Today’s episode is for any writer who’s found themselves focused more on chasing the perfect creative practice than actually having a creative practice. (So, it’s for most of us.)
This month I’m sharing a writerly angle on the idea of holding space or creating a container. Specifically, what kind of space might actually keep you contained enough to experience sustained growth and discovery in your writing.
One of the challenges of making art in a capitalist world is staying attuned to your vision amid a constant flow of things you’re expected to consume and worry about and enjoy and reject and chase.
But to fully hold space for your creative self… you have to stay there, in the space you’ve made. And sometimes that feels constraining. Sometimes it feels like holding yourself back from dashing out into a wider space where everything is actually happening, and if you stay here you might miss something important.
This month, tune in to explore what it can mean to hold better creative space for yourself and your stories.
Plus, I share a simple formula to help you turn your writing practices into containers that actually support you and your work.
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I’ll be honest – I had a couple convoluted ideas for a bonus tip this month, but I realized the best one is really just to play with applying the formula for creative space to some real practices that are part of your writing routine.
So here’s another example of what that could look like, to supplement the morning pages example from the episode.
Let’s say you’ve been following a general practice of writing for 30-60 minutes three times a week, whenever you can fit into your schedule. This approach worked well for a while, but you’ve been noticing that your creative time is getting less and less fruitful – you’re showing up for the planned three sessions without any trouble, but you end up feeling stressed and not really writing much.
At first glance, this practice definitely has two of the three formula ingredients for holding creative space: there’s a constraint of time and number of sessions, and there’s enough flexibility to allow you to be compassionate with yourself in how you fit your writing into your daily life.
But the third bit of the formula, curiosity, isn’t overtly built in to this practice. So if you’re finding yourself floundering to access creative flow, you could experiment with adding an additional parameter that encourages your curiosity. Something simple and straightforward, like giving yourself a specific area to explore each week: brainstorming the background of a single character, learning a new poetic form, writing three versions of the same memory.
Digging a little deeper into the formula, though, there’s another angle you could try for revamping this writing practice – narrowing the constraint. Maybe having a more specific and/or consistent scheduling parameter would take some of the mental work out of managing this practice, allowing your creative brain to subconsciously “plan ahead” to show up in a more consistent container.
Could you take the bus home from work three days a week and write on your phone or a tablet? Could you confer with your family or housemates and block out weekly times to write when you know your space will be quiet? Could you write at the same coffee shop or library branch for each of your sessions?
The trick with narrowing the constraints in any writing practice is to make sure your self-compassion doesn’t get cramped in the process. But with the right balance, constraints can become a surprisingly fertile part of holding deep creative space.
The Numinous Network, monthly membership community with therapist, somatic practitioner, and spiritual counselor Carmen Spagnola. I learned the somatic exercise featured in this episode from the network’s library of somatic practice videos.