Fearless Creating

Description

For writers, painters, or performers in any field, new hope for overcoming creative blocks and finishing the art of their dreams.

The blank page, empty canvas, or uncarved stone will often fill artists with dread. But so may the thought of finishing, showing, or even selling their work. It is in this “artistic anxiety” that creative blocks begin.

With an understanding that could only be gained through years of experience in counseling artists, writers, and performers, Eric Maisel, Ph.D. discusses each stage of creation-wishing, choosing, starting, working, completing, selling–and the anxieties particular to each. He then shows how these inhibiting tensions can be turned to artistic advantages, how truth and beauty arrive in the work of art precisely because, and only when, anxiety has been understood, embraced, and resolved.

Fearless Creating guides the reader, whether an experienced artist or someone just starting out, past the pitfalls that appear in each stage of the process. By following Dr. Maisel’s exercises related both to the world at hand and the ongoing struggles of artistic life, readers will emerge from this book with a completed work of art and a new perspective on their potential to be a fearless creator.Fearless CreatingPreface

Introduction: You Are Creating

1. Hushing and Holding: Nurturing the Wish to Create

2. Making Meaning: Choosing Your Next Subject

3. Belligerent COmmitment: Starting Your Work

4. Creatures From the Sea: Working

5. From Wish to World: Completing your Work

6. Echo and Approval: Showing Your Work

Afterword
Appendix: Anxiety Management Strategies
Recommended Reading

A featured speaker at writers’ conferences and a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest, psychotherapist Eric Maisel has written twenty-two works of fiction and nonfiction including The Creativity Book, Deep Writing, A Life in the Arts, Fearless Creating, and Affirmations for Artists. He lives near San Francisco.US

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