The creative process can feel a bit like a road trip. The promise of freedom, beautiful vistas, and adventures en route to new and exciting destinations. It can also be full of potholes, detours, flat tires, traffic jams, and long, boring stretches. How do we reconcile the process with the product?

If I could get paid for every minute I spend planning to do the work, sighing about not doing the work, ruminating over why I am not doing the work, and prioritizing other work to take up the time that this work could take, I could really make a living at this. I would put the Pro in Procrastination.

Could a white board and a jar be a healthier way to reflect on the wins we have achieved rather than only focusing on what we still need to do?

How can we give ourselves grace when life gets in the way of achieving our goals in our creative practice?

What to do when you are equally committed to artistic work and other kinds of work? How to fight back against the pressure to pick a side?

Impostor Syndrome is often described like a monster. Confidence is often described as something that could be missing or that one must find somewhere...that is, if you don’t get attacked by the ImpostorMonster first. Yet what if we thought about these in a different way?

Whether we want to admit it or not, envy is not unfamiliar to most artists. Whether you make a living from your art through sales, commissions, grants, prizes or you simply want your art to be seen and appreciated by others, you likely make art in contexts of comparison with other artists.

I return to the idea of feedback -- and its twin sister accountability — as it relates to our creative work and process.

There are a lot of creative people who have trouble declining requests. And we are darn tired. How can we improve the art of saying no?

If our situation imposes limitations on our artistic practice, how can we adapt to those limitations and keep our expectations realistic? This is where we can be most creative.