We are all creators.

Module 16: why keep creating? // audio tutorial

In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says,

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.” 

For the past fifteen modules, we’ve provided tutorials, tools, and templates to help you build your podcast—but we hope that in that process, you’ve also built a creative life. It’s the reason why we began with that big question—why create? Why we keep asking it again and again. In this module, we come full circle and ask it in another way: why keep creating?

It’s the question that has echoes not just in the halls of creative inspiration, but in the dungeons of doubt. Because underneath it is another more pointed question: does creativity matter? Is it important? Is it necessary? Is it essential? 

We’ve asked ourselves that question a lot over the years, especially in those early months of Shelter in Place, including in an episode called “Non-essential,” where I quote J.K. Dineen’s story about the San Francisco housing crisis. He writes that living in San Francisco “is not a viable option for the majority of workers any city needs to function: nurses, teachers, cops, firefighters, cooks, librarians, medical researchers, carpenters, architects, plumbers, clerks, bus drivers, social workers, mechanics. Not to mention all the people a city needs to be a place worth living: the dancers, painters, songwriters, singers, designers, actors, poets.”

I think J.K. Dineen is right. Elizabeth Gilbert is right, too. Creativity won’t cure diseases or build houses—it might not even pay our bills—but in more subtle ways, it saves us. It makes life worth living. It gives us a way to take even the most painful parts of life and salvage from them something profound and beautiful. My poet friend Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who co-hosts the podcast Emerging Form, likes to say that art saved her life. She lost a child to suicide during the pandemic, and I can see the truth in her words in everything she does. 

It’s saved my life in a way, too. It’s gotten me through seasons of depression and loss, given me a way to put something good into the world even when it felt like I had nothing left to give. As Anthony Doerr says in this week’s episode, there are reasons to create that are useful, but maybe our premise for asking that question is off. Maybe the best reason of all to create is that it’s joyful. Our compulsion to create is one of the most marvelous parts of our humanity. 

So in this module, we’ll look not just why—but how—we keep creating, and then we’ll look at some practical ways to develop your own creative life. We’ll also provide tools to help you think through the next steps of your podcast, including a launch strategy to get your work out into the world so you can keep creating.

Creativity happens in rhythms and seasons 

Laura: For most of us, the hardest part of that why create question isn’t the “why” but the “how.” Of course we’d like to create, and maybe we’ve even gotten clear on why we’re creating—but how do we keep creating if our creativity isn’t paying the bills? Or if our day job has us working long hours? Or if we’re raising children who never give us a moment to ourselves? 

Creativity is a lot like a garden or a field of crops. It grows and blooms in seasons. There may be years of plenty, when it seems like our ideas and energy will never run out—and then there may be months or years where every seed we plant dies before it reaches full bloom. 

Sometimes those seasons of fallow ground are circumstantial. In the eight years when I was trying to write while parenting three young kids, there were constant creative constraints on both my energy and my time. There was also a shortage of creative compost to feed future ideas. I didn’t have much time to read books during those years. My brain was too full of meal planning and nap schedules. I was still writing, but I wasn’t seeing a lot of results because even when I did have time to work, I’d spent the first hour or more just untangling myself from my to do list so I could think.

Nate: From Stephen King to Elizabeth Gilbert to most of the podcasters we know, most of us have to have a day job—or a night job, or a partner, or some other source of income—that supports our creativity, at least for a while. 

As someone who has spent the majority of his career creating for other people at ad agencies or as a creative director to help market products, I’ve experienced both the benefits and the traps of getting paid for your creativity. It feels good to be paid to create, to see the tangible results not just through your work, but through a paycheck that can provide a little more security. 

But it can also drain your time and creative energy so that you don’t have anything left for your own projects. When I first started out in advertising, I had grand visions of publishing essays and books on the side, but over time I found that after creating for other people all day, I didn’t have the energy for my own ideas. I was working the creative soil so consistently in my day job that the soil was too depleted of nutrients to grow anything of my own. I probably could have used some fallow ground in those years, but it just wasn’t possible. 

Laura: We can also find ourselves in seasons of fallow ground when our learning has slowed. The four years after I got my MFA I was coaching distance runners full-time at the same school where I got my degree, and since I got summers off, I’d spend most of that time writing. I wrote a lot of words during those years, but the stories and novels I wrote never were the cathedrals of fire I envisioned when I imagined them. It took me years to understand why. When I was a grad student, submitting my work in weekly writing workshops, often reading two novels a week for my classes, and learning from masters of the craft, I was growing constantly. It was a little messy sometimes, but in that environment where I had permission to try creative experiments just for the sake of learning, I grew into myself as a writer. I was still growing in those solitary years after that, when I would hole myself up in a Minnesota cabin and write for weeks at a time—but the growth was slower, both because I was doing it alone, and because I was in that awkward phase of learning where I needed to try a lot of things that didn’t work before I landed on the ones that would. I was searching for my voice, as writers like to say, that way of writing that was authentically mine. It would take me many more stories and years before I’d find it.

Then I got a Fulbright scholarship and Nate and I moved to Manila for a year—another period of learning, this time of language and culture. My brain was so full with the Tagalog and new culture I was trying to learn and the relationships I was building with the people around me that I wrote very little of the novel I was supposed to be creating—until the last month of our time there, when I went away to a tiny mountain hut and wrote twelve hours a day for three weeks straight, and came back to the city with the first draft of a novel.

It wasn’t until I began Shelter in Place that I finally understood what was going on in all of those different sessions. All of those months and years of fallow ground and creative frustration hadn’t been wasted. There were seeds germinating as I was learning to write alone, learning to write in between raising kids, learning to write not in someone else’s voice, but my own. Sometimes we need seasons of low productivity because we’re absorbing new learning. Sometimes we need them because we’re absorbing life. Even the act of stopping can set the stage for later creative experiments. So if you’re in a season of creative frustration, of feeling like you just can’t get anything done, remember that it’s a season. When you’re in a creative dry spell, know that the rains will come—maybe not on schedule, but they will come eventually.

Which brings me to the next big idea of this module, which is that the best way to wait for the rain is to prepare the creative soil through creative habits and rhythms.

Develop Creative Habits & Rhythms

Nate: The Russian writer Anton Chekov once said “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” 

I think what he’s getting at here is that most of life is lived not in creative ecstasy, but in the ordinary moments in between those inspirations. 

In modern Western society, we’re in love with quick fixes, dramatic turnarounds, and heroic bursts of effort: the novel written in a month. The former alcoholic lawyer turned vegan triathlete. Or every listicle in a grocery store magazine promising life transformation in X easy steps. But most of the time what we need is not a big, dramatic event, but changes on a smaller scale to orient us in the right direction.

James Clear puts it another way: most people need consistency more than they need intensity. He says that intensity—running a marathon, writing a book in 30 days, or, say 100 episodes in 4 months—makes for a good story, but consistency makes progress. 

Laura: Doing 100 daily episodes was intense—so intense that I was pretty burnt out by the end of season 1—and it gave me a good story. But it was the consistency of that daily practice—not the intensity—that gave me the creative habits and rhythms that allowed me to continue not just with podcast episodes, but other areas of my creative life. 

At some point in season 2, I found that as much as I was enjoying creating weekly episodes, I missed the fiction writing I’d been doing for twenty years before that. But I was in a season of almost no margin. In addition to putting out those weekly episodes, Nate and I were laying the foundation for a business that would eventually include not just this course but a nonprofit narrative podcast training intensive, the Kasama Collective. It was everything I could do to keep those efforts going—but I wasn’t willing to give up on my fiction writing.

So I took the lessons that I’d learned from those 100 daily episodes and applied them to this other area of life. I developed creative rhythms to support the creative work I wasn’t willing to let go of. I started my day with the daily gratitude and journaling practice we’ve included in this week’s module. Then I closed all of my browser tabs, opened up the file for my novel, set a timer for 5 minutes, and wrote as fast as I could. Sometimes those 5 minutes became 15 minutes, because I was in the middle of a thought and wanted to complete it before I stopped. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep my head in the larger story day after day, so I could ruminate on it in the in-between spaces, letting my subconscious work on it even when I wasn’t actively writing. Occasionally I missed some days or sometimes even whole weeks, but since I’d put a daily event on my calendar and the habit was there, I never stayed away from it for long. After a year and a half of doing this practice, I found that I’d written 60,000 words. There was still a lot of work left to be done, but I could see the narrative arc clearly. I knew what I needed to do to finish the story.

But for every time in my life when I’ve successfully developed a new habit to cultivate creative living, there have been dozens more creative rhythms attempted and discarded before they had a chance to take root. Which brings me to the final big principle in this module . . . .

Changing our External Environment Can Foster Creativity

During those fallow years of writing while I was coaching, I was also discovering Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way for the first time. It was a book I desperately needed at that time in my life, because it gave me a bigger vision for what creativity could look like. The exercises in that book weren’t just for writers. They were for all kinds of makers—people who might never call themselves artists, but who still had that innate drive to create. I took 12 months to make it through her 12 chapters in creative recovery, and in that time I made collages, drew pictures, and wrote poetry. 

But even with all of those creative rhythms, I still felt stuck with my writing. It wasn’t until we made that move to the Philippines, when my external environment changed dramatically, that I was finally able to sit down and write something I felt proud of.

But you don’t have to move to another country to change your environment. The scene that opened our season 3 episode “Eight Secrets for Guaranteed Happiness” is a smaller scale example of this. After years of neglecting the overgrown plants in our front yard, I got inspired one Saturday afternoon to do a little rage-pruning. It began with the camelia bush I talked about in that episode, a perfect metaphor for what I was trying to do with my life. In the weeks and months that followed, my excavation efforts extended to the rest of the yard, as I began digging up root systems that had taken over the soil, pulling out dead stems and churning the soil so something new could grow. Then some neighbors gifted us with some succulents, and we got the idea to replace those jungly front yard plants with some that were a little more suited boht to our climate and our stage of life. 

Today, our front yard is a succulent garden with dozens of different varieties. That camelia bush I hacked back is doing just fine. We even cleared away enough of the plants that now there’s a seating area out front. The place that was once a source of irritation has now become a place of delight. It’s perhaps no accident that the idea for Risking Delight, our next podcast project, came during those same months when we were excavating our yard and planting the cuttings we’d received from yards all over our neighborhood. It’s still a work in progress, and it’ll take a while before our tiny succulents grow to fill in the gaps, but every time I look at our front yard, it makes me happy to see it, because it’s proof that change is possible, even when we’re feeling overwhelmed. It’s a reminder that change can feel good even as it’s happening, especially when we’re taking tangible steps to enact that change.

Sometimes we need to change our external environment to foster our internal one. Maybe it’s as subtle as how we arrange our work space or putting our phone in another room on silent while we work. Maybe it’s as dramatic as moving to another country. But part of living in the rhythm of creativity means identifying when things aren’t working and figuring out how to do them differently.