Daily Practice
Everyone has different creative methods. And: who is doing #The100DayProject?
Hello friends,
I’m bringing you a special Weekend Edition of Creative Fuel today, because #The100DayProject starts tomorrow. In honor of that, I wanted to send some thoughts on daily practice and creative habits.
, who facilitates The 100 Day Project, reached out late last year and asked if I would be interested in guest writing some prompts for this year’s. Those will kick off tomorrow and run all week over on that newsletter, so if you want to get those, subscribe over there.If you’ve never heard of the 100 Day Project before, it’s a free global art initiative to inspire making. The guidelines are pretty straightforward: choose a creative project and do it every single day for 100 days, and share your work.
Which brings us to the topic of daily practice.
There is all kinds of advice out there on what helps fuel creativity and daily practice is very much one of them. “Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit,” writes Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit.
This is true.
Here's another truth: this is not the only way to creativity.
One of the most revelatory things that a fellow artist ever said to me about my own creative process was this: “you just might not be a ‘daily practice’ person.”
The comment was in reference to a discussion about Julia Cameron’s popular Morning Pages, a practice that works for so many friends and fellow creatives, but that has never seemed to land for me. I have started and stopped on morning pages more times than I can count. When inevitably I quit doing them, a negative voice shows up to tell me that if I can’t have a committed daily practice then maybe I’m not a real artist/writer/creative person. Silly silly, I know.
We often need someone else to hold a mirror up in order to see our true selves, and the permission that artist gave me (thank you Claiborne!) felt so incredibly freeing at the time. Every time the negative voice sneaks up, I know how to respond.
We all have different processes. I usually work in concerted spurts, and there are times, little creative micro-seasons as I like to think of them, where those spurts are more intense than others. I am not alone.
’s practice of “binge writing” comes to mind and I read about Helen Frankenthaler’s process in ’s book Daily Rituals: Women at Work this week. As she put it:“I tend to focus on a body of work intensely and one day put down the brush and feel emptied out. I realize that I need to shift gears before I paint again.”
I very much identify with this, it’s how I often work. I also feel like I have little micro-seasons in different mediums. Some periods are heavier with writing, some are heavier with papercutting. It’s nice to have a break between them.
Frankenthaler continues: