THE WHEEL OF CREATIVITY®

Why can’t I sell my work?

I often hear from gifted artists who have struggled for years to sell their work.

They’ve tried traditional routes like chasing galleries, seducing agents and covering art fairs until they’re discouraged enough to give up their art altogether.

Their anguish is palpable.

The problem is not a lack of talent; their work is original, innovative, inspired and provocative. The problem is… what exactly? Are we powerless to get our work out in the world?

Here are four radical ideas I hope will help you to see selling in a new, empowering way.

1. Discover Yourself

Everyone wants to be discovered. We want someone to come along and find our beauty buried in the stones on the seaside. And when no one does, many of us would prefer to continue to do the work we love and pretend we don’t really care if it gets out into the world.

Whatever our profession, there are the things we love to do and the things we could do without.  We tell ourselves, “I’m not a business person. I can’t sell myself. I don’t know how.” But today the shoreline is crammed with sparkling stones, and getting someone to notice us requires our effort.

2. Kill The Starving Artist

Getting your work out in the world is the final stage in the creative process, and the process is not complete without it. You can give your work away, but value given demands value in return. Selling is not the only way your work is valued; but in our society, money is the ultimate validation. This is not a bad thing. It’s just an exchange of energy.

Of course, you must validate your work within yourself first and last. Others may love it, but if you want your work to make a real difference to someone, they need to give something of value in exchange. It could be a physical object, an exchange of services, sharing it with their friends or money.

3. Create Your Sales Too

Your creative work—whether a painting or a potato peeler—has a purpose in the world. If it’s not serving that purpose, it will not rest. And you won’t be able to rest either.

The completion of the creative cycle, the final station in the Wheel of Creativity is Harvest. It is where the new thing, your creative product in this case, is released into the world, where you cut it off the stem and make it nourishing.

Like creating the product itself, Harvest is very active. Imagine the physical harvest of a crop in a field. Harvest time is an acute, highly labor-intensive period when the farmer hires extra help to bring the crop in on time. Once the fruit is ripe harvest must be done swiftly if the fruit is not to waste on the vines.

4. Learn a New Language

Harvest is a time of translating your work into the language of the marketplace. You can write the most beautiful story in the world, but if your readers do not speak your language, your story will mean nothing to them. There is a great deal of work to be done to help people hear the message of your work. Helping them understand is a different form of intimacy. And if you want them to understand, it’s your responsibility.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me!

And live CREATIVE!

P.S. Got questions? Post them on the Wheel of Creativity Facebook page, and I’ll answer one here every Friday.

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Conformity Comes Home

At six years old, because of my mother’s desperate campaign against the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll in public schools, I was sent to a strict parochial school. There my own conditioning began. I acquired the school’s judgments about what was right and what was wrong, and my fear took root there. Seeing the harsh punishments inflicted there on those who ventured out of bounds—forced to stand outside the classroom facing the wall, sent to the principal’s office, hit with a paddle—I felt terrorized. And order in the classroom was maintained.

The education at St. Thomas was excellent in classical academics—math, science, English, Latin—and the Arts had their tiny extracurricular place. In addition to chapel singing, competitive Scottish dancing and needlepoint, there were occasional Christmas concerts and plays. Once when there was Shakespeare, I played Portia. There was no structure to develop skill in or understanding of the Arts; they were the seasoning on our intellectual buffet. We were being groomed—with math, science and language—to get into good universities and to excel and compete in the world. I am grateful for the benefits of this training, and I regret its costs.

In this creative outback, there was one woman who saw me. Mrs. Homer T. Bouldin, my first grade teacher, was writing a book on teaching children to read and write phonetically, which she called An Acorn in my Hand. To demonstrate how her method could work, she selected my story and published it exactly as I had written it, exactly as you see it here.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

By Kathy Robertson

When George Washington was a boy his father had pigs, cows and horses. George had a pony of his own, Whitefoot. He rode Whitefoot around in the fields every day. When George was eleven years old his father died. One day when George was at his mother’s house he found some old tools. “Those tools were your fathers tools,” said George’s mother. “Can I have them”? said George. “Yes”, said his mother. “He meshered land with those tools”, said his mother. “I want to learn how to mesher land,” said George Washington. “You will have to go to a man in town”, said his mother. So George went to town. He said, “Sir I want to learn to be a sirvaer”, said George Washington. “To be a sirvaer is hard work”, said the man. “I know sir”, said George Washington, “But I want to be a sirvaer sir”, said George Washington. “Okey”, said the man. One night when George was out with the sirvaing party he saw an Indian war dance.

I was six years old, still innocent of the judgment and shame in words like mistakes, and right and wrong. I was so proud. I am proud to this day—of the sweet little girl who set out to tell her own little story in the best little way she could. Lesson 1: I can do it and it’s fun. But that changed the next year.

In second grade, we learned to write cursive, and Darcy Dunn knew how to make her ovals right. I can remember looking at my page, looking at her page and feeling bad. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get my ovals to look like Darcy Dunn’s; I could not get mine to come out right. Lesson two: You don’t always get what you want.

One day, in third grade, I dared to play a little. It was Halloween time and those little white-yellow-orange candy corn pieces were a favorite. Quite uncharacteristically on a dare, I broke off the white part, went to the teacher with “my tooth” in my hand, and asked to be excused to the bathroom.

I shall never forget the terrible feeling, waiting there in the principal’s office, crying my eyes out. My own inner shame was punishment enough. I never dared anything like that again. Lesson three: Don’t you dare!

By fourth grade, I had learned it was not safe not to know. If I had a question in class, I would not ask it; I feared I would be reprimanded for not knowing the answer. So learning came for me, not from passionate curiosity but from the need to be right, to do it right, and above all to not be wrong. Lesson four: Take no chances!

I stayed at St. Thomas until my last year of high school. Though one year I tried another private school, I returned. I was fused to it. It was the cloth I was cut from. What drove me to excel, despite my innocent love for life, was fear. Year after year, the lessons taught without words took me farther away from myself.

And you?

Q: How, as a child, did you learn to silence your own inner voice in order to conform to the outside world?

Continued next Monday…

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Heading home from the center of town in the oppressive August heat, I heard a sound I’m sure I heard in my mother’s womb. The sound of tinny music, though not played particularly well, was inviting all the same. I searched ahead and found the source: a man sitting on a cushion on the sidewalk, playing the harmonica.

I was born in Texas. My mother’s father was a cowboy rancher who played the harmonica like a magician. I suppose this man reminded me of home.

I pulled a coin from my handbag and as I bent down to place it on his cloth, I noticed that he sat on a cushion instead of legs and his only hand held his harmonica. I caught his eyes, and a few words sprang involuntarily from my lips:  “God bless you. Sounds good!” He smiled a big toothless smile.

My favorite verse of LaoTzu’s Tao te Ching says:

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher / What is a bad man but a good man’s job

If, beyond good and bad, I were to interpret that ancient wisdom for today, I would say:

What is this down-and-out juice harpist but my teacher / What am I but his job

This small disabled man with the big toothless smile is certainly my teacher. His creativity with what life has dealt him inspires me. I’m sure I would not do as well in his position.

I think about all of us who have it all. Two arms and two legs, for example. We put our painted toes in the waters of life to test and see if anyone wants us, and then we get scared and retreat. I will be the first to say I do! But from today forward I will think of the man with one hand out there making and sharing his music on the street.

God bless him indeed. I have been blessed through him.

Never underestimate the perfection of your circumstances today. Take time today to see and hear the blessings on your path. Make an effort to share your music with someone else. In my view of the world, it’s why we’re all here.

Live CREATIVE!

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The Place I Had To Leave

I can’t say exactly when I first had the idea for this book, but its roots are there in my earliest memories of childhood. Not so much from what I was given, but from what I was given to work with. So many experiences, looking back now, showed me who I was by showing me what I was not. So it is my own personal story where I begin—the soil into which those roots reached out, where I was nourished, inspired, humbled and compelled.

I was born in Houston, Texas in 1956, the only child of a Christian child psychiatrist and an uneducated, self-made man. I would have been an only child, except for the fact that six months before I was born, my father’s niece and nephew, who had spent 10 years in an orphanage, arrived to make their home with us.

Ours was a religious home. Sundays and Wednesdays found us at South Main Baptist Church. And I was proudly presented at Sunday School practically before I could form a thought. I learned to think and act in the context of Jesus’s teachings, and someone else’s interpretations of them.

Ours was a fearful home, with right-wing political leanings and well-researched fears about the dangerous changes happening in the world. My mother—a pediatrician turned child psychiatrist in 1960—protected me as only a trained shrink can. My father, less educated in his anxiety, also believed the world a dangerous place for his daughter and tried his loving best to keep me safe. They protected me by instilling their fears in me. I say this with the deepest appreciation for their loving intentions and complete forgiveness for their human limitations. As I have claimed my own limitations along the way, I have come to understand the origins of theirs.

I was a sensitive child. According to my mother, by the time I was able to sit up in my high chair, if I spilled my milk I would burst into tears. I was extremely fearful about doing anything wrong. At the same time, I was a big and colorful character, and probably overindulged as the only child born to parents late in life.

I vividly recall one night, when I was three or four, being in the family room with my parents and my cousins (19 and 14 by then) whom I idolized as sister and brother. I was doing my usual bouncing-singing-dancing thing around the room, when suddenly a dark cloud of worry came over me with a message: “These people are really uncomfortable with me. This is really bad that they feel uncomfortable. It’s obviously my fault. Therefore I am too big.” It was one of those decisions you never really make but changes your life all the same. I began to reel in my energy like a school of fish in a net, tighter and tighter, until I felt it was safe to be there, safe to be.

I was born into a world of other people’s agendas for me. So are we all.

And you?

Q: What place, ideology, system, etc. have you had to leave (do you need to leave) to discover the creative treasure within you?

Continued next Monday…

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Keep in touch and live CREATIVE!

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What would you like with that flavor?

Today, I’m offering the second installment in a series of free samples from The Wheel of Creativity:  Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life.  If you haven’t read the first installment, read it here. Then read on for what comes next.

Splitting Life In A Second

So many of the great adventures of my life have arrived as the unannounced afterthought at the end of a road.  At the time, most of these experiences felt like the end of the world.  For all my talk of questions, living through them is not an easy path. It is not comfortable. But perhaps comfort is not all it’s cracked up to be.

In one split second, on May 7, 2009, all my plans changed. I was in the prime of my life. I was newly married to an amazing man, living in three countries, working on a meaningful project with the ideal client, and beginning to go public with my heart’s desire to sing. I had lots of plans.

On that sunny afternoon in Nice France, having just returned from England, I left my apartment to walk to the store to buy food. I crossed the street and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The curb in that spot was about four inches higher than normal. My foot did not clear it, and I fell. Arms full and unable to break my fall, I landed on my right hip. I tried to move, tried to stand; but my leg lay there beneath me like a tree trunk in the forest.

In that instant, though I pushed my mind to stay open to a better possibility, I knew what had happened. Two hours later, the young ER doctor at Saint-Roch Hospital confirmed it. I had broken my hip. It was a clean break, completely severing the head of my femur from the rest of the bone. My heart sank. Young Dr. Roux performed emergency surgery at 10:00 that night. And I began the long process of recovery. It would be four months before I would walk again, and a year before I would feel close to normal.

Resting there on the sidewalk, even as my body slipped into shock (paramedics measured my blood pressure at 80 over 50), my heart responded, “Okay, if this is what is next, let’s go.” That spirit of acceptance and willingness made the long months of recovery—which could have brought misery and angst with the pain and complications—rich with treasures, discoveries, blessings, friendship and love.

There on that sidewalk, Life took the lead; and I embarked on a new journey. Like countless others throughout my lifetime, this process showed me my place in the adventure of life, required me to respond, and invited me to collaborate in creating the outcome. The cycle I went through, like all the others, had specific stages, which I identify now as The Wheel of Creativity.

The Wheel of Creativity is a map of the creative process, each point of which I have verified by going there myself many times. In addition to showing you that map, this book retraces my steps along the way, so that you can learn to recognize the stations I have visited, in your own life. And it offers you the tips I have learned at street level, for how to get the most out of your trip.

This book is not just for artists, though artists certainly find the material useful; it is also for the rest of us. It is for the everyday people in all walks of life who are unceremoniously doing their best to make something of value with their time on the planet. This is a guidebook for the adventure of being alive.

And you???

Q:  Where has life changed your plans? What outcome would you like to create in collaboration with it?

Continued next Monday…

To be sure you don’t miss an installment, sign up for Blog Alerts. Just fill in the top box over to the right there to get email updates. In the meantime…

Keep in touch and live CREATIVE!

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Hi Katherine,

You say that the creative process is available to all… even those of us who are not the traditional “creative types.”  Can you give some examples of how this process can be used by someone who isn’t an artist?

Cal Harris, Jr., Musician

Thank you, Cal, for this fundamental question.

I know that as a musician you have an experience of the creative process, and we would all assume that to be the case. However, many people also assume the opposite; if they do not earn their living in a traditionally artistic field, then they are not creative.

Western society has divided itself into two camps:  “the creative types” you mention and “the rest of us.” Historically this assumption about creativity is relatively new, and not every culture shares it.

I define creativity as life itself. And the creative process is not only something we use, it is something that uses us. Life is continuously evolving through us, through all that is. We all play a part in that process, consciously or unconsciously. Everything we do with our life force is a creative act. For better or worse.

We could be:

• Building a business
• Waging a war
• Writing a book
• Staging a crime
• Designing a building
• Destroying a reputation

Your personal creative process invites you to choose how you want to use your life force, how you want to engage with the process, and what kinds of products you want to produce in the world. It is the same for artists and non-artists alike.

Here are a few examples:

George has wanted to open his own restaurant for 20 years. He has envisioned all the details, done his homework, assembled the spreadsheets, and written the business plan. He’s developed menus and tested them on his friends. He’s even found a building. Then he stalls, and sets his project aside. About once a year, George goes through this process again. Twenty years have passed, and George still doesn’t have his restaurant. In the Wheel of Creativity, George sees the last 25% of the process that he’s been avoiding – the Cultivation quarter – where his vision takes form. He uses the steps in each station to push through his avoidance. He comes to trust the process, with all its ups and downs, and keep going. On opening day, not only does he have his restaurant, he also has himself back.

Mary is a highly successful project manager; but she works so much that her home life is in shambles. She knows she wants balance, but each time she tries to go home on time, she succumbs to the guilt that she would be shirking her duties. Her heart longs to find a way to have both, but her mind won’t allow her to take the first step. For Mary, the Wheel of Creativity not only helps her articulate this repetitive pattern, but it also helps her clarify what would really make her heart sing. Once she is clear about this, she is able to tap into her personal passion, which has always been siphoned off into guilt. From there, the Wheel continues to help her navigate the ups and downs of this significant change, and reorganize her life for love and work to co-habitate.

Andrew is a retired army captain. Since he was in his teens, he has always served his country, living on army bases, taking his family with him wherever he was appointed. His adult life has always been regimented and focused on taking orders to fulfill his role within a system he didn’t control. Now, with 24 hours a day to himself and no one to tell him where to go and what to do, he is lost. He knows that, at the age of 55, if he doesn’t come up with a new plan, he’ll be dead in five years. But where can he start? The Wheel of Creativity helps him identify, for the first time in 40 years, what he longs to do, beginning with “I don’t have a clue.” And it assists him in managing the inevitable insecurity of letting go of what-has-always-been in search of what-could-be.

The Wheel of Creativity describes the process of creation, which is neutral: the products you produce through it can be anything. Using that process means collaborating with the creative energy that’s there for you. It is recognizable as passion, and will lead you to your true purpose in life. Becoming effective with it involves training, conscious awareness and blockbusting. The entire process is designed to lead you through your own personal evolution.

Give you any new ideas, Cal?

Live CREATIVE!

Katherine

P.S. Got questions? Post them on the Wheel of Creativity Facebook page, and I’ll answer one here every Friday.

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Here! Have a taste!

Today I begin giving away “little pink spoons” … free samples of my book, scheduled for launch as an eBook this Autumn. This version of The Wheel of Creativity:  Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life is going to be a cliffhanger.

Each Monday, I’ll post a brief installment from the book, an easy read, a cool, sweet, creamy taste. And I’ll pose a provocative question to help you apply what you read.

Here’s why.

Not a day goes by that I don’t meet or hear from someone who has a vision, sets off on the journey with hope and enthusiasm, meets obstacles, gets discouraged, digs deeper, encounters breakdowns and…

1. Loses hope, gives up and changes direction
2. Gets support, shifts gears and keeps moving ahead

In offering you a glimpse of my creative process, as revealed in the opening chapters of this book, my intention is:

• That, through highlights of my own creative journey, you’ll be inspired to commit to yours day after day.
• That, reading the twists and turns of my creative process, you’ll see that taking your place in the adventure of life is not a straight shot, but a magical mystery.
• That, discovering the building blocks of the Wheel of Creativity, you’ll be encouraged to…

Keep turning inward… for the answers that lie only within.

Keep turning outward… to create the life and the world you envision.

So, here it is, from the very first word. Enjoy!

The Wheel of Creativity:  Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life

by Katherine Robertson-Pilling

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.  The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.  The artist never entirely knows.  We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” (Agnes de Mille)

Introduction:  Creativity, Source & Me

My most important lessons in creativity have not come in the classroom, but on the street. I have always been curious. How does this thing work, and why?  Why do you do the things you do?  Why do I?  There have always been gaps throughout my life between a relentless string of questions and the answers to those questions, between having ideas and implementing them. It is into these gaps that I love to go.

Half a lifetime ago, I decided that questions never have final answers, that life is meant to be explored and there is always new territory to discover.  Answers come in bite-sized pieces, revealed in the context of the language I understand at the time. Whatever knowledge I gain today will be replaced by something new tomorrow. My life unfolds in never-ending, unceasing cycles, one folding into the other like a great wheel of evolution.

This book explores the territory between the questions and their answers—the mysteries of life and its manifestations, the unseen and the seen—the landscape where spirituality and creativity converge. This book is about how you can use the creative process to explore that territory yourself. I tell you my story not because I believe I am unique, but because I believe, at the deepest level of our humanity, we are the same. Through seeing the process unfold in my life, you can learn to recognize it in yours. And that is the beginning of the adventure!

And you???

Q:  Where in your life is the creative process still a mystery to you? How is it calling you to grow?

Continued next Monday…

To be sure you don’t miss an installment, sign up for Blog Alerts. Just fill in the top box over to the right there to get email updates. In the meantime…

Keep in touch and live CREATIVE!

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