to face.
Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.
Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.
Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.
Ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft.
Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.
Being blocked is most often a failure of nerve, with only one solution: Do something-anything.
The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity.
The great ones shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.
We’ve always done it this way is not a good enough reason to keep doing it if it isn’t working.
How to be lucky: Be generous. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you.
That’s the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confining your creativity.
Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way.
It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it – for ourselves and others.
By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world – and they can be combustible.
Remember this when you’re struggling for a big idea. You’re much better off scratching for a small one.
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell.
I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.
Switching genres was Beethoven’s way of maintaining his inexperience, and as a result, enlarging his art.
Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.
Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.
Inexperience erases fear. You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible.
I became a choreographer because I longed to dance, and nobody was making the kinds of dances I felt inside me.
If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.
That’s what the great ones do: They shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.
There comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout “Begin!” You never know where it will take you.
One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that.
If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
The only bad thing about having a good creative day is that it ends, and there’s no guarantee we can repeat it tomorrow.
What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
Once you realize the power of memory, you begin to see how much is at your disposal in previously under-appreciated places.
Every act of creation is also an act of destruction or abandonment. Something has to be cast aside to make way for the new.
…get busy copying. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you’ve begun.
Obligation is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.
Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first.
Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.
I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
…there’s a fine line between good planning and overplanning. You never want the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of your work.”
Remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started.
The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.
You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that’s a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.
I want my dancers to grab my ideas and abandon common sense. I want them to give something of their own and to push everything to the edge.
You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.
The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good. If it’s something you want to do, make the time.”
Make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?
We need this breadth and passion if we’re going to keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.
But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working
Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.
Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them.
…the creative act is editing. You’re editing out all the lame ideas that won’t resonate with the public. It’s not pandering. It’s exercising your judgment.
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Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.”
You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.
I know it’s important to be prepared, but at the start of the process this type of perfectionism is more like procrastination. You’ve got to get in there and do.
I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It’s inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.
Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.
Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start. How do you know when something is not only the best that you can do but the best that it can be?
I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses, I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.
Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing to what we have experienced before.”
My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?
Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.
Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet do it anyways because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.
When you fail in public, you are forcing yourself to learn a whole new set of skills, skills that you have nothing to do with creating and everything to do with surviving.
One of the horrors of growing older is the certainty that you will lose memory and that the loss of vocabulary or incident or imagery is going to diminish your imagination.
I Guess that’s the real secret to creative preparation. If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout Begin! You never know where it will take you.
You may not think that doing a verb is practical or productive for anyone but a dancer. I disagree. The chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain.
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
Scratching is where creativity begins. It is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity. If you try to rein it in, you’ll never know how high you can go.
You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun…
Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.
Every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.
You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin. You should never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity.”
Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.
Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-centure architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model. But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.”
Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
To generate ideas, I had to move. It’s the same if you’re a painter: You can’t imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas-when you actually do something physical.
Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.”
A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.
Every creative person has to learn to deal with failure, because failure, like death and taxes, is inescapable. If Leonardo and Beethoven and Goethe failed on occasion, what makes you think you’ll be the exception?
Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above your craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. combining the two is the essence of the creative life.”
In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn’t quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
Every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice.
If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this: Identify the concept that isn’t working. Write down your assumptions about it.
As Tracy Kidder wrote in The Soul of a New Machine, Good engineers ship. In other words, while perfection is a wonderful goal, there comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
I believe that every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
There’s an emotional lie to overplanning; it creates a security blanket that lets you assume you have things under control, that you are further along than you really are, that you’re home free when you haven’t even walked out the door yet.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box — reading generates ideas, because you’re literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful.
It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.
My daily routines are transactional. Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.
…there’s a lesson here about finding your groove. Yes, you can find it via a breakthrough in your craft. But you can also find it in other means — in congenial material, in a perfect partner, in a favorite character or comfortable subject matter.”
There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove. (196)
When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous one percent inspiration, abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.
No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion.
Habitually creative people are, in E.B. white’s phrase, ‘prepared to be lucky.’ You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident. In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
I’m often asked, Where do you get your ideas? This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking Where do you find the air you breathe? Ideas are all around you.
You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun—paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.
Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented.
Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: Why do I have to obey the rules? Why can’t I be different? Why can’t I do it my way?
In the end, there is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down.
This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.
Get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
When you’re in scratching mode, the tiniest microcell of an idea will get you going. Musicians know this because compositions rarely come to them whole and complete. They call their morsels of inspiration lines or riffs or hooks or licks. That’s what they look for when they scratch for an idea.”
Jerry Robbins made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him.
Part of the excitement of creativity is the headlong rush into action when we latch onto a new idea. Yet, in the excitement, we often forget to apply pressure to the idea, poke it, challenge it, push it around, see if it stands up. Without that challenge, you never know how far astray your assumptions may have taken you.”
All I have is the certainty of experience that looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit. You appreciate this more and more over the years as the need to not look foolish fades with youth. (Remember the centenarian who when asked about the best part of living such a long life replied, No more peer pressure.)
Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before.
Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say. This was the yin and yang of my work life: Dive in. Step back. Dive in. Step back.
No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have a greater change of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoid tat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark- and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E. B. White’s phrase, prepared to be lucky.
A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to come back with a face. Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook.
Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.
Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple.
Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It’s a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.
When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.
A math professor at Williams College bases ten percent of his students’ grades on failure. Mathematics is all about trying out new ideas — new formulas, theorems, approaches — and knowing that the vast majority of them will be dead ends. To encourage his students not to be afraid of testing their quirkiest ideas in public, he rewards rather than punishes them for coming up with wrong answers.”
More than anything, I associate mastery with optimism. It’s the feeling at the start of a project when I believe that my whole career has been preparation for this moment and I am saying, Okay, let’s begin. Now I am ready. Of course, you’re never one hundred percent ready, but that’s a part of mastery, too: It masks the insecurities and the gaps in technique and lets you believe you are capable of anything.
The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.
Jerome Robbins liked to say that you do your best work after your biggest disasters. For one thing, it’s so painful it almost guarantees that you won’t make those mistakes again. Also, you have nothing to lose; you’ve hit bottom, and the only place to go is up. A fiasco compels you to change dramatically. The golfer Bobby Jones said, I never learned anything from a match I won. He respected defeat and he profited from it.
Ideas take on many forms. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Big ideas and little ideas. A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them. It’s confining and restrictive. The line between good and bad ideas is very thin. A bad idea in the hands of the right person can easily be tweaked into a good idea.
When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. It is not a particularly sociable way to operate. It’s actively anti-social. On the other hand, it is pro-creative.
Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they’ve started work on a project– say, a book– but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it’s going, they tell you that they’re still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it’s never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book.
Repetition is a problem if it forces us to cling to our past successes. Constant reminders of the things that worked inhibit us from trying something bold and new. We lose sight of the fact that we weren’t searching for a formula when we first did something great; we were in unexplored territory, following our instincts and passions wherever they might lead us. It’s only when we look back that we see a path, and it’s only there because we blazed it.
You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses.
When I’ve learned all I can at the core of a piece, I pull back and become the Queen of Detachment. I move so far back that I become a surrogate for the audience. I see the work the way they will see it. New, fresh, objectively. In the theater, I frequently go to the back and watch the dancers rehearse. If I could watch from farther away, from outside the theater in the street, I would. That’s how much detachment I need from my work in order to understand it.
I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.
There are mighty demons, but they’re hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they’ll shut down my impulses (‘No, you can’t do that’) and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout. 1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet, and they’re not going to start now…. 2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. 3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, ‘Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.’ But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day. The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started. In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that’s habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.
Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

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The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp)

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp)

The quotes for this book need curating

About the book

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