Facing the Fear

An extract from an interview with Seth Godin.
The interviewer was Gretchen Rubin on The Happiness Project - a blog with the subtitle: A chronicle of my attempts to test-drive every tip, principle and scientific study that promotes happiness. (Hmmm - happiness is scientific?)

Back to Seth:

"There are two secrets to creativity:

1. Understand that there's no gene for it. No cultural or family history required. Creativity isn't a gift from above, it's something that everyone is capable of.


2. The only thing that prevents your creativity from showing up is fear. Fear of being laughed at, fear of being wrong, fear of seeming uninformed. So many creative exercises and habits revolve around overcoming that fear.

For me, the single best thing you can do to become more creative is to be wrong more often. Creative people are wrong all the time (look at Apple's long string of failures). The goal is to create a safe place to be wrong, a way to be wrong without destroying yourself. The more wrong I am, the more often, the better I seem to get at being creative."

I can certainly agree with Seth about the fear aspect: it's very easy to think 'no one will like this - I'm going to make a fool of myself [especially when it comes to acting, or performing my own music] - this stuff isn't as good as so-and-so's' - and more. It's something you have to keep stepping up on top of and ignoring.

I am a writer

I am a writer.
Let me write that one more time.
I am a writer.
My heart sings when I write.
I declare this is the truth.
The next step of the path is the scribbler's step.

From the 'dedication' page of Brainlash: maximise your recovery from mild brain injury, by Gail Denton.

These lines, which she heads with: Journal entry, April 26, 1993 (three years before the book was first published), apply equally to me, though maybe for the word writer I'd substitute the word, 'artist' which covers everything I do, the writing, the piano playing, the composing, the acting - the performing in general.

Thanks Gail, for these encouraging words!

Getting to grips with the acting

My first rehearsal of the next Narnia play yesterday. Felt quite uncomfortable (apart from not having been feeling the best health-wise most of the week); couldn't even get my first three lines out without reference to the script and nothing seemed to be moving along well. The three 'kids' (Edmund, Eustace and Lucy) were going so well (having had an extra rehearsal earlier in the week) that they were doing their first scenes without scripts at all. Bit off-putting!

Still, I think whenever people start rehearsing a play there's a time when you think, 'Anything I do will look silly,' and, 'Everyone else has got it together, how come I haven't?' Neither of these things is true, and furthermore, the other actors will be feeling just as uncomfortable in those first rehearsals as you do. You need time to get used to each other, to get settled into how you're going to play the particular role (and this can go on for several weeks, when the rehearsals are spread out over three months, as ours are), to feel as though you're getting the hang of what the director might or might not want (even when you've worked with him/her before), and in general you need time to get over plain ordinary nerves; not the sort of nerves that render you paralytic, but the sort of nerves that everyone has in starting something new - and each play you do is something altogether new, however established an actor you are.

Acting requires a period when you have to just let go and forget about what the other actors think - in fact, they'll be doing exactly the same, wondering what those around them think of their work. We're all pretty sensitive, really, us performers!