#creative structure

🌞✨ These are a few sample pages from my new book Stardays — a practical and beautifully designed guide to aligning with the planetary rhythm of the 7-day week.

I just published it on Etsy as a downloadable PDF: 🔗 Stardays: Your Path to Cosmic Rhythm

If you’re someone who loves intentional living, creative structure, or symbolic tools for your day-to-day rhythm — this might speak to you.

I’m also offering free copies of the full PDF to anyone willing to leave an honest review on Etsy (after browsing it at your own pace, of course). Just message me if you’re interested 🌱

I’m pretty far from the stereotypical creative with no routine or organization. I think a lot about how I would structure my ideal day. What would be my ideal morning routine? What would I do to maximize my creative time? How would I balance productive time with rest? Time with and away from my family? How would I balance creative input and creative output? How much time should I be sleeping? How many times a week should I be out for some activity? How should I best orient team structures and invest in relationships?

As if the structure of my calendar holds the key to my productivity.

I know there is merit to these thoughts and I have benefitted from consistent analysis to how things are structured, but my desire to organize, systematize and find the ideal order to all these things can end up building a bigger barrier to getting things done. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Increased Expectations As I spend time creating the perfect environment for me to do work, I’m simultaneously increasing a the pressure on myself subconsciously to have a perfect product. It’s like blank canvas syndrome on steroids.

2. Misplaced Focus For a recent job, I had to track my hours. So I created a simple spreadsheet. Then I got an idea to add some equations to auto fill some cells (again, I’m not the stereotypical creative). I ended up spending a lot of time on what should have been a simple document instead of the actual composition that I was working on. It can be the same thing with my time. Sometimes you just have to make a quick list of things to do and get to it instead of making that list so fancy that it ends up being one of the biggest tasks that you accomplish in the day.

3. Getting Lost in the Progress Ever had to write a paper with a word count requirement? How many times did you open the menu to check your progress? Compare that to the time you got lost in the project itself. If your system of motivating and pushing you to do your creative work ends up with alerts or checkpoint goals that can pull your focus out of the work, the probability of you ending up pulled out of the flow and quite possibly sucked into the Facebook vortex increases as well.

I’ve suffered with these symptoms way too many times, especially over the last year. It’s always hard to review a day and see your time spent in a completely different proportion than what you’d hoped. There may be a lot of excuses I can have, but here’s the new system I’m trying to implement going forward:

Does every college student feel this way in the moments after graduation? This sense of dislocation, of transience-- but still, those are academic phrases (thank you, Bryant) and I'm not in the academic world anymore. What I mean is this: I feel aimless; I feel like I am wandering through my weeks, unsure of what is to come, not making any notable progress toward anything.  

For the past 17 or so years of my life I have been on a very specific track with one destination in mind: a college diploma. Making decisions was easy because I had this overlying structure to every aspect of my life. In Mary Ruefle's new book of essays she notes that Georges Perec, a French novelist who apparently wrote a novel without the letter e, "speaks of anti-constraints within a system of restraints."  Mary jokingly remarks afterward "(Those of you who have heard lectures on the sonnet may recall that this is often, precisely, the point.)" -- When you are told your poem must have 14 lines, and a specific rhyme scheme, your art suddenly has rules; it has boundaries: it must be contained. And with this structure comes freedom. 

How many people would feel more comfortable writing a haiku, with its constricting 5-7-5 syllable requirement, than they would writing a poem? The idea of writing a poem is daunting. Most people would claim that they don't know how to write a poem (as if there were a set of guidelines dictating what a poem must be. (There aren't.) But writing 3 lines with a set number of syllables? That they can do.  The restrictions, the rules, the confines, they allow us the freedom we need to create. They give us a system to operate within.

I'm struggling to write much these days. At Colby I was writing at least an essay a week (creative essays, I mean), and even when I had large chunks of novels to read (namely Ulysses, that demon of a brilliant book) I always made time to write. My life had structure. I was working toward a goal, and as long as I was slowly making progress in that direction, I could give myself as much wiggle room, as much creative playtime, as I could afford.