This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 56: Living A Creative Life.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I want to talk about how important it is to live a creative life.

Before you get worried, no, this doesn’t mean that you need to paint all the time or have crazy sculptures around your house, but you can if you want to. Instead, we’re going to be looking at what it means to really live into being the people that we were made to be.

But first, I received an email from a podcast listener that I’d like to share with you. This is an email that I received earlier this week from podcast listener David who says, “Hi, Sarah. I’ve listened to episode 52, Personal Branding, a couple of times. Thank you for the good information. You mentioned that you were thinking of doing a marketing 101 book or one on branding. I think that would be great. Yes, all of that information can be overwhelming. A basic Marketing: A Book for Dummies would be very helpful.”

“I listen to four writing podcasts and they are all very informative, but it is easy to get lost, as most of what they pass along is too advanced to be applicable for someone just starting out. That is one of the beauties of your podcast. It meets your listeners right where they live. With practical, everyday insights, it gives the building blocks needed to write, manage time, build a brand, and market one’s work. On the human side of things, it gives enough grace and understanding to encourage listeners not to give up. Thanks for your work. And yes, I do encourage you to write some manuals on the building blocks and basics. Sincerely, David.”

David, thank you so much for your email. I know we’ve corresponded since then, but I just wanted to say thank you again for such a really lovely and uplifting letter. And yes, I do in fact plan on following through with my suggestion/promise and creating those writing manuals, so more to come on that.

In the meantime, if you want to send me your own email or letter, you can do so. You can send me an email at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Or I now have a mailing address that you can send stuff to if you’re so inclined. I went to the post office and open up a PO box, and so you can now send me letters, books, what have you by sending them to Sarah Werner care of the Write Now podcast, PO box 123 Sioux falls. That’s S-I-O-U-X Falls, South Dakota, 57101-0123.

Yes, I know that sounds super fake. In fact, I said the same thing to the very nice woman at the post office while I was opening up the PO box. I said, “Really? I get PO box 123? It sounds like fake.” I was like, “Nobody’s going to believe me.” She’s like, “Well, you just lucked out today,” and I guess I did. But seriously, it sounds like one of those addresses you type into a form to test it like, “Oh, John Smith, 123 Fake Street, Booktown, USA,” but it’s not. It’s legitimately where you can send me stuff. Just opening up that avenue. We’ll see how it goes.

Also, if you send me an email or a letter, I may not respond right away, but I will respond. I guess what I’ve asked you is for you to be patient with me, because I have a lot going on, one of which is Camp NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, runs every year from November 1st through November 30th. I’ve talked about this before. I have a couple of episodes dedicated to NaNoWriMo. Basically, it encourages writers at all ages and stages to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, which is no small task.

Camp NaNoWriMo runs April 1st through 30th, and then again in July, July 1st through either the 30th or the 31st, and it’s sort of like NaNoWriMo light. It’s a little more flexible and a little less strenuous/grueling/whatever words you want to use here. The premise is you sign up, you set a goal, you name your project, and you write. Unlike NaNoWriMo, it can be any project, so you can say, “Oh, I want to rewrite my memoir,” or, “I want to try writing a poem every day. I want to publish my screenplay,” et cetera, et cetera. It can be anywhere from 30 words a day to a million words a day, whatever you think works for you and is good for your schedule.

I signed up this year to add an additional 30,000 words to my novel at the rate of 1,000 words per day for 30 days. I feel kind of lucky that April 1st fell on a Saturday this year, because I could actually like start it. Usually when I do NaNoWriMo, I always feel like the very first day I am going on a mission trip, or I’m on a plane to Canada, or it’s a Wednesday, which is my day where I work an eight hour day and have either a writer’s group, or a recording session, or some other thing in the evening that pretty much uses up my whole day. I feel fortunate this year.

Yesterday being a Saturday, I was able to actually set aside some time and I wrote a 2,319 word, and man, it was great. It felt so good. I had like nine cups of coffee and I was like super in the zone. You know that place where … I have a standing desk, so I was standing at my desk, and my eyes were like peeled back super wide, and I was just staring at my screen, communicating mentally with it, or maybe that was just the caffeine. But seriously, I was writing, and it felt great.

I even like accidentally killed off a character that I did not mean to kill off. I have an ensemble cast, and I’m probably about a third of the way through my novel. I won’t tell you which character I killed off, just so that you can enjoy reading it later if you do read it. But it was one of those situations where you’re sort of falling and the characters are doing things you didn’t expect them to do. As a writer, you’re just sort of pulled along behind them for the ride.

I was writing and writing, and this dialogue kept coming out really naturally between these two characters. All of a sudden, I kind of saw where it was going and I said, “Wait, I can’t kill off this character. That’s not in my plan.” But like the dialogue just worked so well, and all of these things happened, and it wrapped itself up in this little bow. Before I knew it, the character had died, and it was surprising to me, and so I hope it will be surprising to readers, but in a good way and not in a terrible way. But death is terrible.

Anyway, I wrote yesterday. I’m going to write again today when I finished this podcast episode, and I feel really good about it. I hope that you’ve had some time to write this week or that you have some time to write in the coming week. If you haven’t, I hope that you’re thinking about writing. I know that one of the main tenants of this podcast is to give you the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write every day, but writing every day is not a requisite. It’s a thing to aspire to. If you don’t write it every day, that’s okay. You can still call yourself a writer. I mean, heck, I call myself a writer and I don’t write every day. I call myself a writer because that’s what I do and that’s what I was made to do.

Join Camp NaNoWriMo if you want to/if you feel it would be of benefit to your writing habit, but there’s no pressure to do so. It’s just something I wanted to try, and it ended up working, hang out okay with my schedule this year.

Enough about that. Let’s talk about what we’re actually here to talk about, and that is living a creative life. When I was in college, being all English major-y, there were a few things that were taking off, and one of these things was a thing called web comics. I loved web comics, and I still do, but I’d just discovered them, and I was reading what are now considered like Penny Arcade, and Questionable Content, and all sorts of things, Dinosaur Comics.

I loved them because they were niche and because they spoke to me. Unlike the comics that I’d always look forward to in the Sunday paper, which were nationally syndicated and designed and written to appeal to the masses, web comics could simply appeal to one audience like nerds like me. There was one web comic in particular that I really just glued onto. That’s a terrible phrase, but I’m going to keep talking. It’s called XKCD, just four letters, and it’s a web comic about math, and language, and science, and romance, and all of the things that I love. It’s very simple. It’s just stick figures saying things to each other, and it always has a message that resonates with me.

The artist is Randall Munroe, and I’ll link to the comic I’m about to reference in the show notes for today’s episode. It’s also under a Creative Commons license, which is why I’m sharing it with you now. But there was one comic in particular, number 137, that I printed off on my printer my freshman year of college. The printer which later I had to disassemble only to discover the carcass of a dead bird inside, but that is another story entirely.

But this comic was what opened up my mind to the idea of a creative life. I kept this comic with me on a increasingly curling, waterlogged, sun bleached piece of printer paper all through college and then all through the five years that I worked at a bank, because it continued to speak to me and it continued to speak to me in new ways. I’m going to read it real quick right now for you.

It’s a simple dialogue between two characters, one of which is approaching the other as the other person is writing at a computer. We’ll just call them Person 1 and Person 2. Person 1 is approaching Person 2 at the computer, and Person 1 says, “You should be more careful what you write. You never know when a future employer might read it,” and Person 2 stops typing and turns around and says, “When did we forget our dreams?” Person 1 says, “What?”

Person 2 says, “The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experience I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day. We respond the same way. We think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curve of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow, our dreams will come back to us.”

‘And no, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become, but I do know one thing. The solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of someday easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.”

The comic then ends with Person 2 saying something not safe for work, which essentially boils down to, “F that noise.” So you’re sensitive to language, you might not want to click on this link. But if you’re okay with the language, I encourage you to read it, or you can listen to me read it again if you hit the back 15 or 30 seconds button on your podcast player.

But when I read this for the first time, I didn’t know that I was allowed to live a creative life. This really hit home about 10 years later. Well, maybe a little more than 10 years later, when I first read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. This book is all about living a creative life, which we’ll get to explaining in just a few more minutes here, but I want to share this passage with you from Big Magic. I’ll provide a link to the book in the show notes for today’s episode, but it’s page 86 in my edition, and it’s under a header called Your Permission Slip.

Here’s what she says. “You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life. Maybe you didn’t receive this kind of message when you were growing up. Maybe your parents were terrified of risk in any form. Maybe your parents were obsessive compulsive rule followers, or maybe they were too busy being melancholic depressives, or addicts, or abusers to ever use their imaginations toward creativity. Maybe they were afraid of what the neighbors would say. Maybe your parents weren’t makers in the least. Maybe they were pure consumers. Maybe you grew up in an environment where people just sat around watching TV and waiting for stuff to happen to them.”

“Forget about it. It doesn’t matter. You want to write a book, make a song, direct a movie, decorate pottery, learn to dance, explore a new land, do it. Who cares? It’s your birthright as a human being, so do it with a cheerful heart. Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants to lead you. Keep in mind that for most of history, people just made things and they didn’t make such a big freaking deal of it. We make things because we like making things. We pursue the interesting and the novel because we like the interesting and the novel.”

“And inspiration works with us it seems because inspiration likes working with us, because human beings are possessed with something special, something extra, something unnecessarily rich, something that the novelist Marilyn Robinson calls an overabundance that is magical. That magical overabundance, that’s your inherent creativity, humming and stirring quietly in its deep reserve.”

It goes on from there, but I would encourage you to read the entire book. I don’t want Elizabeth Gilbert to sue me for reading too much of it on the show, so I’m going to stop there. But when I read that passage, it legitimized something for me. Not that my parents weren’t creative. My dad is a minister, was and is a minister who writes sermons and loves to read. Both my parents encouraged us to draw, and paint, and read, and write to our heart’s content as we grew up.

But what really stuck out to me was the obsessive rule following. Again, this is very personal, so this might not resonate with you so much. But the society in which we live has rules for us to follow. And while we may be aware of some, such as stealing is wrong, killing people is wrong, don’t do those things, there’s also a lot of rules that we follow that are a lot more subtle, a lot more insidious, rules that keep us from living creatively. Rules that say you must go to high school, graduate high school, go to college, graduate college, get a low level, low paying job, grow in that career until you end up in a higher level, higher paying job, retire at the age of 67, and go on vacations to Bermuda.

That’s one of those paths that the XKCD comic is talking about, and honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it. It obviously works well for a lot of people. But I want you to think, is it the right path for you? Like Liz Gilbert says, maybe it’s not, and maybe that’s okay.

I worked for five years in the marketing department of a bank, and I worked with a lot of really wonderful, and talented, and kindhearted people. I want to make that clear, they were good people, but they were not people with whom I fit in.

I live in South Dakota where public transportation is not a thing. Like we have it, we have a bus, but really you only ride the bus if you are too poor to afford a car or if you are unable to operate a car. I moved to South Dakota in 2007, and I moved here from Chicago where I didn’t have a car, mostly because I could not afford a car, but also because I was just used to taking public transportation everywhere. I rode the L or the Boston Chicago, or I walked. In Chicago, it was quite normal not to own a car. In fact, I was in my mid 20s and I had never owned a car, again because cars cost money and I had no money.

But from the very first day that I started working at the bank, I had this label that I was some kind of huge weirdo who didn’t own a car and who had bought a bus pass to ride on the bus with the poor people and the people who could not drive for one reason or another. The bus station was directly across the street from the bank, and I think there was some animosity between the people who worked at the bank and the people who used the bus system.

One of the questions that I was asked the most in my first couple months at that job was, “Why don’t you have a car? Why do you ride the bus?” I was too embarrassed to say, “Oh, because I’m too poor to afford a car,” and I was too shy to say, “Well, you know what? Sometimes I like riding the bus. I meet some interesting people, and I hear some interesting stories, and it’s super cheap, and it’s good for the environment.” In the end, that’s kind of the explanation that I went with. I figured as a relatively new college grad, I could do the whole, “Oh, because it’s good for the environment,” angle and then they would think me a different type of weird than a, “I’m doing it because I’m super poor,” kind of angle.

While those were all partial reasons why I was riding the bus, it wasn’t the real reason, or it became the reason I kept riding the bus, even when I was less poor and potentially able to purchase a car, which I eventually did. I got a beautiful 1986 Honda Civic hatchback in gunmetal gray. The thing was made of solid steel, I think, because it weighed a ton or 12. But anyway.

The reason I kept riding the bus was that I don’t like people telling me what to do. I don’t like people telling me how to live my life. I don’t want to make a 10 or 20 or $30,000 purchase just so that I can get road rage, and sit in traffic, and be like everyone else. Those are the things that I never said.

I was a huge weirdo for riding the bus. I was also a huge weirdo for reading a book over my lunch break in the break room. I was a huge weirdo for eating at the greasy spoon hamburger joint next to the bus station, for trying the new Thai restaurant, for eating sushi, for drinking coffee without milk and sugar in it, for writing a book. Like who did I think I was? Even for traveling alone. Sometimes I like to get in the car and go somewhere by myself. I was a big weirdo because I wasn’t angling for a cushy desk job. I was a huge weirdo because I had this XKCD comic pinned up in the styrofoamy wall of my cubicle.

I’m not saying this to trash banks because, A, a lot of really wonderful people worked there and still work there, and it was a good place, and they were good to me, and they paid me money and put shelter over my head and treated me very well. I know that that’s not limited to banking. I’ve also worked in other corporate settings where it’s very similar.

But maybe you can identify just a little bit, or maybe a whole, with the whole not fitting in kind of thing, with the questions about, “Why do you do that? Who do you think you are? Why don’t you just follow the rules?”

When I talk about living a creative life, I’m talking about asking yourself some questions about why you’re doing what you’re doing. First, are you living the life you want to live, and who decided what those wants were? Are you deciding for yourself what it is you want out of life? Are you living out your purpose or your calling? Are you happy?

When I talk about living a creative life, I’m talking about living with the freedom to step outside of what society expects of you. I’m saying it’s okay to not cram yourself into the mold that everybody else is popping out of.

I also want to stress that living a creative life does not mean … and Elizabeth Gilbert makes this point very well in Big Magic. Living a creative life does not mean you are sustaining yourself 100% financially on your creative work. That’s not what I’m talking about. If you can make money being creative, then that’s great. But more importantly, whether you’re working at a bank, or in a marketing department somewhere, or as a church custodian, or as a call center representative, or as a teacher, or as a tow truck driver, or as a line cook, or as a nurse, you can live a creative life.

Because when I ask you this next question, the answer is always yes. That question is, are you shaping your own world? The answer is yes, whether you’re doing that consciously or whether you’re doing it passively. You can choose to shape your own world and your own life, and to make decisions accordingly, and to give yourself permission to do things that bring you joy and that make you stand out even if you’re not comfortable standing out, or the world can shape you. You can sit around and just wait for stuff to happen, or you can make the decisions to make it happen.

What works for some people does not work for all people, so explore what it is you really want out of life and make the decisions that will make that happen. Don’t just consume things. Make things. Remember, you’re a writer. All you have to do is sit down at your pencil and paper or at your keyboard and worlds can come out. You have immense creative power within you, and I want to make sure that you are living the type of life that allows you to live into that creativity and to truly be what you were made to be.

Special thanks for helping me to make today’s episode go out to Elizabeth Gilbert for writing Big Magic and to Randall Munroe for writing the XKCD web comic. I know you’re not listening to this, but thank you. You taught me how to live a creative life, and I am so grateful for it.

I also want to extend my gratefulness to my Patreon supporters. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that lets people like you pledge a dollar per episode, $10 per episode, a billion dollars per episode, et cetera to help support the work that I’m doing here. This podcast is free, and it will always be free, but at the same time, it takes a lot of time and money to create. So if you’re interested in giving back, you can do so. Just go to sarahwerner.com/patreon, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and follow the instructions there.

You will be joining the ranks of amazing people such as official cool cats Sean Locke and Rebecca Werner, official bookworm Matthew Paulson, official rad dudes Andrew Koons and the Sioux Empire podcast, and official caffeine enablers Colleen Cuttalossa and War Writer. You are all amazing and wonderful, and I am so grateful for your help. Thank you.

If you would like to become a patron of the Write Now podcast, you can just go to sarahwerner.com/patreon. You can also go out to patreon.com and search for the Write Now podcast, but the first way is probably easier.

Plus, going out to my website lets you do other cool things like check out the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 56. You can also sign up for my email newsletter if you’d like, which I think I said this in a previous episode as well, but I am working on ramping that up now so that you’ll get exclusive content within that newsletter in addition to the stuff that you’re already getting. Look forward to that, question Mark. No, no, no. Definitely look forward to that.

That’s also where you can contact me. Just go out to sarahwerner.com. Again, that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Navigate to the contact page, and my email address is there, but you can also fill out the handy-dandy contact form and get in touch with me that way. I like hearing from people, especially when they’re awesome people like you. I’d love to hear how you are living a creative life or how you see yourself living a creative life if you’re not doing it already. It’s important stuff, and I hope that you think about doing it.

Finally, if you’re not living a creative life or if the prospect just terrifies you, spend some time journaling or thinking about what is limiting you or who is limiting you. It can be hard to think about, but I encourage you to start. There is so much power in the person that you were made to be that I hate to let anything interfere with that.

With that, this has been episode 56 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go work on my novel.