Tuesday's Inspiration - Courage To Create - Rollo May #MFRWauthor #Aminspired

While looking through past posts I came upon this from 2010 and realized what I said then remains true today. Writing takes enough courage to be alone, to imagine the lives of your characters, to live in their world and telling their stories.

Rollo May wrote a book in 1977 called "The Courage to Create." I found it on one of my book shelves and pulled it out thinking that it could be a good jump off for writing about things that inspire. The book is geared to all those in the creative art sector but for me writing is where it's at. What surprised me is how I underlined passages and wrote in the margins little notes about my own creative process. This was read during a time when I was exploring all the facets of where I was headed in writing. Short stories, poetry, novels and sort of why I wanted to write.

I have many friends who write and I have friends who have written and who have given it up. Are they on hiatus while ideas are germinating. I'd like to think so, but I fear many of them have lost the courage to create.

Writing is a solitary business and yet it's one peopled with people and places we want to know or to visit. So exactly what is courage?

To me courage for the writer is the ability to get past the fear that there's nothing new to say. Most stories have been told before, but each person tells the story in a different fashion with different people and different places. Courage is doing when one is afraid, when one looks at despair and reaches for the distant stars.

Courage requires a knowing of one's self. Courage isn't rash, Courage is allowing the seeds inside to blossom. Do you have the courage to create?

Tuesday's Inspiration - Creativity and Limits #aminspired #MFRWauthor

The inspiration for this bit was taken from Creativity and Madness by Rollo May, a great book I've read several times. "There is no such thing as unlimited creativity. It is within limits, often very narrow limits, that a creative work comes into being."

Thought about this for a long time. Then I began to think about my own limits when writing. Do I enjoy every kind of fiction? The answer to this was no. I don't read horror and I definitely have limits when it comes to writing stories that have horror elements. Thus there is one limit. There are genres I really enjoy but I have limits when thinking about writing them. Science fiction is one. I just don't have the scientific knowledge to write novels about space. I tried several times but needed more research than I was comfortable in writing. So there are some limits. Self-imposed maybe or perhaps imposed by my education and interests.

What are your limitations? Does your family limit you when you are attempting to write? This can happen. What about your own take on the world? Knowing your limitations can make you a better writer since you can work within your narrow limits and produce gems.

So look at your limitations and use them to write the stories inside waiting to sneak around those limitations.

Tuesday's inspiration #amreading #am writing J L Walters' Thoughts on Limits and Creativity

It's always interesting to find someone who has read some of the same books you have while seeking to learn about the creative process and limitations. Katherine Paterson is such a writere both read Rollo May's Courage To Create. This is what she discovered. "There is no such thing as unlimited creativity. It is within limits, often very narrow limits, that a creative work comes into being."

What are your limits? There are things limiting me. The way I grew up, the life I have today, the kind of memories I have about emotional events and the very emotions, the love I've had and the love I've given. The list could go on. Even my imagination has limitations. There are stories I can never tell, words write. Take horror stories. I can't read them and I can't write them. This isn't to say I can't write very bad people into my stories. Their villany is limited by what I know and have lived.

Part of the trick is in recognizing the limitations you have and using them. Filtering them through your imagination brings a story into being. My life as a child, as a teen, as an adult, the things I feel about what happened to me is filtered through my imagination and usually finds its way onto the paper.

What about you? Have you looked at your own limitations and filtered them through your imagination? Take a moment to think about this.