Creative Lift 67: Designing with Apprenticeship in Mind

by Naomi | Apr 10, 2024 | Podcast Episodes

In today’s episode of Creative Lift, Creating Space: Designing with Apprenticeship in Mind, we’ll explore another essential mindset for creative thinking: apprenticeship. So far in this season, we’ve considered the importance of improvisation, critical thinking, and reflection, and their related skillsets. We’ve given each of these thinking modes a specific space in our mind. We’ve visualized a building to hold these rooms, our creative Illuminary, and considered the look and feel that each room might have. We’ve noted how these rooms can provide shortcuts into a particular way of thinking, and help us to effectively approach the specific creative work in front of us.

In books like Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, or Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon, long-time creatives have emphasized the importance of deeply studying the work of other artists. The goal isn’t to copy, but rather to learn by heart, and after that learning process, build beyond what we’ve learned. In this way, we navigate using the light of those artists who have illuminated the path before us. We’re apprenticing with them, even if we can’t sit in their studios with them.

Today’s room is a Library. Instead of thinking of that Library as a place filled with only shelves and books, I invite you to allow your Library to be expansive. Give it listening rooms, art galleries, and even a live stage. Regardless of what your artistic medium (or mediums) are, you aren’t limited to apprenticing with artworks that look and feel like your own. In fact, sometimes you’ll learn much more about pacing or tone by apprenticing with an artist who uses those tools in an entirely different way than you do as you create.

Inspiring works of art are all around us. How might we use them as tools of apprenticeship? How might we create an inviting space for ourselves as learners that guides that reverse-engineering and skill development process?

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EPISODE LINKS:

Find me on Instagram: @naomikinsman

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You can also help others find the show by rating and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Your words make such a difference for them—and for me, as I continue to create this show. Many, many thanks in advance. And of course, a huge thank you to Alex Doherty for his fantastic editing of the show.

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Creative Lift 005 – Explore Your Creative Space

by Naomi | Jun 16, 2021 | Podcast Episodes

When we try to draft and revise at the same time, our mind engages in a tug-of-war that makes getting our work out onto the page slow-going, if not impossible.

What if, like in a Kindergarten classroom with a reading corner, a science corner, and an art corner, your mind contained well-equipped spaces for the varied kinds of thinking the creative process requires? What if that jumble of creative tools and strategies you’ve collected each had their own space so they were easily at hand exactly when you needed them?

In series one of Creative Lift, we’ve said yes to the call to adventure and stepped into the unknown to explore what’s next with our creative potential. Today’s episode illuminates a secret space to which you’ve always had access, but which you may not have seen in quite this way. Come inside with me and let’s take a look around.

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Like this episode and want more? If so, I’d be ever so grateful if you’d follow and review the show:

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How to Make Your Kidlit Career Success Inevitable

by Naomi | Oct 21, 2019 | Creative Life

What does kidlit career success look like to you? The first question I ask students when we start a new book publishing project at Society of Young Inklings is: What will make you feel like a published author?

At first, they might tilt their head in confusion, or they might grin and say, “When I sell a million books!”

Then, when we dig deeper, we find that they might hope for:

Seeing a reader with their nose buried deep in the book
Giving a book talk at their favorite bookstore — with readers in the crowd asking genuine questions
Reading a real (and positive) review from someone other than their mom or best friend

Over time, I’ve learned many lessons from these conversations, lessons that I’ve taken to heart with regard to my own writing career.

Here are three reasons to paint a clear picture for yourself of kidlit career success:

1. A vague definition of success leads to dissatisfaction.

When we set out to achieve a goal, a misty idea of “I don’t know what I want, all the good things,” can lift our hearts and spark our imaginations. As the prism of possibilities shifts into shape after shape, excitement shivers through us. Ooh, and maybe this might happen. Or maybe that …

Later on, that same openness leads us to say, “Yeah, that happened, but what about …” The minute we cross one finish line, we dismiss it because we’re now focused on the next. Or, we obsess over one beyond-our-control goal—say, winning the Newbery, and instead of taking action, we wait and wish and ultimately, give in to discouragement. Who did I think I was, anyway?

2. Clear goals, within our control, focus our efforts (and the efforts of our supporters).

When we know that success might look like giving a book talk at our favorite bookstore, we can then identify the challenges between where we are now, and where we want to end up. Maybe we need to practice answering questions on the fly, or we need to network to find someone who knows the bookstore owner.

Also, when people ask us how they can help, our answers are more specific. Maybe we’d appreciate our friends and family ordering the book in that particular bookstore, so that our title is top-of-mind when we follow up with our ask. Perhaps we’d prefer that they put their energy toward saving the date for our event, and inviting a friend.

3. Success feels more meaningful in small, relational moments, rather than in pie-in-the-sky impersonal wins.

What will it feel like when your 10,000th book sells? Will you even know it happened? How about receiving a fan letter from a reader who was so inspired by your book that they started writing their own? Or, what if your writing mentor reaches out, completely out of the blue, to tell you how much they loved your book and how proud they are of you?

Sales goals, winning a big award, or landing a movie deal, may seem like meaningful goals. However, in my day-to-day experience, letters from readers and feedback from people I admire have a bigger impact on my overall happiness and motivation to keep writing.

Here’s what dreaming and then achieving a specific success looks like:

At a recent kidlit night out, I found myself beaming as I told my author friends, “Society of Young Inklings is collaborating on a contest with Stone Soup!”

I’ve loved Stone Soup magazine since I was a young girl. For me, designing video lessons and teaching on camera to help youth put their best foot forward when entering a big-deal writing contest is exactly what success looks like. In fact, about ten years ago I wrote my dreams, defining what success as a kidlit author and as founder of Society of Young Inklings might look like. Working with Stone Soup was high on the list.

What does kidlit career success look like for you?

Try this. List all your dream scenarios, even the one about sailing away on a yacht and never working another day in your life. It won’t take much more than a scratch beneath the surface to get to the substantial dreams, the ones that truly light you up. You may even realize that you’ve been measuring your success against a goal that isn’t your heart’s desire. I mean, if you could sail away on that yacht, how long would you sleep and sunbathe before becoming a little restless? At what point might you start dreaming up your next novel?

Inspire us! Share items on your success bucket list, because you know your ideas will spark all of our creativity and resourcefulness. You never know, by putting it out there in the world for all to see, you may just take the next leap toward that dream.

In any case, if you share tag me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram so I can support you and cheer you on.

Develop Creative Thinking Skills with the Writerly Play Kit

by Naomi | Apr 19, 2019 | Creative Life

Psst! If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Writerly Play Kit, you’re missing out! Issued monthly, the WP Kit is a collection of activities, book recommendations, and other inspiration to help you develop creative thinking by focusing on a single skill.

Why one specific skill?

As is true for building physical muscles, you can develop creative thinking mastery much more efficiently when you’re intentional. When you focus on one skill, you:

progress more quickly with less friction
build momentum and the confidence that comes with success
make that skill a habit so that you can turn your focus elsewhere without losing ground

Wait … Creativity is a skill?

Yep, actually creative thinking is a collection of skills. A commonly held misbelief is that people are either creative or not. If I had a penny for every time someone has told me they’re “just not a creative person,” I’m pretty sure I could buy a private jet. One reason this myth is so prevalent, in my opinion, is that people focus on one aspect of creativity when they measure their capacity. So, they might think of creativity as the ability to generate a giant collection of ideas, or to craft a well-told story, or think quickly on the spot.

This narrow thinking often creates one of two problems.

First, a person might not be good at that thing. Maybe they struggle to come up with even three ideas, or they always figure out what they should have said hours after the moment has passed. Thus, they conclude that they aren’t a creative person without noticing other skills they DO have that are also key to creative thinking.

Second, a person may have a strength in one of these areas. When they’re asked to be creative, they play only this one note. When the process moves on to another stage, they may not have the next skill needed, and they get stuck. They may undervalue the importance of developing their creativity because they don’t realize that they are actually bumping repeatedly into a weakness in their overall skill set.

The way to develop creative thinking is through marginal gains.

In his book, Atomic Habits, James Clear shares the concept of marginal gains. Basically, when you improve through marginal gains, you make tiny changes, changes that might seem insignificant on their own. However, taken together, the collection of changes lead to overwhelming transformation. Becoming better at asking questions may not feel significant at first, but taken together with an improved ability to identify problems and generate ideas about possible solutions, soon you start to see fresh, exciting creativity coming to life in your world.

What are your strengths when it comes to creativity? How about areas that get in your way? What if you had clear, step-by-step strategies and a bookshelf of tools to overcome those challenges?

That’s exactly what the Writerly Play Kit is here to do for you.

So what are you waiting for?

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Grit, Empathy, and Vision: What I’m Learning about Creative Writing

by Naomi | Jan 17, 2019 | Creative Life

I woke up in the middle of the night before our most recent Inklings Book launch with these three words bouncing around my mind – grit, empathy, and vision. Sometimes the answer to a question I’ve been wrestling shows up this way. The question? Why is creative writing important, in a world filled with opportunities and responsibilities? The answer:

Creative writing is one of the best ways I know to build grit, empathy, and vision.

Creative writing builds grit in a number of ways. First, and possibly foremost, as Brene Brown eloquently states: “There is nothing more vulnerable than creativity. . . It’s not about winning, it’s not about losing, it’s about showing up and being seen.” She has a number of other important things to say about creativity, some of which you can read on her Facebook page.

For now, let’s stick with creativity requiring us to show up and be seen. Is there anything that requires more resilience than putting our thoughts – and our hearts – into the world, regardless of the response? In addition, if we want to write well, we must work and rework each passage, weighing not only what we mean to say, but also how our words communicate with our intended reader. Add to that the fact that sitting down to write regularly, especially when there’s no deadline or true consequences should we choose to skip a session, and we can easily see the sum results.

Regular creative writing builds grit through requiring us to face our fears, developing our patience and stamina, and pushing us to stick with a challenge in spite of how we feel.

Entering a character’s thoughts, asking why they act as they act, delving into their backstory to pinpoint where mistaken beliefs come from, and tapping into their thoughts and emotions is always an act of empathy. This kind of questioning and reflecting is at the core of writing any story. Writers can’t help but transfer the fine-tuned skill to their own lives, asking “Why do I do what I do?” and also to friends, family, and other relationships, “Why do THEY do what they do?”

Writing creatively is a way to actively practice empathy with ourselves, and with those around us.

And vision? For me, vision is the ability to see a future possibility, and then, to create a plan to make that possibility real. How can we build our ability to set and achieve goals? The crux issue is our confidence – do we believe we can achieve the goal we set for ourselves? Brooke Castillo talks about the concept of “believing hard,” and if you haven’t heard her discuss this powerful thinking tool, by all means check out that podcast link. While it would be lovely if we could use sheer will power to create confidence, the truth is that building confidence is a process. We must prove to ourselves that we are trustworthy. And if we’ve broken our word to ourselves in the past, we have to work doubly hard to convince our inner skeptic.

With vision, as with grit and empathy, creative writing is a deceptively simple, but powerful tool. As writers, we have full ownership over the creative process. We don’t need fancy equipment, a huge budget, or a crew of people to write a book, as we might need in other art forms. Writers have ownership over setting their expectations and meeting them. In other words, creative writing is the perfect place to prove to yourself that you can keep your own word. Over time, confidence grows. Your success multiplies, and you gain the ability to set even bigger writing (or any other) kind of goal.

Writing creatively gives us a landscape in which to build our confidence around goal-setting, and thus, can convince us to believe in our own vision.

Here’s what has surprised me as I’ve started to talk about grit, empathy, and vision with my clients. The connection between these core skills and creative writing is a surprise. The reason I woke up in the middle of the night with those words rattling around my brain is because I’d never thought to express the importance of creative writing in this way. And if I hadn’t thought to do so, as someone who spends all day every day thinking about creative writing–my own and that of my clients, why should I expect others to make the connection?

Make no mistake. When you take time to write creatively, you are not wasting time. Publication may be your ultimate goal, and if public or financial success comes for your project, fantastic! However, I’d say that your investment in your own heart, in YOU, is the true value of those hours spent typing or scribbling away. When you wonder whether it’s worth the trade-off to spend a Saturday morning writing, publication someday may feel like a flimsy result. But how about more grit, empathy and vision today? For me, the clarity of knowing what I’m really doing when I’m writing changes the game. My sincere hope is that this language, these three simple words, will do the same for you.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how creative writing builds your grit, empathy, and vision. Share your insights, and tag me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I can’t wait to hear all that you have to say.