Creative Headspace #5
Stories about the power of creative connections and how to make room in your mind for things to unfold.
I’ve had a lot of new subscribers in the last week — welcome! I’ve been posting on Tuesdays and Fridays. Sometimes I put the spotlight on another book coach, sometimes I talk about the fundamentals of book coaching (the Book Coaching 101 series), sometimes I talk about lessons we can learn about book coaching from [fill in the blank], sometimes I write these Creative Headspace pieces, and sometimes I do something that fits into no category. Oh! And I do FAQs. If you have a question about book coaching, please ask in a DM or a comment (and check out the video FAQs at bookcoaches.com/abc.)
A lot of people came to me because of the Sunday Sermon I did for Jane Friedman on The 7 Steps to Building a Book Coaching Business. If you would like to see the replay, it’s on YouTube. There is a code in the comments for a *free mini-course* called The One-Page Book Coaching Business Plan, which is an introduction to the business of book coaching; that code is good through April 30th, 2024, so if you are at all interested, grab it.
And if you are one of the 60+ people who signed up for that course last week, I just added a module at the end that allows you to sign up to show me your plan and talk to me about whether Author Accelerator’s Book Coach Certification Course if a good fit for you. I intended to have that available for Jane’s audience but forgot to turn it on. Ha!
Now onto today’s Creative Headspace…
I met a friend for lunch and she was wearing wide-legged pants. I commented on them and she thanked me and said they were new. “All the cool kids are wearing wide-legged pants,” she joked. But I thought, Are they?? and felt an odd pang that I was missing out.
I recalled some pants I had in junior high school — a short-lived brand called Dittos. I begged my mother for them because everyone was wearing them. Mine were mint green, flared. The memory was a pleasant one: I knew what to do! I knew what to wear!
A few weeks later, my adult daughter came to visit and she was wearing wide-legged pants. I commented on them and said, “I understand all the cool kids are wearing them.”
She laughed and sent me this article from The New York Times entitled Why Are Pants So Big (Again)? And what the latest swing from skinny to wide tells us about ourselves.
It was my favorite kind of article — a writer thinking seriously and deeply about a seemingly frivolous topic. I especially loved this quote because it so perfectly describes the trouble I have, and have always had, with dressing myself — this sense of feeling like I speak a beautiful language ineptly:
I try to make sense of it as an abiding fascination with the beautiful, funny, fraught workings of a visual language that all of us speak all the time, deftly or ineptly, consciously or not. It’s a language whose stakes are heightened because, unless we count nudists and hermits, there is no way to opt out of speaking it — not to mention that it can be disorientingly difficult to know when a particular phrasing originated within you and when the words you’re speaking have been placed in your mouth from industry puppet-masters on high.
I think about how I sometimes love to go shopping just to touch the fabric and feel its weight and see the sheen — because working with words all day long is so cerebral. There is so little to touch. Writing and book coaching have so little to do with our bodies (except, you know, when it makes your stomach hurt or your shoulders ache.) Touching objects in the world — hand-thrown ceramics, wide-legged pants, a pair of dangly earrings — feels oddly grounding.
I think about the book, Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Eileen Beckerman — one of the books that lives in my memory as being absolutely perfect: perfectly conceived, perfectly executed. Over the years, I have often thought of this book and felt a strange longing, a wish that I had written it. That just-published New York Times article explains this feeling: I wish I had written it because I wish I spoke the language of clothes.
I think about a book one of my clients didn’t (yet) write, because she wrote two others, instead. She is a psychologist and it was going to be about the emotional reasons we yearn for things — why, suddenly, do we wish for wide-legged pants? What does it mean when we can’t stop thinking about a saffron-colored lambswool blanket we saw in a store window? I hope she decides to write it one day.
I also think about one of the first books I ever coached — Wear & Tear: The Threads of My Life by Tracy Tynan, which came out in 2016. Tynan is a Hollywood costume designer and the daughter of famed theater critic Kenneth Tynan. She grew up in London, where Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles would drop by the house. Katharine Hepburn was her godmother. The chapters of the book are organized around important pieces of clothing in Tracy’s life— lemon-yellow underpants, a pair of apple-green leather shoes. I loved this book, and it carries the memory of my falling in love with book coaching, too. We noodled for hours on which clothes, which order, because we both knew how much it mattered. On the jacket copy, it says, “Style was essential and shopping was an art passed down through the family.”
Shopping, in other words, was a creative act, not disorienting difficult.
Where this wandering ends.
I went to Anthropologie and bought some wide-legged jeans. They are not ridiculously wide (although they were ridiculously expensive) and I will have them hemmed to a reasonable length. They are fantastic: high-waisted, soft, stretchy, chic. I am very pleased.
Now I need shoes to go with them.
I teach college students for a living so I see ALL the newest trends. But I have to remind myself which ones are best saved for the young-uns, ha! Wide-legged pants - that I can get behind. (And I might even have a pair of them in a closet somewhere from the last time they were trendy.) Belly-baring shirts? Not so much.
Brand of jeans please!!