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Recently we talked about setting limits to increase creativity.

As we narrow down our focus, it becomes easier to just get on with the work, rather than endlessly debating when, how and what we should start.

In the conversation surrounding that article, I was asked further about how I actually got down to setting the limits I did set, in my example of taking photographs.

In the original article, I talked about the various layers of increasingly narrowed focus – first I chose to only take black and white photographs, then added a second layer – black and white and close up.

The third layer was the subject matter – nature, leaves, trees. The final layer was the time of day – early morning when there was mostly a layer of dew or frost across the land.

(In fact the original narrowing of focus in what to create was to simply choose photography, and to not choose writing, singing, dancing, music, film, or a host of other options that also draw me to experiment. So level zero of focus is to choose photography, level one is choosing only black and white photos, and so on.)

I didn’t choose any of these limits arbitrarily, plucking them out of thin air. Neither did I choose them instantly, and all at once.

These limitations evolved naturally, led my by own curiosity and hunger.

I’ve always loved black and white photography more than colour. Something about it being more romantic, more pure, more timeless.

I realise that this is just the photographic manifestation of a deeper desire or value I have in making art.

For example, I have been writing far longer than I have been seriously taking photographs. I used to have a small set of rules that I wrote poetry by (and still have, they’re just so embedded now I forgot I had them!)

They included not using names of anything that might date the poem. I rarely even use people’s names, and often keep away from obvious hes and shes.

This, for me, makes a poem timeless and open to all.

I could write a poem about a couple in love and give one a clear boy’s name, the other an obvious girl’s name, state their ages, nationalities, set it in a certain place and time, and so on. But for me that would tie it to that time, that boy/girl relationship, those associations the readers’ have of those two names.

Whereas I could write essentially the same poem about the couple and not explicitly mention name, age, place, time nor gender. The underlying feelings would be the same, and in fact would likely to be intensified (for the reader) because all the surface details were stripped off.

You could be anyone that ever had a relationship and knew those feelings of being in love with another, and relate to the poem, whether you were male, female, 16, 106, straight, gay, and so on.

To me this is the poetic equivalent of the timeless black and white photograph.

So from this example I hope you can see that the decisions we make in how to narrow our focus on what we create, are based on the things we already know and are drawn towards. The things we’re curious to explore more, the things we’re hungry to know.

You might not think you know what to focus on, or how to limit your creativity, because you love so many different materials, have so many ideas, and want to create in so many different ways.

But you can’t do it all, certainly not at once.

If you honestly don’t know how to choose, ask yourself a couple of simple questions -

1. Which creative projects have I enjoyed most in the past? What is it about them I enjoyed most? (Clue: In answering this question, How and Why you created them might be far more important than what you actually created and the medium you chose.)

2. If I could only work on three more projects for the rest of my life, then had to stop creating forever, which projects would I choose?

Let you artistic hunger and curiosity come through. It’s already there, just beneath the surface, waiting to guide you.

Let it take you deeper, not wider.

Let it help you become more focused, not more scattered.

Let it guide and inspire you to grow a tiny and incredibly beautiful garden, that you’re highly proud of and others clamour to visit, rather than keep sowing seeds haphazardly across vast rolling fields and never seeing them come to anything.

Ultimately you just need to pick something to work on, one angle, one approach.

Then hone it a little further, and further still. Then explore, own, devour, and dominate that little niche you’ve chosen, until you’ve mastered it. Until you feel like an artist, and beyond.

Then, if you want to, you might to explore another creative path your curiosity and hunger and leading you down…

How do you choose which creative projects to focus on? Join the conversation to let us know.

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image: dancoachcreative

In my yoga practice I’m experimenting with the phrase Empty Everything.

At points where I’m holding a pose, I repeat it gently in my head, to literally empty my head of distracting thoughts.

How could this approach of Empty Everything help in your creating?

What if everything you’d created, and everything you know about creating was emptied, and you could start again?

Where would you begin? How would you create?

Join the conversation to let us know.

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image: dancoachcreative

In a discussion following a recent article I posted, we were talking about setting limits on our creativity, and how that much that frees us to be more creative.

I was asked how I actually decided on the limits I impose on myself, and how I put them into practice. So I’m going to talk a bit more about that here.

The example I’m going to use is how I currently approach photography.

About six months ago I bought my first “proper” digital camera. The previous three I’d used were phone cameras, and whilst I’d got some pleasing photographs and learned a great deal, it was time to raise my photography a level.

So after much research I bought a sleek new Nikon. I downloaded the instruction manual. It was 200 pages.

If I’d have sat down and tried to read about every last feature and function of my new camera, I would have been completely overawed by about page five.

I would not have known where to start actually using it, and most likely would’ve dabbled with one setting, taken not even a handful of shots, before trying something else for a few shots, moving on again, and so on.

I’d have ended up with a batch of disparate, somewhat random photographs that didn’t give me the chance to get know any one feature or setting very well.

Equally likely I would have been frustrated that I was able to take a perfectly adequate photograph in a variety of different modes, but not a great or memorable photograph in any of them. And who wants their art to be merely adequate?

So here’s the first place I set limits.

I saw there was a monochrome setting, and due to a long held love of black of white photography, I decided to pick that and take as many photographs as possible in that mode.

By choosing one setting, it means I was not choosing about 25 others. I’d let go of the pressure I would otherwise impose on myself to master 25+ different settings in the first weekend of owning the camera.

Within that setting, I soon found that it was giving the most interesting results with more detailed, up close shots. I then found the macro setting, and switched that on.

This is the second layer of limits. Layer one – monochrome. Layer two – macro.

Now I was starting to see some really pleasing photographs.

The third limit was subject matter.

I’m a nature lover, and with my previous cameras the majority of photoshoots have been in woods, across fields, and beside lakes. I rarely photograph people, or urban scenes, or anything that can be dated (for example a scene where there are billboard adverts or cars that easily give the era away).

Timelessness is an important aspect to me.

So my next few photoshoots with the Nikon were in the nearby woods, and a few other favourite natural haunts. Being woodland, of course the majority of subject matter becomes trees, leaves and plants.

So this was my third layer – the subject matter – leaves, plants, nature.

Another layer still was informed by the time of day I usually went out to photograph – early in the morning when it was still partially dark.

Being the winter months when I began these explorations, the ground at this time of the morning was graced with a wonderful layer of either dew or frost, as if a glamorous queen had cast her jewels across the entire landscape whilst we all slept.

This gave my fourth layer – the time of day, and therefore the appearance of the landscape and surroundings.

A quick recap.

Layer one in limiting my creative options was to take only monochrome photographs.

Layer two was to use macro for close ups.

Layer three, explore the woods and fields and photograph leaves, plants and nature.

Layer four, photograph early in the morning when there’s a magical, hushed layer of dew or frost across the land.

Once these limitations had been set (and they all came about quite organically – these are the type of photographs I most felt drawn to take) I began photographing in abundance.

By setting such strict limits, I was able to start to (try to) master that particular kind of photograph.

My focus was greatly narrowed by my choices, which meant I wasn’t having endless debates each time I wanted to go out with my camera about where to go, when to go, what to photograph and using which settings. I’d made those decisions beforehand, so I was freed up to just go and find the beauty that was awaiting me.

This doesn’t mean that I will never use any other setting on my camera.

It just means that for me, choosing a set of limits helps me focus entirely on capturing the best photographs I can of a specific type.

As I said before, I’d rather take some great photographs of one specific type, than mediocre ones across a range of different subjects and settings.

Another point to add to this apparent strictness of rules. By setting them as a guide, it doesn’t mean that if I’m heading back from an early morning, monochrome macro photoshoot and the sun begins to rise, filling the sky with glorious tinges and blushes of purple and orange, I won’t take a few shots of that. In colour. I will, because my eyes are always open to whatever beauty I find around me, and sometimes I happen upon it spontaneously.

I chose this example of how I photograph, as it gives some clear, definable limits.

It’s easy to explain the layers of limits I used. I do a similar thing in many other areas of creating, and indeed in other areas of my life.

We cannot do everything, and we’d be foolish to try. In our entire lifetimes, if we created for 23 hours a day and slept the other one, we would still not have time to bring all our best ideas to life. We couldn’t in ten lifetimes!

But once we start to set limits, we give ourselves a chance to focus, and to increase our passion and our competence within those limits.

By saying no to vast swathes of options as to what we could create, we’re saying yes to one or two things and just getting down to creating.

We go from being dabblers in a dozen artforms, to becoming focused and fantastic in a few.

In the movie Adaptation, Meryl Streep’s character comes to a realisation as to why the guy she’s writing about is so incredibly obsessed with orchids.

“There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”

It’s the same thing we’re talking about here. Whittling down our creative options to a manageable focus.

If we try to choose everything, we end up choosing nothing.

And your creative talent and potential is far too precious and valuable to produce nothing from.

Set some limitations, any limitations, focus your passion and energy and talent, and start creating within those boundaries.

Then let us know how it’s working out for you.

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image: dancoachcreative

After using my MacBook I close the lid and let it sleep, then, when ready, I open it and resume where I left off.

Every two or three weeks or so though, I find I have too many applications and windows open. I’ve lost focus, become scattered, trying to do too many things, and hold too much in my mind at once.

So I close everything, shut down, restart.

Then I have a pure, clean desktop to begin again, with whatever’s most important at that time.

How might this approach help in your creative life?

Tell us your thoughts.

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In a forest, when leaves and branches fall, they gradually decay and are absorbed back into the earth, leaving space for the living trees to thrive.

What if this didn’t happen though?

What if leaves didn’t fall from deciduous trees in the autumn, and just stayed there, dead on the branches? How would the new leaves be able to find their way through in the spring, if there was no room for them?

Even if some did begin to grow, how would the tree manage to provide nutrients for so many leaves? How could the sun shine on each leaf when they were overlapping three or four deep and shading each other out?

What if, when a tree died at only a fraction of its potential full height, it just remained there, dead and purposeless in the forest?

How would any new trees be able to make use of the space, the earth, and the atmosphere that the dead tree occupied? How would the forest stay alive and thrive if it was increasingly full of dead wood?

The answer is eventually it wouldn’t.

After only a few handfuls of seasons, the trees would all be dead or dying, the earth would be choked, and nothing new would have the chance to grow.

The forest would be an arboreal graveyard, a snapshot of death frozen in time, without any hope or space for new shoots or new life.

Then of course this would have a wider reaching on the rest of the ecosytem that was dependent on the trees.

And so the decay would spread.

You and I, of course, are not trees, but we can picture our creative lives as forests.

Each new idea we have, is a seed on the wind, looking for somewhere to land.

Each project we begin is a tiny new shoot poking through the earth and reaching for the sun.

The forest around us is our artistic body of work, made up of every project we’ve ever brought to life and nurtured.

But, like the dead forest we imagined above, some of our projects don’t reach their full height.

Some of their trunks never expand to their maximum width. Some of their crowns never stretch out to their greatest potential.

In fact, the majority of our projects probably fall into this category, and are “works in progress”. Even if we haven’t actually made any progress on them in a year, three years, a decade.

Here, we have a choice.

We can either keep them as open projects, taking up space and energy both physically and mentally (even though we know we’ll never return to them). Or we can let go, take the learning we can from the experience, and move on to our new work, a better artist.

If you’re surrounded and choking under deadwood, the entire forest is in danger of dying.

To let the new growth breathe, to let the new projects even have a chance of thriving, the old, decayed and never to be revived wood must be culled and removed.

What does your forest look like? Is it healthy and alive, or drowning in deadwood?

And what about your wider ecosystem – the rest of your life?

If your creativity is choked and in decline, how does that impact your confidence, your wellbeing, your happiness, your state of mind, your relationships?

Maybe it’s time for a little clearing.

Maybe it’s time to take up your axe with courage, clear the deadwood and let that new growth breathe.

Tell us about your forest, and how you deal with the deadwood of unfinished projects in the conversation we’ve started here.

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