Tomorrow! Writing in the Dark's First 30-Day Creativity Challenge Begins!

The power of attention + curiosity as love + the necessity of imperfection + Annie Dillard's wise words: "What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing"

Shepherdess, 1915, Yrjö Ollila

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity. Maya Angelou

Get ready, glorious friends! Creative writing is about so much more than essays or stories—it is about thinking new thoughts, being able to see beyond what we know, learning to use language to recognize beauty, expand our world, enrich our inner lives, and magnify possibility rather than simply defining what has already happened, and that is the reason for Writing in the Dark’s first ever 30-Day Creativity Challenge which starts tomorrow!

I am so excited! If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re all set to receive a new creativity-building prompt every day for the next 30 days (and these are separate from, very different from, and in addition to not instead of the regular Wednesday Writing Prompts and monthly editions of the Writing in the Dark newsletter—this challenge is a thing all its own).

If you are not a paid subscriber, you can upgrade anytime for just $6/month or $60/year to receive the emailed prompts through April and/or have access to the archives so that you can catch up if you get behind, repeat the prompts, or use them flexibly as needed. While the idea is to be as consistent as possible with short bursts of creativity enhancing activities for 30 days in a row, life happens and an imperfect effort is better than no effort. If I didn’t believe that with my whole heart, I’d never have published a book or anything else. I choose to thrive in imperfection because otherwise I’d have to curl up and quit.

And don’t worry if you don’t upgrade, you can absolutely build creativity on your own, because anyone can—it’s super simple (and really hard) because it starts with paying attention. As Marie Howe (one of my favorite poets) said to Krista Tippet more than ten years ago:

This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.

That’s what we’ll be working on together, this task of building creativity through (among other things) paying attention to “what is actually happening.” Not the story of what is happening, not our ideas of what is happening, but the thing itself, whatever that is right in front of us.

It’s a practice, like any other practice, whether that be musical scales, meditation, yoga, ice skating, golf, knitting, or cartwheels. We get better at the things we practice. Indeed, in some ways, we become the things we practice. Which is why Billie Ouellette-Howitz, certified yoga and meditation instructor, award-winning writer, and also my youngest child—whom some of you have studied with recently on retreat with me in Illinois and Ixtapa and Minneapolis—will be helping to enhance our upcoming creativity prompts as well, to strengthen the mind-body connection of this work, and to amplify the experience of creativity as a practice, not a destination.

After all, if we are to believe Annie Dillard (which I emphatically do), then practice is everything, since “… how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” Or, put another way by Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset:

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

With that in mind, can we spend 5-10 minutes a day (more if you have it, but it’s fine, indeed, good to start with a small and realistic goal!) building our capacity for attention and, therefore, creativity?

Yes. Yes, we absolutely can!  

And here’s what you can expect along the way:

• You can expect to receive the prompts via email every morning, so that you have a full day to work them in.

• You can expect the prompts to be short, doable, and scaffolded over the month of April in a way that helps you build capacity day by day.

• You can expect to do more than just put words on a page (though there will be some of that, of course, this is a writing newsletter!), because writing is a metaphor for life, and therefore begins with living.

• You can expect to be invited and encouraged to record your experiences as part of the process.

• You can expect prompts that are holistic and expansive, in that they honor the truth of living in bodies that breathe and move and laugh and cry, while also living in a world that breathes and moves and laughs and cries, while also having unruly minds that are constantly escaping to the past and the future even when what we most need is to attend to this exact moment in order to live lives that are, as Mary Oliver said, “particular and real.”

• You can expect to be imperfect, and for that to be perfectly okay.

• You can expect the prompts to be simple (no special anything needed, just yourself and a notebook/pen).

• You can expect the cumulative effect of investing in your own creative capacity for 30 days in a row to be measurable and perhaps even profound.

• You can expect to enter May with a softer heart and a more open mind.

In case you missed my introductory post, you can find out more about the initial premise and mechanics of the challenge here:

Writing in the Dark’s First 30-Day Creativity Challenge

Thank you so much for being part of this community and for joining me in this challenge.

With love,

Jeannine