Overcoming Creative Blocks through Discipline

Before I started a candle business, I wanted to be an actor. I attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in order to do so. Then in my fourth year of college, I decided I did not want to be an actor anymore. (fear of rejection?)

Luckily I had minored in Creative Writing, a field certainly not associated with any rejection! (hah).

I graduated and got a job in publishing, in the year of our lord 2007, and got laid off in February 2008, deciding to leave New York and move to Austin where I wrote a (not very well read) blog and started an Etsy shop, (that later became P.F. Candle Co.)

When Tom looked to finish his college degree, I suggested California, having long held fantasies of living in California. Tom applied and got into Cal State Long Beach and we were off.

In California, I pursued P.F. because I had no other option (I could not get hired other places), but there’s a part I always leave out because it does not fit neatly into that narrative.

That is, that I hadn’t given up the ghost of a career in entertainment.

“Maybe I’ll go up to UCB and take some improv classes!” I’d tell Tom, while scoping out the transit times via train. “hmm, you could” Tom said.

Then I decided maybe the problem actually was I just needed to combine my loves of performance and writing, and took a screenwriting course at UCLA Extension.

In the screenwriting course, we worked on script outlines. I came up with my Very Best Story and submitted it. I went home, and immediately hated that story. I came to the next class with a new script outline - THIS was my Very Best Story, I told the teacher, the one that needed to be told. “I just didn’t like the other one after all, is that ok?”

Reader, it was not ok.

“No,” the teacher said, exasperated. “You have to finish what you started.”

Embarrassed, I promised to finish outlines for both - which I did.

This is where I learned a very valuable lesson about monetizing your creativity: it does not pay to follow your whims and fancy. It pays to do what you said you were going to do. (well I wasn’t getting paid at all for this, it was, again, a UCLA extension course).

In acting school, I had a teacher that drilled this “creative discipline” message by requiring us to read The Artists Way and write morning pages. She was uniquely obsessed with the Fly Lady as well, a home organization system that I will always remember when I make my sink spotless every night. Both of these are about using systems and routines to make it easier to access your creativity through calm and discipline.

It’s not so sexy when you think about creativity through lens of habit and routine, but it’s more often than not that you’re required to work creatively under pressure and deadline, producing work not necessarily for yourself. You have to sometimes create work when you are just frankly uninspired!! Structure and framework and working your creativity like a muscle are the systems that sustain us.

I’ll be honest that lately I’ve stacked my plate so full that I’ve left little room for that joy and inspiration. I have to go back again and again to the well of the systems that work for me: planning my day in advance, estimating how long something will take me, using a timer to overcome procrastination. Re-arranging my space, editing shelves, sometimes allowing for an idea sparked by the handling of personal ephemera.

1. May 28th’s NYT Strands game was all about scents. In fact, every single answer included a note from a NAMED p.f. candle. (think, sandalwood, etc). That’s probably the best I’ve ever done at Strands (sorry I don’t have the link to the exact one as I don’t have a current nyt games subscription!)

2. Brick red lipstick - my favorite is Mark of a Kiss from Charlotte Tilbury (sold out), but I also like this NARS liner in Mariachi

3. Started reading The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich. The prose of this woman writing about Wyoming, I mean - John Muir who?

4. When in doubt, just wear the same thing over and over: my OG-107s (a perfect vintage buying guide, here) and a mini-t from Uniqlo

5. Lastly, are you watching the Ladies of London reboot on Bravo? What a balm! I’m obsessed with Lady Martha Sitwell.