Creating outside the box means we must first have a box

Some people reach for 10,000 hours.

Some make their 10,000-words-a-week goal.

Some set a timer and some set a time limit, but what they all have in common is a commitment to practice.

If we want to be great writers or painters or singers, we must be willing to put in the practice.

Most of us know this. But there is that small part of us, one we don’t like to admit, that hopes we’re privileged enough to take the easy way out, the way where we don’t have reams of crumpled up paper filling our trash and every word we write comes out exactly perfectly right and we don’t have to work so hard to create something beautiful.

This misguided hope always comes knocking when writing feels too hard today or we just have too much on our plate this week or our mind, as of this moment, is a blank slate.

It’s easy to give in to that voice whispering, It won’t hurt to skip one day.

And it won’t hurt to skip one day, that’s true, but it’s so easy to take that day and skip along beside it until it turns into a week and then a month, and what happens when it turns into a year?

I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer. When my husband and I were first married, I spent long hours at night working on a novel after I got home from my newspaper job. We were kidless then, and, looking back from where I stand today, time seemed endless.

But a year in to writing, I just stopped using those empty spaces. I started filling them with TV shows and got hooked on series and wasted creative energy that could have been harnessed into practice.

It was two years before I picked up a pen again, and by then we had a baby, and writing was sporadic at best.

It wasn’t until we had our twins, nearly three years ago, that the creative pressure built to bursting and I knew I had to write again or explode.

So even though I had a full-time job and two brand new babies to add to the other three, every day, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., I took a lunch break from my day job, and I sat with my (mostly neglected) salad, and I write for 60 minutes without stopping.

I wrote freehand, in a composition book, because studies have shown that writing by hand has a special connection to the part of our brain tapping into our deep well of creativity. And by the end of that hour, I would have five pages of my notebook filled, more than 1,000 words to mold into something that had the potential to become something great.

Some might wonder how having the same practice at the same hour every day might possibly result in our best creative work, but in order to reach outside the box we must first have a box.

Creativity must first become a habit.

That habit can look different for all of us, but in order to master the gift we have been given, we have to use it.

In these three years of habit and same-time-every-day practice, I have finally outrun the internal editor. So I just write, without stopping, for an hour. It doesn’t matter if that first draft doesn’t make a whole lot of sense—that’s what the second and third and one hundredth drafts are for. I just write, without worry and without editors, just for the wonder of it.

The everyday practice is what sharpens our gift.

Because somewhere in the practice we will find our color, or our voice, or our melody. We can’t spend all that time putting pen to paper without uncovering who we are beneath all the imitation and fakery.

This is the real treasure of practice—that we find ourselves.

And a creative who knows herself is a creative who can change the world.

What does your creative box look like? Do you create at the same time every day? Do you set word goals or time goals? How do you outrun your internal editors?