Letter #11: We Create As We Consume

Goa, December 23, 2022

Dear friend,

Creatives from all over India have landed in Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival & the capital city of Panjim is more interesting than ever right now. I went to visit some of the venues & exhibits over the last weekend, and there was one exhibit in particular which echoed the very theme I had in mind for Letter no. 11 to you. (And if this isn’t serendipity, then what is… hehe)

“Under the Influence” is a traveling library featuring 100 books chosen by artists. As the curator wrote & I agree:

For many art practitioners, reading is a starting point for their work, a process that permeates their practice, where books can foster both intuitive encounters & long-term engagements.

To turn this idea into an experience for the festival, the Asia Art Archive India team collected inspiring books selected by artists from around the world, along with their personal stories related to their selection. The titles ranged across genres - novels, poetry, or classics from sci-fi, psychology, history, philosophy, and other disciplines. Visitors were invited to sit and browse the annotated books at their leisure, and share their own stories.

A section from the travelling library "Under the influence"

I too have been wanting to write about the books & podcasts that inspired me in the process of writing the 10 Brain Food Letters thus far. In my first letter to you, I wrote about the Psychology of Inspiration, and it’s only fitting to now look back & pay gratitude to all the delicious brain-food cooked up by other creatives which has nourished my own writings. Consider today’s letter to be the virtual equivalent of my own annotations on writings that have fueled me, and my own stories related to them. Perhaps you’d stumble upon some new books and podcasts to continue curating what you consume in 2023.

The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron

I’m sure I’ve quoted this book multiple times already throughout last year, but it’s truly a special one for me. It was gifted to me by an ex-boss and lay on my desk for almost a year before the book's promise of “recovering your creative self” finally resonated (really hard) with me in early 2019. I finally completed all the readings & exercises given in the book and honestly, it was like therapy in book-form (way before I had the opportunity to start working with a real therapist).

It’s a fabulous book to reflect on where your creative identity (or lack of it) comes from. I used to recommend this book to a lot of people earlier. Even buy it for them. But then I realized that giving this intense book to someone is a lot like gifting a puppy. It’ll bring big changes to your life (tons of inner-work along the way) but it also involves a lot of work (12 weeks of regular reading & reflecting is not the easiest). So pick it up when you have bandwidth. But do pick it up once in your life :)

Creative Confidence, by Tom & David Kelley

I saw this book with a friend and definitely bought it for the cover design, not gonna lie. But I had no clue that all the insights shared by the Kelley brothers would tie in so beautifully with everything I was writing for Vaccines for Fear at the time, and now for Brain Food letters.

This light read kept iterating the core principles of the creative process through stories from the world of science & business, with specially the ideas of “experimentation” & “small steps” being highlighted in big ways throughout.

I see the Artist’s Way & Creative Confidence as two different ways of approaching the same topic, in different languages. While the Artist's Way helped me understand mindblocks from the perspective of a practicing creative and my own inclination leads me to more psychology/neuroscience-based sources, this book explores the same in the context of design-thinking & the business-world. Overall, it really reinforced what I knew and helped me break out of the boxes in which I thought conversations on creative mindblocks belonged.

These two books, kept next to one another, remind me how we have to meet the audience where they are, if we are to have a conversation. So while Julia Cameron uses the language of spirituality, beliefs & the universe, IDEO’s Kelley brothers speak about business innovation & design thinking. But at the core, they both encourage looking at life with open-heartedness & courage.

They reinforce that everyone is creative.

They both bring forward stories of real people with great context-setting.

And they are both about action, not just inspiration.

Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke’s writing inspired me to write the first letter “Notes from Naggar” to my creative community back in early-March 2020, when I was in Himachal Pradesh. Ever since then, the idea of writing letters has just stayed with me and possibly that’s what led to the format of the Brain Food project being a series of letters. The warmth & wisdom with which Rilke wrote to the young Franz Kuppus is something I hope every creative, every human actually, receives on their journey.

I did find it a bit hard to read because of the vocabulary from the 1900s and had to focus extra hard on some sentences. But that’s why these writings are also like the portal to a time-capsule - taking us back ~120 years into the mind of a creative person such as Rilke. So even if you only really understand 50-60% of it, consider picking it up. What you do get from it will be worth your time.

Goodbye, Again by Jonny Sun

This is the book I’d been reading very slowly over the past 5 months, because I just didn’t want it to end. I picked a snippet from it for Letter 9 as well - for my Library of Comfort Notes, and it was a hard task to pick just one snippet for that. The entire book is full of instances from the author’s life which feel familiar without being underwhelming. As we seek & overdose on newness from every platform & piece of content, this book brings home everyday stories from the author’s life, with a dose of emotion that sometimes hits you out of nowhere.

The way Jonny acknowledges his anxiety & difficult emotions throughout the book is soothing and at a creative level, it aligns completely with how I prefer to write myself - by spotlighting the Inner Critic, acknowledging all the demotivating things it says, and then eventually finding ways to move around it.

While I earlier put the idea of writing-brainy-informative-stuff on a pedestal, this book moved me & showed me that writing-with-heart is a worthy pursuit too. The book is soulful, full of illustrations by the author himself & short chapters that you’ll want to read as a comma to your busy day.

Creative Pep Talk by Andy J Pizza [Podcast series]

Andy’s energy is my pick-me-up at the end of a long day. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter what the precise topic is - I know it’ll always be about overcoming creative challenges of some sort, and it’ll be explored in a really fun way. Andy speaks from personal experience & uses a lot of real-life metaphors to talk about these challenges, which is something I like doing as well. I feel it helps demystify the creative process if we start seeing analogies from our everyday lives, minus the design jargon.

A lot of the recent episodes have been aimed towards career-creatives who are creating professionally and need to navigate social spaces - both online & offline

One of the older episodes which I liked a lot was “Types of Personal Projects'' because Andy brings SO MUCH clarity to the chaotic world of personal projects. It’s this one right here: Episode 327 (The 6 Types of Personal Projects and How to Know Which Kind to Do NOW)

Routines & Ruts, by Madeleine Dore [Podcast series]

Quite at the opposite of Andy’s energy level is Madeleine's soothing voice on Routines & Ruts, as she talks about Productivity Guilt. As the name suggests (how nice is this name R&R), the podcast is about the days we go completely off-track and also the days we manage to get a lot done. When I write, I try to imagine how my writing would sound in a voice as honest & calm as Madeleine’s.

If you’ve not heard any of the episodes so far, I’d recommend you listen to Season 1 & 2 of the podcast first, instead of starting from the most recent ones. I definitely enjoyed the earlier ones more for some reason and had referenced this old episode from this podcast too in Letter 9 as well: Season 2 Wrap Episode: Lessons on Wobbling

🍍🍍🍍

We are what we consume, and our creative diet informs our creative output in a big way. My hope for 2023 is the same as the one I had for this year - to keep consuming mindfully.

I hope you have a lovely last-week-of-2022.

Take care of yourself!

Love,

Nishita