(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)

How to not become a creator

1. Listen to those voices in your head. The ones that tell you you’re not qualified and you’re not good enough and they would all just laugh at you and no one cares what or if ever you create. These voices sometimes sound like a cringe-worthy shout, when you’re about to hit that publish button. Sometimes they sound like a can’t-ignore whisper, when you’re staring at a blank page or a white canvas or an empty room where beauty waits to be imagined. Stop. Give up. Forget about creating. Listen to them and feel the way they shake your hands and steal courage from color and turn legs soft. Believe them and put down your pen and cover your canvas and lock that dance room door. Because they’re right. You could never do this.

2. Believe you don’t have time to create. There’s a full-time job that leaves no breathing room in the margins. There are kids sucking the life out of you. There are responsibilities that just can’t be delegated or neglected or renegotiated. You have no time to work on this creative pursuit, and no one looking at your crammed-full schedule would argue. So don’t even go looking for time, because it doesn’t exist. Just do what you’ve always done, save it for later, and hope that someday, somehow, that time to create will just show up on your lap and you’ll live happily ever after.

3. Subscribe to the camp that says one size fits all. It’s the camp that says you have to pursue creativity in the earliest hours of the morning because that’s before the internal editors wake up, except as soon as you roll out of bed you have to get kids fed and packed up and to school in time, and by the time they’re all gone, your internal editors are already shouting all over each other (Or should be…except it’s eerily quiet). It’s the camp that says you should write three thousand words a day every day if you ever hope to get any better than you are now, and who are you kidding? You don’t have time or words like that to spare. It’s the camp that says you’ll never reach the state of flow necessary for creative endeavors unless you have long blocks of uninterrupted time. If you can’t subscribe to this camp, you should just give up, because you’ll never play with the majors. Don’t you know? One size fits all when it comes to creativity.

4. It better be perfect on the first try. If you’re truly skilled at your craft and want to be taken seriously, you better get it right the first time. You shouldn’t need two drafts or seven drafts or seven thousand drafts to write like Faulkner. And if you do, you better destroy the evidence, because what if someone finds that choppy, doesn’t-even-make-sense babble scrawled on three pages; and what if they see the way you botched that portrait’s face, the eyes that are crooked and weird and inhuman; and what if they hear that first composition where you went up instead of down and the song was almost ruined because of it? Get it right the first time or don’t even try at all.

5. Don’t work on your craft. This is all there is, champ. You’re the best there will ever be, because we are all born with our creative ability, and it’s not something all those who are geniuses in creativity have ever had to work on. You should stop reading those books on your craft and learning from those creators you admire and researching the processes of other creative people. Because you are the best there is. And if you’re afraid you’re not, then stop creating. Stop trying to become the best. The best were born with it, and, obviously, you were not. Creating is just not for you.

(P.S. In case the irony of this piece is lost on you, the way to become a creator is to do the exact opposite of everything I’ve listed here. Work hard on your craft, because we can always, always, always get better. Never shoot for perfection the first time around (or anytime, really. The most beautiful art is imperfect). Find your own creative process, the one that works for you, even if it doesn’t look like anyone else’s. We find time for what we love and can’t live without, and that includes creative pursuits. And never, ever, ever listen to the voices in your head. Learn to create in spite of them.)

(P.S. #2: Remember who you are. You are a creator.)