After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
Interpretation
Creativity requires discipline and routine to be effectively harnessed.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp emphasizes the importance of establishing routines and patterns in the creative process. She suggests that being creative is not just a spontaneous activity but a structured endeavor that often necessitates a full-time commitment and consistent habits to cultivate and sustain creativity in a productive way.
In practice
In a workshop on creativity, this quote can inspire participants to develop their own routines.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity.
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value
Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.
Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.
When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.
Do you think of yourself as a creative personality? If you do, you are both fortunate and correct, in fact the beautiful truth is that everyone is creative and we all have the ability to develop our creative potential. It is wise to remember that the person who follows the crowd will get no further than the crowd. The person who walks the creative path is likely to find they are in places no one has ever been before.
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