Transcript: Episode 26

Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

Before I get going, a quick housekeeping thing: I’m recording under slightly different conditions today than usual (by which I mean, my partner is now working from home, so this is sort of a test to see if I can record during shared working hours). So there may occasionally be a bit of background noise I can’t edit out – I’m hoping not, in which case this announcement will be magically cut from the episode and you’ll never hear it. But just in case, there it is.

And another quick note: If you’re a new listener here, welcome! I’m so glad you’ve found the pod. This episode is a bit of a direct follow-up to last month’s topic, so if you’ve got the time and inclination, please do check out episode 25 as well. And if you’re a long-time listener and you haven’t yet left a rating and review for the pod, I’d be so grateful if you took a couple minutes to do that right now. This is a small and scrappy little podcast, so every review really counts and helps support this virtual space.

Okay, on to the episode!

This month, I’m going to be giving you a little creative pep talk by talking about two things:

1.      Why your consistent creativity matters even if you’re not publicly prolific, and

2.      A practical way to reach the level of consistency that feels right for your practice

As I was getting ready to write this month’s episode, I found myself really wanting to dig deeper and more specifically into something that surfaced in the last episode on productivity culture: the creative ideal of being prolific. This ideal is definitely closely tied to quote-unquote “being productive,” especially the way most people typically use the word.

But it also has its own set of assumptions and implications that I think we can actually play with in order to break a bit of the hold that productivity has over the creative process – while still living out a commitment to making consistent creative work.

I guess if last month was me talking shit about productivity culture, then this month is my follow-up on one potential way to rehabilitate an aspect of it. So here’s a super-brief recap of my main point of contention with the productivity world:

Systems that help us create more things can clearly be good and helpful in the right context. But when productivity itself is a core guiding value of creative practice, I think that encourages us to mistake productive actions for meaningful ones. It basically skews our context – we start to see completing tasks and projects as synonymous with doing fulfilling and purposeful creative work.

So, what I’ve been thinking about for the past couple weeks is this: How can we actively commit to creating more meaningful work without pushing us into that productivity ethos? (And I mean “creating more meaningful work” both in the sense of making stuff that captures deep meaning and also in the sense of making that kind of stuff more often.)

For writers, one adjective that often gets thrown around as a productivity-approved benchmark of worth is “prolific.” When you hear the phrase “so-and-so is (or was) a prolific writer,” it’s generally intended as very high praise – as a marker that so-and-so is the real deal, someone so creative and so dedicated to the craft that they can consistently make a bunch of stuff. Look at all this cool stuff so-and-so has made! Imagine how much more cool stuff we’d have to read if everybody was as productive as so-and-so!

And then those of us who do not typically or naturally produce a lot of finished, published work feel like the saddest, slowest little inch worms, desperately crawling along in the lengthening shadow of all the cool stuff we might have made already if we could just. inch. faster!

But here’s the thing: This sort of standard discourse around being creatively “prolific” is based on some pretty big unexamined assumptions that I’d argue don’t actually increase our potential to create more meaningful work more often.

If you look at just the word “prolific,” there are some more nuanced connotations there that aren’t always associated with it in current common usage. If something is “prolific,” that means it’s fruitful, not merely that there’s a lot of it. To be basic here for a minute and quote Merriam Webster: “fruitful adds… the implication of desirable or useful results, as in ‘fruitful research.’” And another phrase from their definition is “abundant inventiveness.”

I should acknowledge that this is sometimes part of what people are talking about when they praise a writer for being prolific. Like, nobody’s going around calling Toni Morrison prolific only because she wrote more than 30 books – it’s because she wrote more than 30 really really good books.

And yet… the publication stat alone does have prestige. And the more culturally focused we get on creative productivity, the more prestige it has – it becomes an aspirational signpost that eclipses the more subtle or slippery aspiration of “desirable or useful results” and “abundant inventiveness.”

If you google “prolific authors,” a lot of the names you’ll find are actually authors who have become brands – their publishing stats are boosted by a team of ghostwriters. And I don’t personally think that’s fundamentally unethical or even undesirable: Full disclosure, I’ve edited ghostwritten books. But this kind of high-profile, marketplace-approved prolificness is not the more artful, nuanced version one might describe as “fruitful” or “abundantly inventive.”

(See also: the prestige flex of posting creative work online as frequently as possible, which has created a cultural demand for all of us to post more.)

I talked a lot last month about the ways productivity can misdirect us, and how it can keep us from allowing the space and slow integration that is so often required to channel our most creative and inventive inspirations. So I won’t get too deep into that again here, except to say that within a productivity context, it’s actually very reasonable to lose sight of the more nuanced side of prolificness.

I mean, for one thing, the number of projects you write is obviously way easier to quantify than the fruitfulness of those projects. And in the productivity context, the number of projects you’ve published is an even better value metric. It’s the clearest proof of productivity – even though it says nothing about the actual abundance of your creative life, in terms of your own fulfillment and the depth of connection and exploration happening in your practice and in your work.

Another way to put my whole point here is that writing a prolific amount isn’t the same as writing with a prolific range of thought or depth of insight. It’s not the same as prolific meaning.

So, how can writers rehabilitate the ideal of being prolific – how can we get our internal aspirations closer to chasing prolific meaning rather than purely prolific output? I think one pathway to this might be through a very practical concept we can steal directly from productivity culture, like little bookish raccoons diving in a late capitalist corporate dumpster.

(Apparently I’m stuck on a non-charismatic animal theme today when it comes to making analogies, so you’re welcome, I guess?)

The concept I’m talking about is “closing loops.” I believe this term originally comes from David Allen and Getting Things Done (?), which is also the origin of “next actions,” one of the ideas I was basically complaining about last month (“Welcome to the Inspirited Word, the podcast where I complain about shit and hope it makes us feel better afterward…”).

Anyway, I managed to resist the need to spend like a whole day researching the exact origin and all known usages of “closing loops,” because it’s not necessary to my point and I’m trying to get better about not obsessively researching things that make me want to throw out all my digital devices. So just know that I’m using the term generally here and not in response to any one particular productivity system.

I was reminded about the concept of closing loops in a YouTube video by writer and filmmaker Rachael Stephen, relatably called “how to NOT f**k up your creativity for a decade.” (This video is full of good ideas and she also has a gorgeous Scottish accent, so for sure check out the link in the show notes if you need another creative pep talk after this episode.)

In the video, she talks about closing creative loops as way to maintain wellbeing, momentum, and inspiration. (And by “closing creative loops,” she means completing smaller projects more frequently, in addition to working on projects that may take months or years to complete.) Here’s how she puts it:

“This is the thing YouTube taught me that [writing] novels never could: Finishing things is motivating.... The more often I can start something and complete it and close that creative loop, ... the more happy I am, the more satisfied I am, the more creative I feel.... And it also helps with my perfectionism... [because each loop] is just another brick in the wall of my creative life.”

This all sounds really reasonable and inspiring… and it also might sound like just productivity under a more friendly and accessible name. But I don’t think it inherently has to be, depending on how you define two things: What counts as a creative loop? And what counts as closing a loop?

Rachael Stephen does specifically say that she sees publicly sharing the project as the closing point, but she doesn’t mention other markers that might also give that feeling of having closed an open loop. And I’ve also seen other creatives describing sharing as essentially the completion stage of a creative work.

Writer, web designer, and visual artist Kening Zhu gives her take on this in episode ten of her podcast botanical studies of internet magic (the episode title is “sharing your work as creative release”). She calls sharing “completing the creative exhale” (which gives you a hint of how beautiful the language in her podcast is).

Here’s a composite quote from the episode:

“Sharing is a prerequisite to being in energetic flow with the world…. [It’s] a sort of creative death and release, because it’s the end of one cycle. It’s allowing the idea to be born from a seed, to grow through the summer. And then the act of sharing is to surrender it into the collective consciousness, in this case, probably the internet.... Whether or not that idea or creation is seen or acknowledged is a whole separate thing. …

Sharing your work is such a crucial juncture point of letting your work be in the world, letting it be seen – and then being curious about what feedback you receive.

[That feedback] is about being in conversation with the other. It’s about listening to the ripples of your work, the echoes that come back to you from the wilderness.”

(end quote)

Her full exploration of sharing as release is well worth listening to; I’ve just touched on a snippet here. But the relevant note for what I’m talking about today is again the idea that the completion phase or season of a creative work is when it’s shared with the other – by way of a public platform like the internet. The act of posting or publishing is the creative exhale, the way to close the loop and maintain the cycle of creative flow. (This idea is also very similar to a blog post by Bob Doto that I referenced last month.)

I really love this way of framing the act of sharing work publicly. But I also have to admit that it doesn’t work for me as a measure for what counts as closing a creative loop. When I look at my creative practice, if I were to apply this framework on its own, I’d be swimming in open loops – especially when it comes to aspects of craft that I’m experimenting with, areas where I’m very actively learning a new skill or a new medium (which I’ve been doing a lot of lately).

I mean, to put it bluntly: Some finished projects just aren’t meant to be shared, you know?

I doubt that any of the writers I’ve quoted are intending to say that literally every creative thing you work on must be shared, and that things that are not shared basically don’t count or aren’t part of your craft. So then my question is, why do we so often center the act of public sharing when we conceptualize creative flow – instead of making it just one possible branch in that flow?

This feels to me like a prime opportunity to reprogram the ways productivity has crept into our collective default parameters about what counts as worthwhile creative work, and our vision of what living a creative life looks like.

Why does private writing and making not seem to count as prolific? Why is public sharing the most important benchmark, and the main portal for closing the loop and maintaining the flow? Or put another way, what other kinds of sharing might also close the loop, rather than sharing in the sense of either publishing or posting? How does our relationship to our work change if sharing and completion includes the public creative marketplace, but isn’t limited to or defined by it?

I spotted another reference to creative release this month, in writer Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s March newsletter. Here are her thoughts on the importance of creative practice in light of current political realities in the US:

“If I want more kindness in the world, I’m responsible for expanding my capacity for kindness. If I want less oppression in the world, I must deliberately examine and free myself from internalized oppression. I long for love and equity to be our country’s governing principles. The place I must begin, then, is by allowing love and justice to govern my heart.

... This is why I lean into the transformational dimensions of creative writing, give my energy to supporting others’ creative and contemplative practices, and foster communities where such work is valued. Inner release opens us to an agency no ego-directed act can match.”

The two points in that last line really struck me: the connection between inner creative release and increased agency, and the distinction between agency and ego-directed acts.

To start with that first point, inner creative release is exactly what’s missing for me in that formulation of public sharing as the close of a creative loop. Sometimes sharing publicly is absolutely the thing a project needs to be complete, the act that’s needed to honor and continue your flow with the world. But sometimes the necessary act of flow is internal – the one who needs to receive the gift is actually you, and just you. Sometimes there is no other, abstract or concrete, who needs to witness the creative release.

Moving on to the second key part of that quote, the difference between agency and ego – Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s newsletter didn’t fully unpack the distinction, but she recently published a book called The Release that I suspect might get into it. I just picked up the book so I can’t yet speak to the content, but I can tell it’s going to be good and it’ll be linked in the show notes.

To offer my own take on that distinction, though – I think ego-directed acts are ones that emerge from an isolationist view of how to get what we need to thrive, whereas agency is the power to act and thrive within a greater whole. It’s the larger, deeper power we unlock when we take action as if we’re embedded within a whole web of potential thriving that intersects with us but isn’t defined by us. Because, of course, that’s exactly how things actually are.

Agency is what we access when our understanding of ourselves brings us into relationship with that greater whole, rather than separating us from it. And creating as a consistent practice of flow with the world is one very powerful way to support that understanding. Both when we create things that are shared, and when we create things for our own inner release.

On the surface, this feels a little contradictory, the idea that giving a creative gift privately to yourself can actually reconnect you with something beyond yourself. But I think it starts to make a deeper sense when you remember that you have a relationship with yourself just as much as you have a relationship with the rest of the world. And sometimes that relationship needs tending without any outside witnesses.

I don’t think the art that emerges from that inner exchange is any less complete than art that does get publicly shared – even if you might have initially planned to publish and then changed your mind. The loop has still been closed, the flow still maintained. It’s just that instead of sharing and receiving feedback from the external world, you’ve shared something between parts of yourself. And you still get feedback with this kind of sharing – it’s just coming from your own internal creative system rather than from an external other.

To explain what I mean by that, I’m going to reference Kening Zhu again, this time the most recent episode of her podcast, “transcendence of a productivity addict.” One of her main ideas in the episode is that creative systems are cycles, not recipes.

A recipe is a set of standardized steps that creates a specific output; it’s a method of combining discreet, concrete inputs in predictable and measurable ways. This is what she sees as the predominant approach in productivity culture – productivity tries to, as she puts it, “allocate” your effort, time, and creative energy into a quantifiable output. But that’s not really the way creativity functions.

Creativity is a system, meaning that it’s (quote) “more like a growing organism; there’s a regenerative, living property to systems. There are things that emerge from systems that are unexpected and spontaneous.” (end quote)

Unlike a recipe, creativity is a system of cyclical, evolving relationships between the different aspects of your craft and your practice. These relationships can evolve through our external experiences with sharing creative work. But they can also evolve through experiences and feedback within ourselves. And I think finding ways to acknowledge that internal feedback is how we can close the loop on a creative project without sharing it, and sometimes without even finishing it in the way we might have originally intended.

We complete the loop when we integrate the spirit of that creative work and carry it forward with us, regardless of whether we reached the anticipated end point or whether anybody else interacted with it.

Taking this view of your work could spare you a lot of angst around specific projects that you might otherwise get completely stuck in your head about. But I think it can also expand your idea of what even counts as a creative loop – what counts as doing your creative work. If you start defining those loops as anything you can complete that feeds into your creative system, suddenly there are opportunities for satisfying, consistent creative work all around you.

Finishing and publishing a novel is for sure closing a creative loop. But so is publishing a single poem. So is writing that single poem and not showing it to anybody. So is sketching for ten minutes or doing a freewriting prompt you know you’re never going to look at again.

Maybe it feels like taking such a broad view on what counts as a closed creative loop is sort of frivolous, that it will undervalue those big, high-effort loops and possibly even keep you from working on them. But I don’t think that’s a real danger. I think the more we become aware of all the ways creativity is at work in our lives, the more we feel connected to it and to its full potential – the more we feel connected to agency, that power that flows through us but isn’t limited to us.

When we expand our definition of what kinds of creativity are worth doing, we’re making sure that we actually gain the insights and gifts available in all the parts of our craft, all the parts of our creative systems. Even the quick, scrappy, imperfect parts that are just for us. If a loop is feeding your creative system, it’s part of the flow of creative spirit – it will also feed your inspiration and motivation for the bigger projects, and for the projects you do choose to share. It will help you create more meaningful work more often.

If you were around last month, this might be reminding you of the idea I referenced from Taylor Heaton – that adding quick, low-stakes moments of creative expression into your day can help avoid information overload and dysregulation, especially if you’re neurodivergent. I wasn’t thinking in terms of closing loops when I made that episode, but I think the framework of loops can help explain why Heaton’s idea works, even if it feels like doodling or taking a dance break has nothing to do with the information you’re trying to process.

It works because you’re using a tiny loop to shift your brain out of overloaded consumption mode and into integrating and expressing mode. That one little closed, private creative loop is like a reboot for your entire creative system. It pauses the dysregulated flow and restarts the creative flow.

So, here’s what I’m suggesting on a practical level (because I did say at the beginning that this was a practical concept). If you want to nurture a more consistent creative practice without getting sucked into the productivity trap, I think there are three basic steps that can go a long way to getting there.

The first step is to recognize the kinds of creative loops you’re already closing regularly in your practice – whether that’s on a daily basis, a weekly one, or even a monthly or yearly one. Acknowledge these loops and the insights, experiences, and skills they add to your creative life, no matter how small or pointless they might seem when viewed from a productivity mindset.

The second step is to add more small loops into your practice – but note that I’m not talking about adding projects that will expand your long-term to-do list and give you something else to feel bad about. (Yes, I’m talking to you, dear overachieving overthinking overcomplicating listener.)

I mean adding loops that feel both exciting and currently doable. Loops you know you could work on and close over the next few days or weeks, whether you close them by sharing publicly or just with an inner release. And as you both acknowledge your existing loops and engage with new ones, notice what kind of pace feels natural for you – even smaller loops don’t have to be closed daily or weekly unless you want them to be. You get to define what feels prolific for you, both private and public.

The third step to a more consistent practice is to explore ways to honor the completion of your unpublished and unposted creative loops – ways to share them more intentionally with yourself, with a small circle of others, or even with non-human others. Maybe you read your work outside in a favorite place with no human ears to hear. Maybe you dedicate your work to a loved one who’s not around in the physical anymore. Maybe you offer it as a prayer or gift to a spiritual ally, or just to the animating spirit that moves you to create in the first place.

This third step is the most fanciful one, and so maybe it seems like the least important one. But I think it’s actually the most important one in a lot of ways. It’s a direct expression of the key difference between closing loops in a productivity-centered way vs a creativity-centered way.

By honoring the work you don’t publicly share, you remind yourself over and over that your goal is not to get the most possible output in front of the most possible consumers. You’re not trying to be the kind of prolific that equates publishing stats with creative worth.

Your goal is to practice your craft consistently as an ethic, not a metric. It’s to become the kind of prolific that’s deeply fruitful for yourself and for others – even if the end results don’t produce anything but more life and agency and spirit in the world.

If you’re subscribed to the pod newsletter, check your inbox for some more specific tips on ways to apply those three steps to a more prolific practice. And if you’re not yet a member of the newsletter circle and you want those tips, please join! You’ll also get instant access to the Creative Rescue Kit, which is a special resource I made just for this pod community. It’s a set of three bite-sized but powerful tools to help us get out of the drafting doom spiral and back onto the path of actually writing our stories.

Everything in the Kit is designed to help you shift blocks and make the most of your creative time. It includes a quick guided audio practice to bypass anxiety blocks in the moment during a writing session. There’s also some low-pressure but deep-diving journal prompts to help shift your creative anxiety at the source. And to help you reclaim your writing practice for the long term, I’ve also created a streamlined digital writing session tracker to spot patterns in your writing life and discover which practices really increase your creative flow and fulfillment.

So, if you’d like in on those resources and on monthly episode tips, just scroll down in the show notes wherever you’re listening and look for the link to become a newsletter subscriber. You can also join by visiting inspiritedword.com/contact – just look for the big peacock green button that says “Join the newsletter.”

That’s it from me today, friend. I hope this month’s episode has given you a gentle nudge to go take any action toward closing a creative loop, no matter how big or small – and to give yourself credit for practicing your craft, even if nobody else knows about it.

Until next time, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.