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Who Has Your Creativity Sold Out?
Is your creativity selling out someone in your life? Joan Didion famously wrote that “writers are always selling somebody out.” Songwriters, painters, novelists and other creatives channel their life...
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Guest Post: Honoring Your Muse
Today I’m honored to provide a guest post by Lisa Hayes, a singer/songwriter extraordinaire. I’ll confess to a love of passionate and lively Americana roots music, and I love Lisa’s music. I’d describe...
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Creativity Tweets of the Week – 9/14/12
It dawned on me that I should collect some of the best links on writing and creativity I tweet during the week and compile them in a single, easy-to-use guide. I thought I’d call it “Creativity Tweets...
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Resisting the 3 Steps to Embracing Your Muse
What do you do when you have all of the answers on how to maximize your personal creativity–and you’re an inspiration for others in this regard–and yet you don’t fully practice that advice in your own...
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Is Kickstarter the Answer for Aspiring Authors?
Few unpublished novelists or memoirists are able to convince a publisher to consider their work until it is complete. But it can be daunting to spend months or years bringing a book to completion with...
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How Do You Define an Artist?
Here in Washington, D.C., we are all swept up in amazement and wonder with the Redskins’ rookie quarterback, Robert Griffin III. He is as flawless off the field as he is on. It becomes difficult after...
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The Importance of Creativity in Education
For the last decade I have repeatedly emphasized a correlation between the encouragement of creativity in childhood and professional, personal and economic success later in life. I have done so here on...
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How Technology is Advancing the Arts
Every artist on some level understands that the actions of an artist are dictated by technology. Before Gutenberg invented the printing press, writers were far more limited in page count with wound...
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Own Your Identity as an Artist
I savor the comments readers leave on this blog. But often they are apologetic in tone, along the lines of “I’m not really a writer,” or “I aspire to be a writer.” In the technical sense of the word...
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3 Steps Off the Path of an Art-Committed Life
College Hall on the campus of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I will receive my MFA in Writing in early July. It is one of my greatest fears. I have abandoned my creativity before; this blog is...
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A Creativity Lesson from Albert Einstein
Think with your entire brain and you’ll be as creative as Albert Einstein. That is perhaps an oversimplification of the latest scientific research on the brain of one of the greatest minds of the...
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Creativity and the Aging Brain
“Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.” So said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing of creativity. The...
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Why I am Obsessed with Artists
“Patrick, why are you so obsessed with artists and their creativity?” I’ve been asked that question a fair amount during my years as an artist’s advocate and a creativity and writing instructor. There...
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Road to Publication: The Story Comes Full Circle
So Committed: A Memoir of the Artist’s Road features dozens of artists I interviewed on a 2010 cross-country road trip. Last week one of those artists interviewed me for a podcast on her Boise, Idaho,...
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