✍️ The Power of Creative Minimalism
or, Enjoying the Silence
My vacationing son and daughter-in-law sent a group chat video of them in a club, cheering to “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode. The text came in just as I was getting things together for the writing retreat. “Dad needs to see this,” was the conversation apparently. It made me laugh. I love they thought to text me.
I’m not sure how he knew, but my son was absolutely right: I needed to be reminded of that song. I had some trepidation going into this retreat as I mentioned last week. I’m at a creative crossroads. The goal of this weekend, I decided, was to find direction. Decisions are often easier to make when you remove yourself physically. Paris is one of my go-to preferences, but (a) that’s a plane ticket away and hotels ain’t cheap anymore, and (b) the writing retreat with all my peeps was at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, not Paris. For now, anyway.
As the title of this post may suggest, I’m enjoying the silence. The banner image above is my view while writing this post – yesterday morning, your time. The day before, there was a rare winter fog that covered everything, frosting the pines along Marie Louise Lake. It was amazing and surreal – a time and place that you’ll only experience in a few specific pockets of the world. And I was standing in one of them.
There have been workshops and discussions and meals together, and lots of writing time in between. Creatively, I’ve dabbled in the novel a bit (more of that in a future post) and I took on a whole new, fun project: a sleep story.
Yeah, that’s what everyone here asked, too.
A sleep story is an adult bedtime story meant to help you de-stress and calm your mind so you can drift off to sleep. I downloaded a few of them in my Spotify account for my trip away. Perhaps the most famous sleep story is “Blue Gold” written by Phoebe Smith and read by Stephen Fry. (Not available on Spotify, bee tee dubs.) To write a sleep story, you need long, flowery, conflictless sentences that meander aimlessly, emphasizing rhythm and long vowels to literally lull the reader to sleep.
Well, I can do that!
Now that it’s finished (save a few last-minute tweaks, no doubt), my plan is to record it and put it on YouTube or Spotify. But I’m not making any promises, because another successful breakthrough I had this weekend is that I’m not putting any pressure on myself for personal projects. I will dive into the projects that interest me, and I will get out of the pool when the water gets cold. If a project gets finished in that short time, excellent! If not, meh. There are other pools to dive into.
The rest of my creative energy will go into work projects. I have a couple of new career directions I want to branch out into, which will take my “extra” time to build. Being able to put aside my novel for a guilt-free while to concentrate on those options is ultimately the best move for me.
Creative energy is a funny, finicky thing. I’ve enjoyed a life of flitting around like a bee, drinking from this flower and this flower and this flower. The problem now isn’t the flowers. My creative well (to boldly mix metaphors and split infinitives) is as deep as ever. The problem is me. Creative flitting between projects isn’t as easy as it once was. That realization isn’t fun, but it’s fine, now that I’ve identified the issue.
And the solution for me, dear reader, is creative minimalism. Give more attention to fewer projects. This weekend has been a microcosm of that philosophy, and it’s worked wonderfully. For now, on the last day of the retreat, I’ll sit back and plan those next work steps. I’ll stare out over that beautiful lake.
And, I’ll enjoy the silence.
Over to You
How do you keep an even creative keel? Do you like working on many projects at once, or just a few? Or maybe only one? How do you enjoy the silence? Let us know in the comments below!
Until next time, keep writing with wild abandon!
~Graham
email me if you get lost.
Love “creative minimalism”! And yes, it’s sobering when fluttering among creative ideas becomes more difficult. But I can still do good work—better, even. Less, but deeper.
This is why we released books for Roy in 2024 and 2025 and my next novel is nowhere near ready.
There was a guy in the 1900s (actually the 1990s 😊), one of those business guru types, who talked about the number of projects people can have on the go at any one time and still do them well. And it’s different depending on temperament and the projects.