Fearless Creating: A Step-by-Step Guide To Starting and Completing Your Work of Art
by Eric Maisel (Author)
Booktalk: For writers, painters, or performers in any field, new hope for overcoming creative blocks and finishing the art of their dreams.
The blank page, empty canvas, or uncarved stone will often fill artists with dread. But so may the thought of finishing, showing, or even selling their work. It is in this “artistic anxiety” that creative blocks begin.
With an understanding that could only be gained through years of experience in counseling artists, writers, and performers, Eric Maisel, Ph.D. discusses each stage of creation-wishing, choosing, starting, working, completing, selling–and the anxieties particular to each. He then shows how these inhibiting tensions can be turned to artistic advantages, how truth and beauty arrive in the work of art precisely because, and only when, anxiety has been understood, embraced, and resolved. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Snippet: Like a Laurence Olivier who experiences severe stage fright but still acts, like a Maria Callas who experiences severe stage fright but still sings, it is our job to exclaim, “Both creating and not creating make me anxious, and I choose the anxiety of creating.” The task is to replace paralyzing anxieties with hungry-mind anxiety, with the anxiety of wanting so badly to create that the walls of Jericho will not stand up to our trumpeting. This is perhaps a strange idea, but our goal is not to grow calmer but to substitute one anxiety for another. But in fact every challenge in life is met exactly that way.
You choose to do something challenging not because you expect a worry-free experience, but because you want the experience so badly that you accept beforehand the new anxieties you are about to experience.
Copyright © 2015 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.
