Stepping Off Now: Lessons in the Art and Craft of Creativity
Stepping Off Now is a podcast about how to live your creative best life. I’m Kendra, a social scientist and writer. I spent decades feeling creatively unfulfilled while I pursued conventional life goals, culminating in severe burnout that took years to recover from. This podcast chronicles my journey in real time as I find my way home to my essential creative self. I discuss topics like harnessing the intuitive creative process, using creativity to manage mental health, and sorting through all the external pressures and expectations to figure out what YOU really want. My hope is that you’ll find inspiration and solace here. You are not alone, and you are stronger and wiser than you know! You can find out more by visiting my website, kendrapatterson.com.
Stepping Off Now: Lessons in the Art and Craft of Creativity
E139. Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Times in the Creative Process
Most timelines of the creative process depict it as linear and progressive, an "up and to the right" trajectory (like on a graph). But what I am finding in the final stretch of writing my novel, though, that this phase is entirely different from every part of the process that came before. Nothing about how I'm working as I struggle toward that finish line is like my ordinary creative practice, and I've had to alter both my approach and mindset. It truly is extra-ordinary (in the sense of being outside of the ordinary), and it does not fit with linear-progressive models of the creative process.
In this episode I discuss different cultural conceptualizations of ordinary vs. extraordinary time, and how we can adapt these to help us understand those periods in our own creative process that seem to take us far off course even as we struggle to maintain our bearings.