Time Management Tuesday: Reading "Boundless Creativity" Part III

I've been reading Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks by Martha Alderson, because I think creativity--encouraging it and how we use it--can have an impact on how we manage time. I hope so, anyway.


In Week One of my Boundless Creativity blog arc, I wrote about inner spiritual goals and how I've been using one.

In Week Two, I wrote about outer creative goals and how I've been using one.

In Week Three, I'm writing about...

Commitment/Discouragement

 

In Boundless Creativity (and in her earlier book, The Plot Whisperer) Alderson writes a lot about what she calls The Universal Story, a common structure she believes underlies all stories. When she lays it out graphically, it looks like a variation on the traditional plot diagram, though Alderson goes into detail about what she sees happening in each part.

Alderson also suggests that this story structure is part of our lives and our creative projects follow this structure, as well. I can't claim to understand The Universal Story, but I see it as a sort of plot structure (like The Hero's Journey, but not so complicated and mind-numbing). However, this idea of a creative project following a plot structure is very interesting.

For instance, Alderson says that at one point in our own project's Universal Story we will become less excited about what we're doing, begin to doubt ourselves, and not feel we can move forward. If you follow any writer blogs or twitter accounts, you've probably seen people write about the point in a project where the writer knows that what they're doing is crap. (No other word for it.)

The project I've been working on is just an outline. And, at the point I was reading about this discouragement thing in Boundless Creativity, I was also pounding my head against a wall over whether or not I've spent way, way too much time--years, people, years--trying to find the perfect plotting method. Maybe, I was thinking, I should accept myself as an organic writer and stop trying to make lengthy plots before starting to write. Maybe instead of hunting for the plotting secret, I should spend a few years hunting for the organic secret.

Yeah. That was a good idea.

So I spent an hour or two hunting on-line for material on organic writing.

Then I went back to working on my outer creative goal to complete an outline by the middle of June, because I have that inner spiritual goal about finishing one thing.

So that was an interesting experience. What will happen next?

FTC Disclosure:  I received my copy of Boundless Creativity from a publicist marketing it.