owl in flight

“The ultimate call of the Muses in contemporary life is to live a creative and authentic life.” Angeles Arrien

Creativity—The Adrenaline Rush of Choice

Creativity comes with adrenaline and fear. ~ Mary Jo Putney, author

At the romance writers conference that I attended last weekend, I sat in on a seminar given by Mary Jo Putney. Putney, a published romance writer of more than 30 books, has made all of the national bestseller lists including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USAToday, and Publishers Weekly.

When she said, “Creativity comes with fear and adrenaline,” it caught my attention. So I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What does that mean and is it a good thing?

While that might sound like a not-so-good thing—-after all, adrenaline and fear are stress factors and too much stress or the wrong stress, isn’t healthy for you—-adrenaline and fear are important signals to us in the before, during and after stages of our creative work.

Before
Fear and its companion, adrenaline, are common signals at the beginning of any creative project. And contrary to logic, they do not disappear once you have reached a certain level of success or have been doing your creative work for a long time.

In fact, if fear and adrenaline don’t show up, that’s when you should be concerned.

Why? Because every new project should carry an element of the unknown and require that risk, that willingness to leap off a creative cliff unsure of whether we are going to fly, or fall and break ourselves on the rocks of mistakes and failures below.

If the new project doesn’t carry even the smallest element of risk, fear and adrenaline, then chances are you have no emotional investment in the project and you run a different kind of risk—that of the project lacking heart and soul.

During
As we work on our creative project, adrenaline can show up in the rush of discovering something new and unexpected in the work. When that something new or unexpected is a blessing then we experience that adrenaline rush of excitement about new dimensions and possibilities for the work. If that something new is a creative challenge or problem for the work, then we get the fear and adrenaline of worrying about successful completion and whether or not we can wrestle the work back to where we thought it should go.

But the appearance of fear and adrenaline in this part of the creative process is always an opportunity to challenge ourselves to take the work deeper and wider, to stretch the work and ourselves to reach towards full potential.

After
Here’s where many of us fall victim to fear and adrenaline. The work is complete or almost complete and yet the fear of whether or not it is “good”, and whether or not anyone will like it, and whether or not anyone will buy it, can keep us from putting it out into the world.

This is where we tell ourselves that we need to do one more edit, or fix that last part, or find a better illustrator. As long as we can put off those final steps of completing the work, we can put off our imagined pains of failure and rejection.

Fear and adrenaline at this stage offer us an opportunity to insure the success of our creative project. Here, we clearly define what our visions and goals for the work are, and then create a plan or strategy for getting that work out to our waiting public without being too emotionally attached to the outcome.

Fear and adrenaline in our creativity can work in our favor. They can fuel the drive for excelling at what we do, strengthen our commitment to moving past blocks, and empower us to give birth to the work in the world.

Are you feeling the fear? And the rush that goes with it? Good.