Three IS the Charm

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

My creative writing has been done in the comforts of my Notes app and the numerous amounts of notebooks and journals all over my home. My daughter has threatened to start throwing away the excess notebooks if I buy more. I laugh because while IT IS a ridiculous amount of unfinished books, they’re mine and attached to my various parts of life. They’re also attached to my creative writing process… something I haven’t acknowledged in a long time.

However, I started reading The Creative Act (the book you see above) and a LOT of shit started flooding out of my memory banks. I was reminded that I DID have a writing process that kept me publishing three blog posts a day, years ago. I had a method to my madness and it was if I saw something, was approached about it, or had conversations about anything 3 or more times, I would write about it. It allowed me to create my own space to filter my opinions about any and everything. There were a lot of messages from people asking if I was talking specifically about them and I answered honestly every time with a “No” because I wasn’t. I was relying on the energetic output of everything in the universe; what reached me is what I wrote about.

I think one of the things we still haven’t quite acknowledged about how the internet works is that it’s no different than other media medium. It feeds us what we (and the people we interact with the most) engage most frequently. Even if we’re tired of child support discussions coming around the first and last of every month, they’ll still reach us if we even say we’re sick of them being revolving convos. We can say absolutely nothing but if the person we talk to everyday has entertained it by posting, reposting, quoting, or chiming into any conversations, it’s going to reach us too.

This is one of the ways connection works and oddly, we forget this everyday, despite it blatantly being in our face.

I’m getting sidetracked… back to my process. Rick encourages the reader to “set up a daily schedule, where we engage in particular rituals at specific times every day or week. The gestures we perform don’t need to be grand. Small rituals can make a big difference.” My 3 Times or More ritual was something that never failed me because I also read a fucking lot and listen to people. As a writer, if your head isn’t completely up your ass most of the day, there’s always something to write about; granted, it might not be what we want to spend time ruminating over but topics are always in abundance. Rick also mentions The Source (where all creativity stems from) and maintaining a relationship with it to the point that we get what we need to consistently fuel our artistic output.

Being open-minded and observant is what allows me to stay plugged into The Source. I often call myself a Child of the Universe because I truly believe humans are connected to everything. We pick and choose if we stay connected, sometimes without acknowledgment. So with the development of things like The Law of Attraction, I saw it as an attempt to control what we take in and release from The Source. However, any artist worth their weight in creative gold knows some of the best art comes from leaning into the duality of life. When we start assigning moral status to the expressions of humanity, our art becomes limited to the boxes we have intentionally chosen to fuck with or to steer clear of… and that’s okay… but true to what Rick reverberates throughout the book, we don’t get the best art by limiting ourselves.

So, I’m going back to what I know works best for me. Three is the magic number and that’s how I’m going to keep this writing engine running. I have a feeling all the things I want to do with my writing will come out of this consistency. Here goes nothing…