Thank Your Muse: Gratitude Enhances Creativity
By: Grant Faulkner
Tags: Creative Process, Inspiration, Creative Writing, NaNoWriMo, Writing

Thank Your Muse: Gratitude Enhances Creativity

If you don’t appreciate the beauty of the flame, you take away its oxygen.

If there’s one thing we writers specialize in, it’s self-loathing. We tend to beat ourselves up, whether we’re stuck in the muddy middle of a rough draft or slogging through a seemingly endless revision of a novel. We somehow forget the wondrous flow of a mellifluous sentence we write one day as we clank our way through a ragtag snarl of words the next. The novel idea we were once so thrilled by too quickly becomes a burdensome yoke around our neck.

Our demands are akin to a candle snuffer that smothers the flame of a candle. We forget how to appreciate the beauty of the flame, so we take away its oxygen without even knowing it.

Despite all the artistic mythology built around the anguished artist creating great works in fits of dark thrashings, ideas are like people: they’re attracted to positive energy, warmth, kindness. They don’t like being taken for granted or used and tossed aside. They don’t like to be ridiculed or disparaged or abused. They yearn to be lifted by the love and excitement around them — and when they feel the buoyancy of such exultation, they call out to their friends to join in the merriment.

So it’s good to pause and give thanks for your story, to bow to the transcendent powers of your creativity, to remember those fine moments when your words glowed, and pay heed to the specialness of your ability to conjure them.

Give thanks that you have a story breathing within you, and that you have the pencil and the paper or the computer to write it. Instead of focusing on the things you think you deserve or your inadequacies, take a few moments to focus on all that you have. Give thanks that you have a desk or a favorite mug for your coffee or tea. Give thanks for your singular life experiences — experiences that only you have. You’ve traveled to another planet in your life, and it’s a planet whose terrain only you know. Give thanks for your imagination, all those synaptic sparks constantly firing in their mysterious ways, seeking meaning, seeking thrills, seeking life.

Gratitude makes you healthier, happier. Gratitude makes you less self-centered and friendlier. Gratitude leads to more exercise and better sleep. Gratitude makes you a better manager or employee, a better teacher or student. Gratitude makes you more optimistic and builds your self-esteem. Gratitude builds your resilience and improves decision-making. Gratitude builds empathy and reduces envy.

Gratitude opens the soul to those everyday epiphanies that enrich us and our stories.

And gratitude makes you more creative. It instills a peace that opens up possibilities on the page. When you appreciate the incandescence of your creativity, it’s like putting on a sweater that keeps you so warm that the chills of any failure won’t make you cold. Gratitude opens the soul to those everyday epiphanies that enrich us and our stories. It lightens the burden of all the baggage we’ve loaded upon ourselves so that you suddenly can remember what it’s like to be yourself, a creator. When you recognize and acknowledge the abundance you have, your abundance grows.

You can replenish your gratitude each day as you sit down to write. Give thanks ahead of time for the chapter you’re going to write. Don’t focus on what you don’t have — don’t pick apart your writing ability or seize upon what’s wrong with your story, because you’ll always find yourself lacking. The next sentence you write is going to be a special one. Do you know how I know? You’ve never seen it before. And it’s going to lead to another sentence, and then another one after that.

So praise each word that flows from your pen. None of these words are bad. None of them wish you ill. If they’re awkward or cantankerous or just don’t sing in quite the way we’d like them to from time to time, we just have to be patient with them. Don’t disparage roses for their thorns. They wouldn’t be roses without those thorns.

Try This: Make a Gratitude Jar

Write down one thing about your creative life you’re appreciative of each day on a small piece of paper. Perhaps it’s a sentence you like. Perhaps it’s the title of your novel. Perhaps it’s the way you show up each day to write with fortitude and gusto. Or perhaps it’s the way you’ve helped others to write, how you’ve formed a creative community.

Put each piece of gratitude in a jar. When you’re feeling down, take out a piece of paper and read it. Read several at the beginning of the week or the month. Read all of them on New Year’s Eve and toast yourself.

Grant Faulkner is the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner.