As artists, we try, we fail, but we keep trying. We offer our gift to the world, the world rejects it, and we keep offering. It helps to be compelled. It helps to have a vision, an emotion, a perspective so exciting, at least to us, its creator, that we are compelled to make it come alive. Like anything important, putting creativity at the center of one’s life involves sacrifice.

Twyla Tharp (dancer, choreographer), in her book The Creative Habit, talked about the work habits of Mozart and Beethoven: 

Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. Certainly, he had a gift that set him apart from others. He was the most complete musician imaginable, one who wrote for all instruments in all combinations, and no one has written greater music for the human voice. Still, few people, even those hugely gifted, are capable of the application and focus that Mozart displayed throughout his short life. As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times. . .” 

Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well-organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.

. . .

It is interesting to me as someone engaged in creative work, and as publisher of Nurturing The Song Within, an e-journal about the use of journaling in creating a life and doing creative work, how common journal keeping is among creatives.

 Journaling is our sounding board through which we attempt to understand thoughts, visions, creative impulses on the edge of our understanding.

. . .

Below, the two-page spread of this entry from the upcoming Heron Dance book on living and working as a creative outsider,
Nurturing The Song Within.
Click here or on image to download PDF.
Pre-order the Collector’s Edition printed by a high-end art book printer here.
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After publication, these journals will be printed by a print-on-demand printer at the same price.