Welcome to the weekend edition of Creative Fuel.
These weekend missives are intended for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. Paid subscribers have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.
Starting December 1st paid subscribers will be getting 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being! If you don’t know what that is, we’ll leave it with the allure of mystery for now.
I wrote yesterday about the constrictions that can be felt when you do creative work for business.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance between play and professionalism when it comes to taking your creative work seriously. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, which is why there can be a lot of tension in doing that work professionally.
I remember reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic many years ago, and her talking about how long it took before she stopped doing “other” jobs. She didn’t want to put the pressure of needing to make money on her creativity.
I found this excellent quote from that book when digging around:
“…to yell at your creativity, saying, ‘You must earn money for me!’ is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
This visual is hilarious, and reminds me of another creativity/cat example, this time from Ray Bradbury:
