The Creative Habit – Learn it and use it for life

by Twyla Tharp

What makes someone creative?

How does someone face the empty page, the empty stage and making something where nothing existed before?

Not just a dilemma for the artist, it is something everyone faces every day.

What will I cook that isn’t boring? How can I make that memo persuasive? What sales pitch will increase the order, get me the job, lock in that bonus?

These too, are creative acts, and they all share a common need: proper preparation.

For Twyla Tharp, creativity is no mystery; it’s the product of hard work and preparation, of knowing one’s aims and one’s subject, of learning from approaches taken in the past.

It’s a process undertaken every day.

It’s a habit.

The Creative Habit is not merely a look inside the mind of a remarkable woman with remarkable skills, but a programmatic, inspiring, encouraging guide to help each of us achieve our fullest creative potential.

The creative habit by Twyla Tharp

Creativity is not a gift from the gods, says Twyla Tharp, bestowed by some divine and mystical spark.

It is the product of preparation and effort, and it’s within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it.

All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life: In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

In The Creative Habit, Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow — whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew.

When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities.

Tharp’s exercises are practical and immediately doable — for the novice or expert.

In “Where’s Your Pencil?” she reminds us to observe the world — and get it down on paper.

In “Coins and Chaos,” she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order and peace.

In “Do a Verb,” she turns your mind and body into co-workers.

In “Build a Bridge to the Next Day,” she shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight.

To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost).

Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules.

An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing.

And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!