This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 92: 10 Harmful Creativity Myths.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. There are a lot of lies floating around out there about creativity, and creative writing. In some of these lies, a lot of us have learned not to pay too much attention to. Lies like, “Write what you know, and only what you know.” And, “You won’t make any money if you self publish.” We’ve shown and we’ve come to believe that these lies are just that, they’re lies. They’re not true, or they’re not necessarily true.

But there are still a lot of really pervasive myths about creativity. I started making a list of these myths for an email series I did a while back for my newsletter subscribers, and it was kind of hard to narrow them down. But I think I finally narrowed it down to my top 10 creativity myths, and why they’re myths, and why they hold us back and how they hold us back, and why we believe them. Some of these myths we learned early on in our education, some of these myths we learned later as adults, and some of these myths are just things that our entire society and our entire culture believe, and they go unchallenged, so let’s challenge them today.

Myth number one, imagination is just for little kids. There’s this myth, this really limiting belief that imagination is not something that’s appropriate or valued in an adult. If I came up to you, a fellow adult, or someone near adulthood, and I said, “Hey, let’s sit down and really just use our imaginations.” Would you feel a little weird about that? Would you feel like maybe I was pandering to you or talking down to you? Would you give me a weird look, and very consciously and subtly move to the other side of the room? We’re so used to the realm of make believe being relegated to children and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood that I think we forget that it’s actually a really essential and in fact crucial tool for us in our daily lives.

This is where innovation comes from. This is where problems are solved. Imagination, the conjuring up of something out of nothing. That’s where so many amazing books and works of art come from. But I think that there comes a point in our lives, and this happens to me, maybe it did not happen to you, or maybe it will not happen to you, or maybe it has yet to happen to you. Where someone tells you implicitly, explicitly, however, that you’re getting a little old for this. That it’s maybe time to stop daydreaming and focus on what “really matters”. To join people in the realm of adulthood, to put aside childish things, like creativity and wonder. Now, if I were cynical, I might say that society tells us to, “grow up”, because people with imaginations, people with dreams don’t work very well in a machine.

The economy runs on obedience and hierarchy. But I’m not cynical, right? But what if daydreaming is important? What if imagination leads to innovation? You know, one of those values that corporations outwardly claim to value. What if creative problem solving mattered? Oh, wait, it does. This is how we move forward. This is how we invent things. This is how we innovate. Jerome Stern says, “We have to recognize imagination as a form of knowledge, because it is.” there is a limiting belief that creativity is not for us that imagination is not for us. But it is. It never stops being for us, it never stops being ours. In fact, it’s our duty to hold on to it, and to use it to help the world begin to flourish again.

Myth number two, you need a special degree in order to be creative, or to be a writer. I talk with a lot of writers. In fact, my primary job has kind of become talking to writers. A lot of the writers I talk to don’t allow themselves to call themselves writers because they don’t have the “proper credentials.” Writing and creating are a little bit different from other professions, from other hobbies, from other activities, such as performing brain surgery. If I need to get brain surgery done, then I’m going to want to get it done by someone who is accredited, somebody who’s qualified, somebody who has preferably a medical degree.

I want this because as somebody who’s about to undergo brain surgery, I’m scared. I’m scared that something will go wrong. I’m afraid that they’ll mess up the surgery. Demanding a qualified brain surgeon mitigates the risk, whether in reality or in my mind of something going wrong during a very critical procedure. Now, this is where my opinion often gets me into hot water with other writers. I’d like to preface this by saying, hey, everything in this podcast is purely my opinion. But while writing is hard work, and while writing is tedious work, and while creativity is a long and difficult journey, you don’t need any sort of credentials, or any sort of qualification to jump in and start doing it.

In my mind, education is such a weird and fickle thing. While I’m very grateful for my education, I also realized that it is not 100% everything. Education does not equal skill or talent. Education does not equal aptitude. I don’t have an MFA, a master’s in Fine Arts. I don’t have a PhD or a doctoral degree in literature or writing. But I do educate myself daily even, on what good writing is, on what storytelling is, on what makes a story work and what makes it not work. If you are willing to open up your mind, if you are willing to have discussions with other creators, if you are willing to admit that you might not know everything, then you are in the midst of a great education.

I need to be very careful here because if you do have an MFA, if you do have a master’s degree, if you do have a doctorate in literature, in writing, in English, I don’t want to disparage that. You put a lot of time and money into earning that degree. But that degree alone is not a permission slip to become a writer or a creator. Some people treat it as one. Some people like to say, “I’m going to get my MFA so that I feel qualified. I’m going to get my MFA so I can finally give myself permission to write.” And some people need that, and I am not here to judge them. I at one point in my career was considering going to graduate school so that I could feel like I had the permission I needed to create what I wanted to create.

But I want to say loud and clear right here, you do not need a special degree to tell your story. You do not need a certificate or a qualification to write a book. The myth is that you’re less of a creator, you’re less of a writer, or you have less potential if you don’t have a master’s degree, an MFA, a doctorate degree. But while those degrees and qualifications do open up certain doors, and align you with certain privileges, they by no means can dictate whether or not you can be a successful writer or creator. The limiting belief here is that you alone are not enough to tell your story. That’s the myth.

The truth is, you have permission to be creative right now. You don’t need to wait for anyone else to okay it. You don’t need to wait for anyone else to sign a diploma in order for you to tell your story. You have everything you need to start right now.

Myth number three is that you’re either born creative, so you’re either naturally creative, or you’re not. I’ve heard this from so many sources, including my own mother who insists that she is not creative. I think at some point, this is one of those myths that has begun to feel like folk wisdom, but it’s not. It’s a lie. I worked at a bank for a decent chunk of my career, I was in marketing. And every year I would send out an email to my coworkers and say, “Hey, who’s with me for this year’s NaNoWriMo? National Novel Writing Month? Who’s with me? Who’s in?” And invariably, I would get back responses from my coworkers that would say, “Sorry, I’m not creative. Sorry, I can’t write a book, I have a business degree. Sorry. I would love to join you, but I’m left brained.”

Have you heard that distinction? Left brained, right brained? I think that’s a myth too. I think that we use our whole brain. I don’t think you’re limited to just one hemisphere that we’ve assigned creativity or logic, as though the two could be perfectly divided. You are a whole person with a whole brain. I think when people say they’re not creative, what they’re doing is using those words to replace a truth that is difficult for them to say, such as, “Sorry, I can’t do NaNoWriMo because I don’t want to.” Some people have no desire to write a book, and that is amazingly, absolutely, perfectly fine. But to say you’re not creative is to do yourself a disservice. It’s to deny something fundamentally true about your human self. It maybe also comes from fear. For a lot of people creating something is an incredibly intimidating and potentially scary process of hard work and self discovery, and uncovering and facing truths that you’re maybe not yet ready to uncover or face.

Some people are born with amazing linguistic skill. Some people are born with the ability to come up with incredible metaphors. Some people learn this through a lifetime of reading and writing. But nobody is born either naturally creative or not creative. We all create, whether it’s through writing, painting, ceramics, baking, dance, knitting, quilting, growing a beautiful garden, nurturing children and others. We’re all naturally creators. You’re creating your own life right now. The myth is that some people are not born to be creative. But the liberating truth is that creativity is an innate part of who we are as human beings.

Myth number four, you need to move to New York City or Los Angeles in order to create. I think that sometimes we don’t know what to do with who we are, and what we are, and where we are. So we begin to look for reasons and escapes. I had the privilege of attending college, and when graduation time came around, I had people asking me, “So what are you going to do?” I said, “Well, I’m going to get a day job, and I’m also going to write.” A lot of people asked me if I was going to move to New York City, and I said, “What? No.” Then I spent a year or two living in Chicago and then promptly moved to South Dakota, which for my international listeners, is pretty much smack dab in the middle of what we call flyover country. That is to say, I live in a part of the nation that people fly over and do not stop in.

If you’re on a plane and you’re going from coast to coast, you know the important parts of America, you just fly over South Dakota, or maybe you have a layover in Denver. But you don’t go there. There’s this perception that where you live shapes who you are and what you have the potential to do. One of the reasons I was reluctant to leave Chicago, despite being completely miserable and alone there was that I was afraid I would pass up some kind of opportunity that would not be available in a smaller city or town. I think that at the time I was sitting in my little garden apartment, aka the basement of a building in the Ukrainian village, just waiting, I guess for a publisher to come knocking on my door. Just waiting for a book deal to fly in through my window like a little paper airplane.

Here’s the deal, living in a big city versus living in the Midwest does not diminish my chances of success as a creator. Living in a flyover state does not make my work or your work any less meaningful or fulfilling or important than anything that is created in a more culturally important place. Yes, there are opportunities in larger cities. Yes, if you’re looking to get a job working in publishing at a publishing company where you have your desk in a corporate office, then yes, you might need to move to one of those places. But the equation of living in New York equals successful writer, or living in LA equals successful screenwriter those are huge myths. I’m currently working on a project that if we were not in the midst of COVID, and a global pandemic would require me to fly back and forth between South Dakota and LA quite often. But am I going to move to LA? Am I in any way enticed to move there? No.

I made my opportunity for myself while I was living in South Dakota. Once this project is over, I will continue to live in South Dakota. The limiting belief is that where you live has an enormous impact on how and what and why you can create. But the truth is, we have the internet, and you have everything that you need to create, where you are right now with who you are and what you have. If someone wants to look down on me for being a podunk Midwesterner, that’s fine. They’re allowed to have that opinion of me, but I do not have to let it define me, and I sure as heck am not going to let it stop me from creating my best and most meaningful work.

Myth number five, you need to be 100% completely original. Coming up with new ideas and indeed using our imaginations is an incredibly rewarding and validating experience. But as Shakespeare said, or maybe it was the Bible, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s all been done before. You can come to this assertion with either a mindset of despair or abundance. You can say, “It’s all been done before, why even bother?” And you can sit on your couch and watch TV until you die. Or you can say, “Oh, it’s all been done before, so there’s no pressure on me to create anything radically new. I can just innovate with what I have, with the ideas that I have, with what I’ve curated, with what I’ve read, with what I’ve dreamed.

I can take some of these existing ideas and put my own unique spin on them. Some people may even tell you that there’s just three stories that we’re telling over and over and over again, the comedy, the history and the tragedy. But that’s not what’s important. Originality isn’t everything. People might praise what they see as an original idea, but so often our ideas are mashups between things we’ve learned things, we’ve experienced thoughts and images and ideas that we’ve curated from other sources, into works of art, a work of creation, a novel, a book of poetry, a memoir, a podcast. Whatever it is you’re creating, is so much more than just an idea. Whatever it is you create takes work, it takes voice, it takes skill, it takes talent, it takes dedication, it takes commitment. An idea is just one small part of the equation that comes out to creative work.

What I’m saying is, don’t get too hung up on the need to be original in the premise for your work. I mean, give it a shot. Don’t just go out and say, “Well, I’m going to write a story about sparkly vampires who play baseball, because that’s plagiarism.” Don’t just copy someone else’s idea. But I also think we need to do a better job of acknowledging that our own ideas are often not completely or at all original. Our work comes from us, and we have to struggle with this paradox that we are simultaneously wholly unique, but also we experience very similar things. It’s the human condition. The limiting belief here is that you need to be 100% original in order to be creative. Where the freeing belief is that you can use your experiences, others experiences, other stories, ideas, everything that you have at your disposal to create something beautiful, and meaningful and new.

Myth number six, it’s possible to run out of creativity. Back when I was working full time in marketing, I used to be very careful about how I “spent” my creativity. At this particular time, I was setting aside two hours every evening to work on my novel, so from 8:00 to 10:00 PM. During the day I would think, “How am I rationing out my creativity so that I have enough when I get home tonight to put into my novel, my book, whatever it is I’m working on?” I didn’t want to waste my creativity, if you can imagine. I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that you can’t run out of creativity. It’s not like the last little scoop of flour left in the flower jar. As Maya Angelou said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Creativity begets creativity.

It’s sort of like love. I don’t withhold my love for other people so that I can save it for when I see my niece. No. The more love you let into your heart, the more love you give, the more love you feel, and the more love you have. Creativity is a wellspring that continually flows if you let it. What’s the bad news you ask? Well, the bad news is, we can run out of energy. If you’ve ever been burned out before, if you’ve ever overextended or overwhelmed yourself, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Energy is our tethered to the physical. Energy dictates how far we can go, what we can produce, what we can create, how late we can stay up. This is why I am such a huge proponent these days of self care, of taking care of yourself, of replenishing your energy when you need it, of not overworking yourself.

Because while you cannot run out of creativity, you can run out of energy. You can get to a place where you’re hurting yourself, where you’re limiting your future production, your future creation by pushing your physical form too far, and not giving it the time and rest and hydration it needs to recharge, and to prepare itself for another full day of creating. The limiting belief here is that we can run out of creative. But the freeing belief is that the more creativity we use, the more we have. We just have to be good at taking care of ourselves and replenishing our energy when we need it.

Myth number seven, society doesn’t want you. When I initially sent out these emails to my newsletter recipients, this was the myth that I got the biggest response to. I graduated college in 2006, right at the start of the Great Recession. I remember thinking as I searched for jobs, that had increasingly less and less to do with the degree that I had earned, “Wow, society really doesn’t want me.” The economy had no place for anyone in my graduating class, and it was really easy to come away with a sense of purposelessness. To come away with a sense of being unwanted and unneeded. I had a very good friends with a degree in physics who was working the overnight shift at a gas station. I was very fortunate to land a data entry position shortly after I graduated and I remember feeling betrayed.

I had been told that going to college was the key to entering a meaningful place in the workforce, and I know that many of my friends and colleagues felt the same way. We’d been lied to, and we had thousands and thousands of dollars of student loan debt that working overnight at a gas station, or working for $10 an hour doing data entry wasn’t going to do much good and paying off. As I continued to work my way through my career and I went from data entry positions to entry level marketing position, to mid level marketing positions, I found that I was still a little bit bitter or angry or betrayed. None of the jobs that I was working wanted the actual value that I could provide. They didn’t want to pay me to be innovative or creative. They didn’t want me to solve problems. They wanted me to sit down and push buttons.

They just wanted obedience. They wanted a warm body who could carry out a task. Maybe you’ve experienced something like this. Maybe you’ve been in a position where you’ve wanted to say, “I have so much more I can offer if you would just let me.” It can be frustrating and even hurtful to say, “Look, I’m capable of so much more,” and to have someone else say, “No, we don’t want that.” If you’ve ever written a novel or a short story and submitted it for publication, if you’ve ever queried an agent, if you’ve ever gotten rejected from either of these, it’s so easy to feel unappreciated. It’s so easy to feel invisible and frustrated and helpless, and even betrayed. It’s tempting to say, “You know what? Fine. I’ll keep my head down and I’ll do my work, and I won’t even try to be creative.” But here’s the thing. While society will tell you over and over again that it doesn’t want your creativity, it actually needs it to move forward and evolve.

Because what makes a real difference in society and to individuals? It’s not the form letters that I was sending out, it’s not the data I was entering, it’s the creative works that innovate. That reinvent the way we live and the way we see things. Those things that push our buttons and coax us out of our comfort zones. That give us things we’ve never seen before. While society might not explicitly want or ask for your creativity, it sure as heck needs it. The limiting belief here is that society doesn’t want you, it doesn’t want your creativity. The freeing belief here is that maybe you’re not creating for society. Maybe you’re creating for you. Maybe you’re creating because you love to create, because you have a story to tell, because you have a message to share. And maybe after all of that, you will become more valuable to society than anyone including yourself ever imagined.

Myth number eight. success comes from hustle. I went through a phase in my life actually right around the time that I started the Write Now podcast when I was working a full time job podcasting, volunteering, ghostwriting books in whatever spare time I could find. I was living the hustle life. I was in this mindset that if I wanted to get anywhere I had to go harder. I had to work harder. Sleep was for the weak, rest was for the pitiful. I don’t know. There’s this whole mindset that went along with the glorification of overworking yourself. As we talked about before, we have a limited amount of energy, and we need to take care of ourselves and rest and replenish that energy so that we can become the creators that we need to be. Now you may be thinking, “Sarah, with everything I have going on, maybe adding in a creative project, like writing a giant novel is not good and will lead to burnout.” And yes, it might. However, creativity is actually really good for us.

It alleviates stress. It helps us feel happier and more fulfilled. It even makes us more resilient and less prone to disease. So inevitably, as usual, we’re faced with a paradox. That is, the creative projects that we’re longing to do are good for us mentally, physically, even spiritually, but how do we fit them into our already cramped schedules? How do we create without the act of creativity becoming yet another hustle? The answer to this question/paradox is going to be different for everyone, and there are no easy answers. I had to sit down and think about this for myself. I had to journal about it for a while. For me, the answer that I came up with was two part. That A. creating is an act of self care, and B. I have a choice in how I live and how I spend my time. I have a whole podcast episode about this, but sometimes saying yes to a creative project means saying no to something else that we’d previously prioritized.

It’s up to you to make that decision. It’s up to you to line up your priorities and make difficult choices about what needs to be in your life. I think at the end of the day, it’s less about squeezing in yet one more activity and more about understanding and prioritizing what is truly meaningful, fulfilling and life giving to each of us. The myth here is that success comes from hustle, from overworking yourself, when really, success comes from taking care of yourself and leading and choosing a fulfilling, fulfilled and prioritized life. I’m just going to acknowledge right now that today has been a perfect symphony of trains, airplanes, helicopters, garbage trucks. It’s a noise factory outside. If any of those noises have seeped through into today’s recording, I apologize. I know it’s not fun to listen to, but it will not stop. It’s like Richard Scarry’s, Busy, Busy World out there. Okay, on to the next myth.

Myth number nine, you must create a masterpiece. Maybe you’ll relate to this, but I am a recovering perfectionist. I am trying to get over perfectionism. The need for everything I create to be perfect. Whatever that means. I’ve always had high standards for myself and my work, and to think of lowering those standards and producing something that was not earth shatteringly beautiful and amazing, perish the thought. Also, ask me about my ego sometime. I remember the day at the office where my boss told me something that was really hard for me to hear. He told me done is better than perfect, and that sometimes we need to ship things. Sometimes we need to send things off to clients that are done, and that the extra seven or eight hours that we would put into tweaking it and making it “perfect”, were not worth the investment of those hours.

It’s something that stuck with me now as I create for a living, done is better than perfect. Because as a perfectionist, what I used to do is never publish or submit anything. This recording is going to be imperfect because I live by a train tracks, a hospital, an Air Force Base, a school. Actually to hospitals. This isn’t going to be perfect. But you know what, I’m getting this episode done and it’s going to help people, and if you as a gracious listener are willing to tune out the train whistles and the garbage trucks and the helicopters and the F-16s, I thank you for it. If we are focused on being perfect, if we are obsessed with being perfect, which I was, then nothing is ever good enough, nothing is ever finished and our work crumbles at our desk, unseen by the world, unheard by the world. Our messages go adrift.

My perception of perfect came from the works of literature I was reading. I would look at a book that had been published, I would look at my own draft and I would say, “This is not good enough. This is not a work of staggering genius.” Again, ask me about my ego sometime. I didn’t think about this until years later when I watched an amazing video from the School of Life called The Perfectionist Trap, which I’ll link to in the show notes for today’s episode. But I was comparing my rough drafts to someone else’s published work. Someone who had decades more of experience than I did. Someone whose work had been through multiple editors. Someone whose work had been through multiple rewrites. We cannot do that to ourselves. It is not only unfair, it is cruel. Give yourself a little bit of grace. Are you holding yourself to an impossible standard? Or are you willing to learn as you go?

Are you willing to publish as you go? Are you willing to grow as a creator? To subject your work to the criticisms of others, learn from them, and continue growing? If the limiting belief here is that you must create a perfect masterpiece? The freeing belief is that done is better than perfect.

Finally, myth number 10. Failure is bad. Failure is such an interesting topic. It seems so weighty. It seems like if you fail, you die. If you fail, it’s something that you can’t recover from. If you fail, you’re over and you go away, or you fade into oblivion. But I have a truth for you that might be hard to hear, and that is failure is an inevitable part of the creative journey. You’re going to write poems that don’t work. You’re going to write stories that don’t work. You’re going to write novels that don’t sell. Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself, would you keep working on that project if you knew it was going to be a failure? Why or why not?

Taking risks and experiencing failure is how we learn those hard but crucial lessons. While the consequences can sometimes be painful, humiliating, or you know, just downright irritating, failure is a necessary part of the creative process. Our job is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. We need room to fail because we need room to grow. That’s right. We need to fail sometimes, because that’s how we learn. In that learning, we also learn how to recover gracefully from those failures, to deal with the consequences, and move forward, bolder and more informed. Failure is not a death sentence. Failure is a chance that we take, and everybody fails from time to time. Even people who you think of as successful, everyone has a failure. Everyone has something that they’re not quite proud of.

What’s important is not whether or not you fail or whether or not you experience failure and its consequences. What’s important and what defines you is how you react to the failure. How you react to the consequences. Whether or not you’re able to brush yourself off and try again. Failure is not final. Failure is usually not fatal. Failure is something we experience and we move past. The limiting belief is that we can somehow hide from or protect ourselves from ever failing ever, when the freeing belief is that we need to just get comfortable failing and then recovering from it.

Well, that’s a really cheery note to end our 10 myths on. But seriously, I hope that these were helpful. If you would like to take this information with you or pass it along to a friend, you can hold on to this recording. You can also download the free ebook that I made to go along with today’s podcast. You can download my 10 Harmful Creativity Myths ebook for free from my website, sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com/10myths. That’s sarahwerner.com/1-0-M-Y-T-H-S. If you’re interested, it’s completely free. There are no strings attached. Just submit your email address, let me know where to send the copy of the ebook to.

If you are not comfortable submitting your email address, there is a little link you can click in the fine print that just says, “Hey, just let me download the PDF,” and you can totally do that. I just want this to be something that you can take with you that feels inspiring, that feels like a breath of air in a very crowded and cluttered and stuffy room. This podcast and all of the free resources and such that I offer are made possible by my amazing patrons out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that allows you to pay $1 per episode, $2 per episode, whatever it is you feel like pledging to me here at the Write Now podcast. In doing so, you help me cover my time, hosting costs, all of that good stuff to make sure that the Write Now podcast and all of the accompanying resources are free for everyone.

Special thanks today go out to patrons. Amanda King, Amanda L. Dixon, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Michael Beckwith, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, TJ Brick, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you all so incredibly much for your generous support. Again, if you would like to download my free eBook based on this episode, you can do that out at sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com/10myths. That’s 1-0-M-Y-T-H-S. If you would like to become a patron of the Write Now podcast, you can do so by going out to patreon.com that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/sarahrheawerner S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R, or by going out to my website, navigating to the show notes for today’s episode, and clicking on help support this podcast. Either way, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I hope you enjoy the free ebook. I think it’s about 50 pages.

It’s not like a massive giant book, but it is fairly substantial and hopefully helpful. Feel free to download it, share it with people who you feel would benefit from it. Just share the love. All right. With that, this has been Episode 92 of the Write Now podcast. The podcast that helps all writers aspiring, professional and otherwise to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I know you can do this.