It’s been trying to kill me.
I think sometimes it can be hard for truly creative people to give birth to things that really matter to them. I know for myself, I am extraordinarily creative. It comes out in my gardening, my cooking, the way I decorate my home, I love to entertain and plan parties… all of that is very easy for me, it comes naturally. However, when I try to focus my creative energy, I often put myself under too much pressure and choke the spirit of creativity right out of me.
For me, this project is something I’ve thought about all my life. These stories and these characters have lived with me since I was a kid, but last year when I tried for the first time to bring this project to life, I put too much pressure on myself and the entire thing died. I had my internal editor on the entire time I tried to write, which is death to any good story right off the bat. I also knew my own personal needs for income. I’m trying to sustain myself with my art, that is never a good thing for any artist. That’s why painters seek out benefactors, when your art is tied to your next meal, it is very difficult to be pure and simply pour the vision out from your soul. You’re constantly worried about sales, about the market, will this fit anywhere? Will people take a chance on you? And furthermore, why should they?
All these voices in your head will kill your creativity, I guarantee you.
Being creative is part of living. We all have the urge to create, it’s in our nature. From the most precious of creations, having a child, to the simplest, putting something new and exciting on the table for dinner, we all desire to create something at some point in our lives. The sacral chakra is linked to our creativity and our sexuality and I personally think in our culture today, this particular chakra is very often underused and abused.
Keeping chakras and energies balanced, can be a confusing task, but
I see the difference in my life when I'm in balance, so I intentionally work to keep them that way. One of the best ways I've found to keep all my chakras aligned in harmony is to honor the spirit of them across the board in my life.
With creativity in particular, I always urge people to carve out a time and place for creativity and make it sacred. I think too often we dishonor the spirit of creativity by deeming it worth less. Creating something is a work of soul and it should be honored in that way.
For me, with Starlight Key, I lost my way on that. I made it be about work and success and food and rent and though I tried to create stories and characters that were fun, interesting and unique, I was still forcing it into being rather than allowing the story to be birthed into existence.
Starlight Key is something I’ll never give up on though and over the past few months as so much of my life has been aligning, Starlight Key has taken on new shape as well. I’ve gone back to my roots, my heart. I know that I want to create a world where the supernatural exists within the world we see around us every day. In authorspeak, I want to write an urban fantasy novel. It’s so much more than that though. I want to build an empire based on this world, not because I want to be rich and famous, but because I want to bring into the world something that touches lives like that. I watch the sci-fi world and their fans and I love what I see. I love seeing people light up over a character, a story, a world they never could have imagined before. For readers, stories matter. Books take us to worlds and introduce us to people we'd never see or meet any other way and to me, I am beyond honored to have a gift for bringing that to the world.
All my life, I’ve know the thing I wanted to do most of all, was touch people’s lives, make them think, make them smile, make them feel. Starlight Key is born out of that. I think I underestimated it’s size though. I think in my need to “make a living” I tried to take an entire world and shove it into a box that was simply too small. I dishonored the spirit of creativity, by trying to manipulate the gift as if it were mine.
I believe art comes from something greater than us, that we are used as vessels to explore and examine beauty and pain, triumph and heartache. I believe good art, in whatever form, should make you feel something and I believe great art only comes from those of us who somehow find a way passed our internal editors, our insecurities, our fear of being vulnerable and somehow find it within ourselves to strip naked and stand on a stage in the center of town and say look at me, find me worthy, beautiful, hear me.
To do this takes extraordinary courage and few people truly succeed at it. I pray and strive to be one of those who achieves that level of creativity. It’s in my soul, not just to be good, but to be great and I believe that something like that isn’t born from vanity or of the ego, but from a place far more spiritual, someplace deeper than the mind alone.
Each day Starlight Key and the world within that story becomes more and more real to me. Its stories will be told across several mediums, from full length novels, to blogs, to serialized episodes, someday I hope to even see the world splashed across the screen, but I know the only way to accomplish that is to honor the spirit of creativity that lives inside me and let it speak through me, not attempt to control and manipulate the gift.
What would you create if you simply let your soul speak?
Creation is such an interesting journey of vulnerability and rare glimpses of immortality, one unique from anything else this life has to offer. If something is speaking from your soul, stop pushing it back, stop thinking I could never, stop thinking small.
Honor the spirit and let it flow out of you. I’ll bet you’re amazed by what you have the power to create in your own life and who knows, maybe whatever it is will grow so large, it will touch the world. Isn't that worth making some time for? I think so, but we will never know what we are capable of unless we try. Honor the creative spirit within yourself, let is speak and just see what it says... it may surprise you.
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