Writer, performer, blogger and web content strategist Amanda Hirsch

Today I post the next installment in my “Artist @ Work” series, an interview with writer, multimedia producer, improv/performance artist and blogger Amanda Hirsch.

I came across Hirsch’s work through her Creative DC blog, which has functioned since 2006 as a lens for focusing all that is cool about creative efforts in the nation’s capital. Before launching herself into the freelance world, she worked producing web content for PBS, and still posts to that organization’s P.O.V. blog, which discusses issues related to documentary filmmaking.

After 10 years spent living in DC proper, and three-and-a-half years authoring the Creative DC blog, Hirsch and her husband, Jordan, moved this past week to New York City. It will be interesting to see how she transforms that cultural landscape!!!

Amanda's blog about creative community in the nation's capital, Creative DC

Tell us about your creative pursuits, paid and unpaid.
My whole life is a creative pursuit! But more specifically: I’m a writer and performer. I’m also a blogger – an art form unto itself, I’ve realized lately. I have an impulse to curate things online…

What is your business model for your writing work?
I’m new enough to being a published writer that I am more concerned with exposure at this point than financial compensation. I do get paid for one of my writing gigs, but it makes up a fraction of my income. Still, when I submitted a book proposal earlier this year, as part of demonstrating my “platform,” I could say that I write a column for so-and-so. For someone at my stage of the game, that’s worth quite a lot – being able to show that not only do you reach a large audience, but also trusted organizations have published you.

All of this is to say that I don’t rely on writing to pay the bills. I primarily earn a living as an independent consultant, helping indie media companies and nonprofits strengthen their web content. I work for myself, at home, with my husband (also a freelancer) and dog (a lazy, but adorable, hanger-on).

Who makes up your customer base?
I do a lot of work with public media – I worked at PBS for over six years before I made the leap into freelancing, so they’ve been a natural client, and I’m on my third project now with NPR. I believe passionately in the importance of non-commercial media to our democracy. I’m actually working on a new project called Public Media Girl that leverages my knowledge of, and passion for, public media – for now it’s primarily a Twitter feed, but I’m fundraising to create a complementary blog – kind of a daily digest of the best content in the public media universe.

Outside of public media, clients include the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

How does your improv/performance art work dovetail with your writing and consulting? Is this a labor of love only, or are you being paid for your work in this area?
One of my writing jobs pays, and I’ve been paid for a handful of performances over the years (primarily improv-as-corporate-training gigs), but for the most part, writing and performing are labors of love – necessary ones, though, since when I can’t perform, I get antsy, and when I can’t write, I get morose.

What are your financial and professional aspirations in each of the creative fields that you work/perform in?
I would love to live in a world that valued my contributions as an artist as much as it values my contributions as a web content strategist, but unless Lorne Michaels falls in love with me (for example), I think I’ll have to rely on my web skills to pay the bills for the foreseeable future. That said, I am working to generate more of my income, incrementally, from my own creative projects. For example, if Public Media Girl is funded, that will be work I genuinely love, that someone is paying me to do … versus consulting on someone else’s project. I am fortunate to work with clients whose work I deeply admire and support – but at the end of the day, it’s still about supporting their organizations. I increasingly want to fill my days working on things that are mine…

Ultimately, I’d love to earn a living solely doing things I love to do – “love” meaning, things I’d do even if I were independently wealthy: writing, performing, blogging. I took a workshop this summer with an artist and educator in Washington, DC, Laura Zam, who emphasized the importance of naming your unmitigated dreams – only then can you take actions that get you closer to those dreams. My dreams, unabashed, are to write a nationally syndicated column, publish my book and be cast on Saturday Night Live. Of course, once I’m on SNL, someone will notice my potential as a dramatic actress and cast me in their independent film in the role of a lifetime. Meanwhile, I’ll continue living a creatively and spiritually fulfilling life that involves good food, travel and a lot of yoga.

I’ve learned that you don’t snap your fingers and wake up to the life you’ve imagined … you take steps, each day, and gradually your life shifts. Or, as I said in my one-woman show, Brushstrokes, “Time is my paint, each day is my canvas.”

There’s a great debate at the current moment about the price of web content and the ability of content producers to be able to “sell” anything online. As a consultant in this field, what’s your stance on marketing and selling writing or other creative works on the web?

I agree with the maxim that “information wants to be free.” That’s the culture of the Internet, and the Internet is increasingly the engine driving all media, not to mention culture. The finer points of strategy will vary, of course, by company/individual, but generally speaking, just because content costs you something to produce, doesn’t mean people will pay for it. Which sucks for anyone who spends serious time or money creating content. But if you want to be competitive, you need to let go of worrying about what you’re “owed,” and focus instead of delivering something people want to pay for. If it’s not your content, maybe it’s an experience you create, or a service you provide. It comes down to creating real value for people online, and earning loyalty – that’s how you get people to support your company/product/brand. The trick is to really understand that value proposition, and deliver on it.

For artists, creating value often means being accessible and transparent to your online audience — people start to like you, to feel like they know you, and then when your album (for example) comes out, they want to donate to the cause, even though they could download it for free. The other day, at a Paid Content conference, Shelly Palmer said, “The brand is not the publication but the author in 2009.” The author is the brand – think about that. It’s very empowering. Because it’s the brand that ultimately sells content/films/paintings/etc.

The flip side of this is that it can be a burden to artists, all the time they need to spend interacting with their audience. I think it must really be a challenge for introverts, or people who find that much audience interaction disruptive to their creative process; for me, being on Twitter and Facebook — it’s like performing, in a lot of ways.

I really recommend a book by Scott Kirsner called Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age; it addresses these issues very effectively.

One of your ongoing gigs is writing a blog for PBS related to documentary storytelling and the web. What can web content producers learn from documentarians in terms of funding their work and finding a receptive audience/customer base?
To be honest, I feel like the web is influencing the work of filmmakers, more than filmmakers are influencing work on the web. For example, I know a few examples of filmmakers using the MoveOn.org approach of incremental fundraising – raising money during each phase of a project through direct audience outreach, versus writing a lengthy proposal for a foundation. And of course many filmmakers are realizing the grassroots marketing power, not just of the web, but of social media – I’m seeing more Twitter accounts pop up for indie film projects, and I’m hearing from a lot of documentary filmmakers using Facebook to engage with supporters throughout the filmmaking process.

In your experience, what is the biggest challenge for artists related to integrating making art with making a living? Any advice for how to tackle that challenge?
I think an enormous challenge is cultivating your energy, so that you can bring your best self the creative process. My advice is to know yourself, and know your limits, and try to arrange your days accordingly. For me, office life was incredibly draining – being “on” all day, constantly interacting with people, navigating office politics… I came home exhausted every single day. By contrast, freelancing from home, in my sweats, with my dog, is so much more relaxed, and I find that I can really focus on the work and do it well…then, in the evening, I’m ready to go out and rehearse, perform, etc. I tend to do my best writing first thing in the morning or last thing at night. So if I want to get a lot of writing done on a particular day, I arrange my schedule accordingly.

How will your move to New York City affect your livelihood and/or art-making?
I will become rich and famous, of course! But in the near-term – professionally, it will mean opportunities to meet and work with different kinds of cultural organizations and nonprofits, I hope. Artistically, it will mean that I’ve got a whole new infinite set of stimuli to get my creative synapses firing, and the opportunity to perform with new people, in new settings, for new audiences…

Do you have any advice for serious hobbyists or part-time artists on balancing the “day job” and their art work?
There’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for how to manage the balance between earning a living, and pursuing your heart’s desire. For some people, these things are one and the same; for others, their art is best served by keeping it separate from thoughts about a bottom line. No one can tell you what’s right for you – you need to rely on your own self-knowledge and intuition. So if you’re feeling out of touch with yourself, step one is opening up the channels that let you hear your truest, inner voice. Step two is learning to trust that voice. Step three is taking action – sometimes big (like, my move to NY, or when I left PBS to make the leap into freelancing), sometimes small (like when I decided I wanted to take an acting class to supplement my improv work).

These steps are the work of a lifetime, and they’re also steps that you repeat over and over again, I find. I’ve had big breakthroughs, periods where I’m completely satisfied with the balance between my professional life and my artistic life… and then periods where I start to feel “off,” or weighed down, and I realize further tinkering is needed. You can’t do this if you don’t take care of yourself though – for me, yoga and journaling are critical tools for staying in touch with myself. And I have to give a lot of credit to The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron for setting me on this path in the first place – anyone struggling with these issues who hasn’t read that book owes it to themselves to pick it up. I also highly recommend a book called How to Find the Work You Love by Lawrence Boldt.

Is there anything else on this topic we haven’t covered that you think is relevant?
I’d just say that as you navigate the balance between earning a living and making art, it’s important not to get overly serious. One of my favorite quotes is from Howard Thurman, who said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Joy is in the journey, not just the destination. If you’re grinding your teeth over what kind of life you want to live – get out there and try stuff that sounds like fun; it’s the best way of identifying your heart’s desire.

What will the future hold for Amanda in NYC?

Photo courtesy SXC.

Art Every Day Month: November 1st

Novelists have NaNoWriMo to put the proverbial flame to their backsides during November. The rest of us creative types can participate in Art Every Day Month, a challenge hosted by Leah Piken Kolidas of Creative Every Day blog.

Art Every Day Month is in its seventh year, Kolidas notes on a separate page dedicated to explaining the challenge, and its sixth year of being a group challenge. The point is for artists to create as often as possible, but not feel pressured to meet any kind of hard-and-fast rules around the contest:

“I keep the rules for AEDM really simple and very loose. I encourage people to make something every day, but my goal is to foster more creativity, so if you make just one piece of art per week or just one for the whole month, that’s fine with me. The idea is to bring more creativity into your life, not to make you feel overwhelmed, pressured or guilt-stricken. Art is also loosely defined here. I mean art in the sense of anything creative, whether that be painting, drawing, knitting, sewing, cooking, decorating, writing, photography, clay, jewelry-making or whatever!

“Look at AEDM as a soft nudge to add more creativity to your everyday life with a bit of group support. It’s the group support that makes it so lovely I think.”

This year, Kolidas has added a survival guide for AEDM and there is an AEDM Flickr page, which will be augmented over time by those who participate in the challenge. Readers who want to get in on this year’s challenge can still participate by e-mailing her at leah0776@gmail.com.

Fifty Crows – Social Change Photography

Fifty Crows is a nonprofit that seeks to “bridge the gap between venues and distribution mediums for documentary photography” and ultimately cultivate social change as a result of the images that are produced. Founded in October 2001, FiftyCrows couples visual stories from world-class documentary photographer with action and media campaigns in order to affect change. Eschewing the “limited viewpoints and images” often purveyed by mainstream media, the group leverages its website and partnerships to unite communities to work together in confronting current social, political, and environmental challenges around the globe.

One of the core programs of Fifty Crows is the International Fund for Documentary Photography, which it inherited from Mother Jones Magazine. The IFDP has awarded more than half a million dollars to 78 photographers working around the world.

You can visit the main Fifty Crows site to view images by photographers associated with the project, learn about upcoming exhibits and action programs and purchase mind-blowing prints from famed documentarians at significantly discounted prices. The organization also has a terrific blog, which is updated almost daily with news about Fifty Crows artists and information from other like-minded documentary photography groups.

(I was alerted to this organization by my friend Julie Denesha, who is an amazing photographer in her own right. Thanks, Julie.)

Make Amazing Art, Be Authentic, Tell Your Stories and the Art Will Sell

If you read the Surf’s Up section on this blog regularly, you’ll notice I link to Clint Watson’s Fine Art Views blog quite often. I love his posts because he is both upbeat and unflinchingly realistic about making it commercially in the art world.

In this recent post, Watson talks about how storytelling is at the heart of building a successful following and business as a painter.

He tells us,

“Back when I owned an art gallery and spent most of my time selling art, I stumbled upon a little secret I’ll let you in on – I didn’t really ‘sell’ art, at least not in the way we think of a car salesperson ‘selling’ you a car.  The truth is, I spent most of my time being a storyteller.”

He provides several examples of the sorts of stories he told to gallery patrons related to specific artists. None of them are the least bit technical or aesthetic in nature—all relate to the artists as human beings, or what they had to go through to get a particular painting finished (including, in one case, the painter nearly being mauled by a leopard).

He explains why these are the sorts of stories artists should be spreading about themselves:

“If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that all these stories have something in common – they really don’t have anything to do with art methods, awards, exhibitions and the like.  And yet, over and over, I noticed that people I talked with in my role as ‘salesperson’ just weren’t that interested in knowing what awards an artist had won, what exhibits he/she had been in, what magazines had run feature stories. … Nope, what they loved was hearing about how their guy almost got mauled by a leopard.  I’m not being glib here.  I ‘sold’ a lot of art this way.”

Watson hypothesizes that this approach is successful because artists can act as what Hugh McLeod terms a Social Object, a concept he got from Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku.com. Simply put, a social object is a definable “thing” (product/service/idea) that connects people, and makes the core offerings of a business “sharable.”

This sharability factor is crucial when selling art online, Watson asserts. He quotes artist Linda Blondheim, writing in a recent WetCanvas.com forum thread,

“I have felt for a long time that some artists are on the wrong path in marketing. Most of the artists I know focus entirely on other artists and the artistic community. I think that is a mistake. Seventy percent of my patrons are not artists, and they are not really involved in the art community. They, instead, are involved in all of the things I love, like land and water conservation, history, nature, dogs, wildlife, cooking and foodie interests.

“I think many artists have a narrow viewpoint and a narrow interest … They would be surprised to find that many art buyers are buying because of the subject and interest in the artist because of non-art related interests.” (Emphasis is Watson’s.)

Overall, the post is an excellent primer on how to use social media and Web 2.0 to further your creative career, and why presenting yourself with the utmost authenticity online is not only a good idea, it’s vital to having any success in that world at all!

Bonus Links!!

20 Ways to Stimulate Your Own Creativity

Diana Adams, writing on the Bit Rebels blog, presents a score of great tips for getting your creative mojo flowing.

10 Must-See Art Documentaries

From the Art Schools Guide blog. Ten documentaries that show artists at work or delve into their psyche, including films about Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Maya Lin, I.M. Pei and others.

Crediting Your Artwork

A brief but excellent reminder from Alyson Stanfield of ArtBizBlog to always credit your images when you post them to your blog, Facebook page or other places online.

Novelist Sarah Quigley

Photo courtesy of Sarah Quigley.

Today we interview novelist Sarah Quigley, a writer who is balancing motherhood, with the pressures of producing a good sophomore work. Her story is particularly encouraging because she was able to succeed in getting published without a formal background in creative writing or English literature; she simply did work that she loved, and in an incredible stroke of luck, she received the opportunity to create a novel for a publishing house.

Quigley has great insights about the creative process and the necessity of time-outs during a long project. Enjoy!

Tell us about your creative pursuits, paid and unpaid.

I’ve been writing since I was six. A group of older children came to my first grade class to read books that they’d written and illustrated themselves. It occurred to me that I could write my own book, too, so I did. My first book was about best friends named Rocker and Mary, female versions of Goofus and Gallant (remember them from Highlights magazine?).

My aunt gave me a journal when I was nine, and I wrote regularly in that until I was in college. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I tried my hand at different kinds of writing: short stories, poetry, and opinion pieces for the school newspaper.

I began blogging in graduate school as a way to procrastinate on writing my master’s thesis. A few years later, it attracted the attention of an editor at Penguin. She thought my writing style would work well in a young adult novel and invited me to pitch her an idea for a book. I knew I would never get an opportunity like this again, so I immediately got to work putting together an outline. The editor liked it, I signed a contract, and three and a half years later, my debut novel, TMI, was published.

I’m currently working on my second book. Everyone asks if it’s a sequel to TMI, but it’s a totally new project. It’s a coming-of-age story that takes place at a summer resort.

Do you have any formal training in your creative discipline(s)? Do you feel training is important in creative development? Why/why not?

No, I don’t have any formal training in creative writing, but my academic pursuits were focused heavily on language. I have a bachelor’s degree in Russian and a master’s in English as a second language, and I believe my studies and professional experience have helped me develop as a writer.

I’m sure I would have benefited from taking some writing courses or joining a critique group (and I’m still open to doing these things). Instead, I spent many years alone in my room with a pen in my hand or sitting at a computer, getting all the words out. This was excellent training. True, I wasn’t getting any feedback, but that also gave me the freedom to experiment and find my voice. I didn’t worry about whether or not my writing was good enough for anyone else.

What habits do you cultivate to facilitate your creative “flow”?

Until I was under contract to write TMI, I simply wrote when the mood struck. Fortunately, that happened almost daily for many years. Then, when I had a deadline to deliver a completed manuscript, I had to get a bit more disciplined. I couldn’t treat writing as a full-time job, as some authors do, because I already had a full-time job teaching ESL to college students. I set aside an hour or two each day and forced myself to focus.

In between writing TMI and my new novel, I had a baby and became a stay-at-home mother. I thought I’d be able to write during nap time, but it turned out that I needed a nap as badly as my daughter did most days. It was often difficult to find even an hour of uninterrupted time each day, and I tended to glaze over when I finally sat down at the computer. I was overwhelmed and stressed out and feeling guilty about all the writing I wasn’t doing, so I gave myself permission to take a few months off.

This past summer, I returned to my new project with renewed vigor and a fresh plan of attack. My goal is to write a thousand words a day, six days a week. This forces me to be efficient with my time and also accommodates interruptions. It was a struggle to make myself reach my daily word count at first. Now I’ve got a great momentum going, and I recently rewarded myself with a new outfit for completing 20,000 words in less than a month. I expect to have a first draft finished before Thanksgiving.

What advice would you give to a “blocked” artist in your discipline to free up their creative energies?

Be patient with yourself. A year ago, I would have said that writers need to continue to write all the time, no matter what. However, I did myself a huge favor when I took a break. I finally recognized that, as a new mother, my focus had shifted and that it was normal and okay. I talked to other authors who were parents, and they assured me that I would find my creativity and ideas and mental energy again. And finally, I did.

Which artistic project that you are working on excites you the most right now?

There’s only one, and it’s my new novel. It’s quite a departure from TMI, and I’m really enjoying it.

How do you select your creative projects? What elements of a potential project tend to intrigue you the most?

So far, I’ve loosely based my novels around my own experiences. Of course, there are healthy doses of the imaginary; if I wrote biographically, the stories wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

I find plotting incredibly challenging, but I love creating characters and giving them quirks and mannerisms and secrets.

Any other advice to artists to help them create more effortlessly?

I’m not sure that “effortless” and “art” belong in the same sentence! That being said, I think that persistence, consistency, and silencing one’s inner critic are all crucial to the production process. On days when writing isn’t going well, I tell myself that it’s okay to write badly. After all, a badly written novel can be fixed, but an unwritten novel can’t.

Image courtesy of SXC.

Once again, Creative Liberation, the official e-newsletter of Creative Liberty, has rolled off the virtual presses. You should subscribe to the letter to make sure it gets delivered to your inbox each month, but you can get a sneak peek of what you’re in for by reading this month’s edition.

In this month’s edition, we take a look at tips for harvesting your creative ideas and I share a whole bunch of cool links for your inspiration.

Enjoy!

Photo courtesy of SXC.

Nurturing the innovation reef

In this interesting post from McKinsey & Company’s What Matters blog, Mario Morino asserts that innovation is like a coral reef, in that marine biologists don’t fully understand what causes reefs to form, but do know that human actions can nurture or harm the process.

He says,

“The same is true for innovation—a natural, chaotic, unpredictable process that is hard, perhaps even impossible, for well-meaning outsiders to foster. If we try to control or micromanage innovation, we risk squeezing out the very life forces that give rise to successful new ideas. Instead, we must focus on finding ways to nurture and accelerate the natural processes of innovation once they’ve begun organically.”

He points to Silicon Valley in California as a prime example of reef “ecology” in action.

“For almost half a century, Silicon Valley has been the most compelling example of a healthy innovation ecosystem in the United States … It’s important to note that Silicon Valley’s remarkable ecosystem was not the result of a grand plan hatched by a civic or political leader. It developed organically, beginning as far back as the Great Depression, when Stanford University students Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett started tinkering in Packard’s Palo Alto garage. It’s also important to note that there has never been a defined, structured way to connect the dots in the valley. Instead, this organic ecosystem, with its interrelated professional and personal networks, has allowed the dots to connect themselves.”

The rest of Morino’s very comprehensive blog post focuses on several actions that could be taken at the national/federal level to build a strategic framework to help these reefs receive more consistent nurturing, and also proposes some interesting experiments, such as a federal innovation stock exchange for encouraging the federal government’s 4.2 million employees to float out-of-the-box solutions for tough societal challenges.

Whatever you may think of Morino’s suggestions, his reef metaphor certainly seems like an apt one for innovative work or creativity in general. Nurture, don’t control!!!

How Simplicity Can Help Creativity, Briefly
I’ve spoken with Leo Babauta several times on this blog, most recently in relation to his book The Power of Less. This recent post on Leo’s Zen Habits blog is a lovely, quite specific articulation of how practicing simplicity can benefit one when attempting to create.

There are three points out of the 11 that Leo makes that I especially love:

“Ideas, again. Instead of finding ways to do more than everyone else, find ways to do less. If your competitor has a coffee shop with a wide array of beverages and food items, narrow it down: offer just one kind of coffee, but make it amazing…

“When you’re overwhelmed, focus on less. If the project is too big or complicated or just hard, narrow it down. If you must write a book, don’t focus on the whole book, or even a whole chapter. Just write a section — something you can do in a few hours or less. If you’re starting a new business, don’t worry about getting the whole thing up and running — what’s the smallest amount you can offer at first, the smallest unit you can create? Focus on that.

“Do just a little each day. If you can write for 20-30 minutes a day, or take a few photos a day, it won’t be long before you’ve created something great. This tip is for those who think they don’t have time to create. It doesn’t have to take all day, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Just clear 20 minutes and create — do nothing else during that time.”

All of the points are worth reading, and all are very true. Sometimes, when you’re going to create something meaningful, it’s not bigger and better than comes out on top—it’s simple and focused.

Are You Killing Enough Ideas?
A long post from Strategy + Business that argues that killing some creative ideas is necessary for businesses to capitalize on the truly useful ones.

Authors Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach argue that truly innovative companies have an optimal balance between the informal part of their organization (the soft, squishy creative part that generates ideas) and the formal part (the project management and hard data side that brings them to market and makes them profitable). If creativity is king, they argue, idea-selection becomes overly political and creative teams are encouraged to chase every idea, no matter how unprofitable. If the formal side of the house rules the roost, nascent ideas that are disruptive innovations (rather than extensions of a company’s existing product set) will not be allowed to see the light of day or receive the support they need to be developed properly.

The part of the post I liked the most concerned the importance of harvesting adequate information from “failed” projects and ideas. The authors assert that having a high number of failed ideas in one’s organizational past, far from being an embarrassment, is actually a sign that the innovation function is being well managed and that workers are learning from their mistakes.

This is how they put it:

“Whether in transforming a company’s innovation practices or in maintaining them over time, one of the most revealing indicators of effectiveness is the number of losing ideas. This may at first seem counter-intuitive, if the goal is to take ideas to market. However, a high number of losing ideas indicates that the informal and formal aspects of innovation are working well together. It shows that the enterprise is creatively generating enough ideas, evaluating them to predict which will be successful, then applying internal discipline to drop support for those that won’t work while shifting time, money, and attention to driving the best into the market.”

This is a long article, and very business focused, but there’s a huge take-away lesson for artists in this, too. Creative people who are able to learn from their failures, and who can quickly determine which ideas are ripe for commercial potential and which are strictly for personal art-making experiments, are often able to make the most use of all of their exploratory work.

Bonus Links!

16 Inventions That Boost Habitats, Humanity, Health and Happiness
From Fast Company.com. Emily Pilloton is founder of the non-profit Project H Design, where chapters of designers around the world collaborate on products that improve the four H’s: habitats, humanity, health and happiness.

Roadshow and Tell: Fahrenheit 451
Fellow Arizona blogger-artist-writer-coach Quinn McDonald had her altered book, which she developed based on Ray Bradbury’s classic sci-fi novel, highlighted on the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read Blog”!

Hitchcock – Mobile storyboarding for your iPhone
Cinemek has created an iPhone app that uses photos instead of hand-drawn sketches for storyboarding and allows filmmakers to storyboard directly from their iPhone.

Photo courtesy SXC.

It’s an artistic stereotype that creative people are “disorganized.” Anyone who’s spent time around successful artists will probably notice that they are anything but. Unconventionally organized, perhaps, but most creatively productive folks have some sort of system to help them stay on top of their art-making, the business side of their vocation, and their family and social commitments.

If you are casting about for an organizing framework, one of the bigger names in systematizing these days is the Getting Things Done (GTD) system, developed by David Allen. Allen created GTD while piloting a productivity seminar for a thousand managers at Lockheed in 1983. His system has grown into an information empire, and adherents consider it a powerful method to manage commitments, information, and communication.

The heart of Allen’s system is the concept that lists of all the things that need to get done must be put into a logical and trusted system outside of one’s head. The key, once that’s been accomplished, is to have the discipline to make decisions about all the “inputs” in one’s life, so there will always be a plan for the next actions to take, although those plans can be renegotiated at any time.
GTD mandates five stages to workflow on any project:
1.    Collect all inputs—especially those hanging out inside your head. Get them on paper or in the computer!!
2.    Process the inputs—assess whether the input requires an action or if it could be useful in the future (tickler file, reference material)
3.    Organize the results—utilize a system for tracking and moving information
4.    Review options—Look over what you could do, now that you have the proper information available at your fingertips
5.    Do—take action if it’s a priority, time/energy is available, and the context makes sense

Allen’s book provides comprehensive information about how to put the GTD system to work. (You can also read this nice synopsis of the book from WikiSummaries.)

What does GTD offer artists and creative people?

You may be wondering what all this left-brain sounding activity can do to benefit those living the creative life. One of the best explanations I’ve found comes out of the mouth of musician/writer/speaker and 43Folders.com website creator Merlin Mann. He was interviewed for Lifehacker blog a few years ago, and here’s what he had to say about artists and freelancers using the GTD system:

“In my experience, GTD can work really well for almost anyone who primarily has to manage themselves.

“So many careers — whether consulting, programming, sales, writing, or even art and music — are basically a black box to the people who are paying the tab. They hire you for your skills and then understandably expect you to take care of all the sausage-making that makes the magic happen. … Ditto in spades for freelancers and the self-employed. Having a theoretically unlimited amount of time to do a theoretically unlimited number of projects is fun for about ten minutes, and then you basically feel like your staring into an abyss.

“GTD provides a sufficiently transparent and flexible framework to allow people with a huge array of interests and careers to provide a shape to the formerly inchoate. Whether you’re making sculptures or filling out invoices, you’ll benefit from a system that keeps you focused on the best use of your time and creativity.”

A visual artist who’s found GTD to be useful is Aisling D’Art, who struggles with Allen’s book but finds following the system makes her to-do lists, well, doable.

“It’s not easy reading (Allen’s book). Not for me, anyway… (But) it’s already making a huge difference in how much I’m getting done. More importantly, it’s given me more focus for my creative projects. And, it’s given me a way of creating to-do lists that I can actually complete, even when unexpected things come up and divert my attention.”

What works about GTD

I will come clean here—I am not a GTD adherent; I am offering this post as a window into an organizing system that has a lot of support and documentation available, since many folks find that helpful. With that said, here’s what I like about GTD’s five steps:

Any system that encourages “getting it out of your head” has done at least one thing right. Our brains can only hold a limited amount in our working memory and ideas and creative inspirations are competing with your grocery list, your e-mail inbox and your phone messages list. Finding an appropriate holder for information as it comes at you is crucial to actually finding it when you want to act on it.

GTD forces you to step back and evaluate inputs, rather than reacting solely on an input’s perceived “urgency.” We’ve all heard the advice, “Never let the urgent crowd out the important,” but it’s difficult to practice this in real time. GTD’s middle three steps force one to figure out the proper response to the input and if immediate (or eventual) action is really the best option.

Flexibility of response is built-in. GTD goes beyond just making a to-do list, or several to-do lists. The review phase just before the “do” phase allows one to consider several options, and doesn’t make ACTING the be-all and end-all. This focus allows one to take the right action, rather than seeing acting as right under all circumstances.

What doesn’t work about GTD

Of course, not everyone—artistic or not—is a fan of GTD. Jamie Grove, writing in 2007 on the assertively named How Not to Write Blog, mentions that co-workers at his tech-savvy workplace had embraced GTD, but he had not. For him, the joy of the flow of writing trumps any worries about productivity or process. This is how he explains his stance:

“I haven’t got it in me to prioritize anymore. I don’t want to get things done. I just want a long, uninterrupted think, and maybe a cigarette (even though I don’t smoke). I’ll keep to my scatterbrained ways and think about the flock of robins that landed in my front yard and wonder just what the hell they were all doing together.

“Writing, even structured writing, takes me away from all that process oriented crap. It’s takes me away from the if-then mentality of the workaday world. It is my salvation.”

Another on-point critique of GTD, ironically, comes from Andrew Flusche, an ardent lover of the Getting Things Done system. He says he’s writing tongue in cheek in this 2007 post on his Legal Andrew blog, but his complaints—that there are too many books, blogs, indexes, software packages and Moleskine notebooks out there to help you successfully organize your life via GTD—actually hold some sway, if you ask me. I’m very suspicious of any system that requires me to invest in lots of paraphernalia before I even begin to sort through my piles—but then again, I was the girl who had the local printer make up my high school graduation announcements and headlined them with the Thoreau quote, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

Resources for artists getting started with GTD

GTD Times
Official blog of Allen and the business he has built around the system.

Getting started with Getting Things Done
From Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders blog, which discusses the usefulness of various productivity techniques.

Massive GTD Resource List
From Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog. Leo is a writer who is a huge fan of GTD.

GTD Drawings
A blog by (male) artist Joan M. Mas, with the tagline, “because getting organized should be attractive.” Illustrations and tips for using GTD.

GTD Toolbox: 100+ Resources for Getting Things Done
A Mashable.com list with lots of GTD-related apps you can download.

The questions to you

Do you use GTD or another formal system to organize your life? How does your organizational system impact your ability to make art and/or be creative when you want to be?

Photo courtesy SXC.

The Myth of Crowdsourcing

Dan Woods, chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, argues that crowds don’t innovate, inspired brilliant individuals do, in this essay from Forbes.com.

He begins his story by mentioning the recent Netflix crowdsourcing challenge, then questioning the concept that groups of people solve problems or innovate better than individuals.

“In the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous…

“There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. … The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.”

Woods discusses his assertion related to open-source software, computer programming and other techie fields. He is frank about what his real concern is, which isn’t incipient agoraphobia:

“Why do I care that people think a crowd is capable of individual virtuosity? What bugs me is that misplaced faith in the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor. We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail. A false idea of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition that companies can tap the minds of inventors on the cheap.”

Woods’ op-ed is strong tonic in a world that’s definitely fallen in love with the crowdsourcing concept. I do share his concern with “using” the crowd to solve internal problems at the expense of properly rewarding individuals who innovate or create. I’m not as convinced the danger is as intense in the arts, as collaboration and audience participation in installations and projects are commonplace (not to mention that how the audience defines itself keeps changing) and often add to the artwork in question. Still, his piece is worth reading just to know the flip side of this very trendy business concept.

Teaching Craft in a Designed World

Nick de la Mare, writing for Design Mind’s Total Design blog, discusses the tensions between craft vs. universal design theory in design education and in the real world of designing for clients or employers.

De la Mare notes that he has taught design at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and he struggles with the best way to prepare young designers to face a rapidly changing field.

“The role of craft within design has become increasingly relevant. As design becomes more of a generalist field, with designers expected to be conversant in a far wider variety of areas than in the past, it’s important that we have a process to lean on, a foundation to build upon, and an understanding of how it, and we, became this way…”

It’s important not to overemphasize one pole of the craft/design tension at the expense of the other, he argues. For example, while many academic environments still emphasize craftsmanship, he says, this emphasis has actually made life more difficult for those in applied design fields such as graphic design or industrial design, which must deal with mass production demands and the machine economy as facts of life.

De la Mare concludes that integration of the craft/design split is the best approach.

“I would argue that, as designers moving inexorably further from specialist to generalist roles, we need to be better at both identifying and teaching the underlying habits and structure that lie between practice and thinking, and using those habits until they become second nature…Those on the making side must focus more on the theory and reasoning behind the things they create, and vice versa; those on the theoretical side must hone their ability to create. Ultimately the best-looking thing is meaningless if there’s nothing behind the façade, and the best story is useless if nobody can understand it.”

The essay is interesting even for non-designers. Industrial Revolution thinking and manufacturing touches all creative people, no matter how esoteric the discipline (poets, think of Hallmark’s influence on popular perception of verse), and de la Mare’s essay will make you examine where you fall along the craft/design spectrum.

Internet Art: Craigslist Missed Connections Become Gorgeous Visuals

This is an intriguing short report from Mashable.com about the work of Sophie Blackall, a New York City-based artist who has turned the musings would-be romantics on Craigslist into an artistic hobby and budding business.

Missed Connections is the section of Craigslist where posters seek to recapture lost opportunities for romance. Blackall, who works by day as a children’s book illustrator, has created a sideline mining this subject matter, rich as it is with regret, longing, passion and irony, to create ink-and-watercolor paintings that offer her interpretations of the messages. She sells her works on Etsy and blogs about them on the appropriately named Missed Connections blog. She’s also negotiating with a publisher to bring forth a book of the illustrations.

Blackall is another example of an artist, much like the contributors to the POKE! exhibit in Houston I mentioned recently, who is taking social media for what it is—one more way to engage in the human drama of communication—and making meaning, and delightful art, out of it. Bravo!

Bonus links!!!

Push Through a Creative Block with a Diversion

From the Lifehacker blog. Eliminate your block with a sneak attack by doing something unrelated to your art.

10 Ways to Help Left Brainers Tap Into the Best of Their Creativity

The Heart of Innovation blog gives excellent tips for warming up analytical types in order to unleash their idea-generating power.

Arturo Herrera on Failure

From the Art 21 blog. In his Berlin studio, Arturo Herrera discusses the importance of accepting failure in order to be able to learn and grow as an artist in this very brief video.

Photo courtesy of SXC.

Another month, another e-newsletter …read about the role of failure in the creative process, discover the wisdom of “Little Miss Sunshine,” and find plenty of cool creativity-related links to stir your grey matter. Go take a peek at the new edition.

And don’t forget to sign up to receive Creative Liberation by e-mail!

Photo courtesy of SXC.

The Creative Person’s Hierarchy of Needs

This is a delightful post by Cynthia Morris of JourneyJuju.com. She asserts that in addition to the traditional hierarchy of needs posited by psychologist Abraham Maslow, creative persons have other needs that must be satisfied in order to life a fully productive life.

“Creative people, those who are making things – books, businesses, design, art – have additional needs. Recognizing these needs and making sure they are met are essential to applied creativity.

“When we don’t acknowledge our needs, we’re allowing life to dictate our experience. Knowing your needs and being willing to take action to make sure they are met will make the already challenging work of creating much easier.”

Morris says that creative people have the following needs:

Need for creative space

Need for creative peers

Need for creative fuel

Need for imaginative space

Need for the body to be expressed

Need for your creative edge

Need for ample amounts of faith and belief

Need to have our work responded to

Need for certainty

Need for time

One of my favorites from this list is the one concerning the need for a “creative edge.” Morris explains this need as,

“Solving problems, pushing boundaries, developing something new is at the heart of the creative process. Rather than despair about how difficult it is to write a really good article, embrace the challenge of your craft. While you’re at it, embrace the challenge of your creative industry. For instance, publishing a book traditionally seems nearly impossible these days. Take that challenge on by either figuring out the publishing game or self-publishing. Relish the creative edge – you need it.”

The post is a great article and jives nicely with my Creative Person’s Bill of Rights. A large part of maintaining creative momentum relates to taking care of oneself, and meeting our basic needs as artists is a large part of that.

POKE! exhibit spotlights art made with social media

This article from the Houston Chronicle focuses on a September 2009 show at the FotoFest Gallery in Houston that uses social media as its pretext.

Curated by Jennifer Ward, FotoFest’s exhibitions coordinator, “POKE! Artists and Social Media” brings together photographic, video- and Web-based work by eight artists who use — and in some cases re-enact — material from many of the popular sites that define so much of 21st-century life.

Ward’s inspiration came “from seeing how more and more organizations and politicians, particularly Obama, were using social media to drive their message to the public or to reach new audiences, and then just using social media myself — being a part of Facebook,” she said in the Chronicle article.

Some of the exhibit’s artists used social media in a light way (such as Lee Walton of Greensboro, N.C. whose video shorts are reenactments of his friends’ and relatives’ Facebook status updates, no matter how silly or banal), but others take on heavier fare. As reporter Douglas Britt notes,

“The show’s most affecting, often heartbreaking work is a pair of videos by David Oresick, who excerpts and edits together YouTube footage posted by U.S. soldiers during and after their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. You see soldiers behaving both bravely and badly, in both relaxed and hair-raising moments … Then you see them after they’ve returned home, surprising loved ones, going on drunken rampages and — in an infuriating, saddening scene — jumping to their feet in groggy fright as a wife, girlfriend or sister screams to startle them awake in a foolish prank. It’s all there in footage the soldiers have posted themselves.”

This story is a good example of how artists are using social media and how they are deepening the conversation about its role both as a communication tool and a shaper of communication.

See, feel and hear great ideas: Engaging your modalities in the workplace

Gary Bertwhistle writing on the Innovation Tools blog, makes a brilliant (I think) assertion about the best way for people to develop creative ideas by leveraging whichever learning modality (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) is their strongest.

Here’s how Bertwhistle lays out his thesis:

“I think there is a relationship between finding great ideas and your learning modalities. Here’s how it might work: If you’re a visual person, then in order to unlock your great ideas, you need to see things. You need to be out and about with color, movement, pictures…

“Auditory people will need to have noise, conversation and even in some cases, silence around them, to be able to produce good ideas…

“Kinesthetic people will think best when their hands are engaged and doing something. ie playing with a toy, clicking a pen, being able to play with a scale model or prototype, or page through a magazine.

“What are the implications of this idea? When you run brainstorming sessions, you should use color, movement, interaction, conversation and combine all the modalities together so as to ensure that everybody in the room is engaged with their particular style.”

I would add to this very intelligent assessment that most of us have a secondary modality that we utilize at least part of the time, and mixing all the modalities when generating ideas may also spark some excellent cross-pollination or interplay, as we bounce back and forth between our strongest and second-strongest modality. Heck, we might even pick something up from switching back and forth between our strongest and our weakest modality.

Bonus Links!!

50 Ways to Foster a Sustainable Culture of Innovation

The Heart of Innovation blog authors discuss ways to close the gap between theory and knowledge in terms of developing an innovation-centric work culture.

Creative Deconstruction: Why Dell’s Designers Tear Apart Their Own Computers

Ken Musgrave writing for Fast Company. “Most of a designer’s time is focused on the pursuit of improvement at the moment of creation–the birth of a product’s lifecycle. But it is often important to look at the other end of the lifecycle–the deconstruction of the very products that they create.”

Photo courtesy SXC.

It’s a pretty well established fact that mastery in any field, especially the creative arts, doesn’t come from talent alone; deliberate practice – about 10,000 hours worth – is needed to get really good at just about anything.

One way to stay motivated as you go through your practice regimen is to make yourself accountable to others. Often, if we have to tell someone else we didn’t do what we committed ourselves to doing, we’ll find a way to get it done.

A fun way to build accountability into your practice schedule is to blog about the results of your practice. In addition to providing motivation through accountability, blogging can allow you to get feedback on your technique, share ideas with other artists, and build connections with other practitioners and fans of your art form.

Here’s a brief list of some of the “practice” or “challenge” blogs I’ve read regularly; all of them have in common the desire to share the results of one’s creative output on a regular, if not a daily, basis. Take a look and see if you can find some approaches to publishing your practice results that help you grow creatively and are fun to do as well.

Writing

Promptly
This Writer’s Digest blog posts new writing prompts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Writers are encouraged to share their responses to the prompts in the comment section of the blog.

The Morning Porch
This sweet little microblog provides a 140-character report of what blogger Dave Bonta can see from the front porch of his home, which is often something natural and beautiful. The posts frequently read like poetry!

Painting

Daily Painting Practice
Peter Yesis, a oil painter in the Midwest, shares his work as a “daily painter,” which refers to the practice of creating a painting each day, often in a small format or as a study for a larger work.

Carol Marine’s Painting a Day
Marine, who lives in Texas, posts her daily work online in this blog and also offers links to where she sells these treasures. She also lists upcoming daily painting classes that she teaches.

Daily Paintworks
This site offers the work of 12 daily painters. You can sign up for an e-mail featuring their daily output, or you can view each day’s creations on the site itself. It also offers links to each individual artist’s website and videos showing the daily paintings as they are being created.

Music

Gotta Go Practice
This blog, authored by a cello player, offers her ongoing thoughts about the material she is rehearsing and where she is at with mastering the material. I like the informal tone of the blog; it reminds me of hanging out with my band mates in junior high and high school and discussing the music we were learning for school band or our other gigs.

Acoustic Guitar
This blog, done by long-time player Tony Hogan, incorporates lots of multimedia in an attempt to help guitarists get better at what they love. Tony posts lots of clips of pros from YouTube and audio files as well (not to mention free guitar tablature, articles and short tips). But someone operating a practice blog could just as easily post video or audio files of their own practice sessions to share and invite comments.

Sketching

One Mile From Home and A Family Portrait
In 2006, UK artist Julie Oakley set herself a challenge—walk a minimum of one mile from home and record what she saw with a drawing, sculpture, photo or painting, every day for a year. She spent 365 days during 2006-07 doing that, and then started a new challenge blog in 2007-08—draw a portrait of her various family members as often as possible.

She has continued the second challenge into 2009, and the sketches are often quick studies of her loved ones on planes, sitting at cafés, or just going about the motions of living at home. Her work has a lively quality to it that makes you feel as if you want to be there with the family.

With My Boots and Sketchbook
Penny blogs about the sketches and lino cuts she is inspired to make after tramping around the area near her home in rural southern Australia. She also includes a bit of haiku and news about her life. I feel as if I’m chatting over the back fence with her and she’s showing me the sketchbook in person.

My Creative Journey
Blogger Trish from Ohio shares pages from her sketchbook, her watercolor paintings, and creations in her art journal.

The question to you…

Do you have a practice-oriented blog where you share your creative work-in-progress or the output from your daily practice sessions? If so, please include a link and explanation in the comments area below.