Creative Headspace #3

Stories about the power of creative connections and how to make room in your mind for things to unfold.

1.

A recent post by Emily Henderson, an interior designer I follow, was a reveal of the primary bedroom in the sprawling farmhouse she is building in Portland, Oregon.

I am obsessed with this blog. I can’t remember where I first heard about it but Emily or one of her team members posts every day and I think I look at it every day to see if there is something I want to learn about.

What I love is the way Emily teaches about interior design—this is WHY you want to hang your art this way, this is WHY you want a rug this big under a couch, this is WHY you might not want to paint a small room white, this is WHY custom millwork is so expensive. 

Emily is also a very authentic writer. She is vulnerable about the mistakes she makes, the money she invests in her business, and what it is like being the more successful partner in her marriage, among other things.

I also really like the way she talks about taking creative risks and trusting your gut. It aligns very well with what I teach about book coaching.

My husband and I live in a small-ish townhouse and it was new when we bought it in 2018. We had a burst of furniture-buying when we moved in—but there are five things in the house I want to fix or change. I am a bit stuck on all of them— afraid to move ahead for fear of getting something wrong—and so I go to Emily’s site to see if she happens to be talking about any of these topics (such as how to manage all the books; what to do with a small dark room; what to do with the weird nook in the place in our dining area where nothing works.) 

I loved the color on the walls of the bedroom Emily was showcasing in the post, so I clicked in.

2.

Emily shared the exact color, so I went to the Sherwin-Williams site to check it out and made a note to order a swatch. I thought this color might be the solution for our small, dark room.

3.

But later in the post, she says that this color was a mistake! And that she likes this other color better! This caused me a great deal of confusion. I put the two colors side by side on my screen and saw that one leans slightly more blue and one leans slightly more sage.

So it’s a tiny difference in tone, and what I thought was this: What difference does it make?

With everything going on in the world, does paying attention to paint chips matter?

People are dying in airstrikes and shooting sprees, there is political unrest, there is economic unrest, there are climate disasters, the industry I have spent more than 35 years in is reeling from AI, and I wring my hands every day wondering what I can do.

Looking at paint color is obviously not the answer to anything.

4.

And yet—I turn to Emily Henderson’s blog every day precisely because she cares about paint color. The difference between two very similar colors of bluish-green matters to her. She has made it her business to care about the creative work she does. She has chosen to pour herself into it and I trust what she has to say about it.

That trust means something to me, perhaps because I have made it my business to care about words and the books people write and how they write them — things that can sometimes feel like small, too.

I can spend hours debating one word over another. When I was naming this post series, for example, I thought about calling it:

• Creating Wanderings

• Creating Dominoes

• Creative Ping Pong

• Creative Labyrinth

• Creating Mindset

• Creative Habit (the title of one of my all-time favorite books by Twyla Tharp)

I decided none of those words were right because this series is about making space in your mind for creative connections to happen. This is not a frivolous undertaking. It’s what I believe underpins all good writing.

There is an app for meditation called Headspace, a business name I have always admired, and I landed on Creative Headspace. That felt exactly right, because before a writer can write, they have to think, and before they can think they have to feel.

So Creative Headspace is about taking the time to take in creative inputs from your environment and your experiences. It’s about having the wisdom to hold onto those inputs, to connect the dots in your mind, and to know that they matter.

Before they can matter to anyone else — before they can go out and make an impact — they have to matter to you.

5.

What this leads me to conclude is that writing well is nothing more or less than deep caring.

What a book coach does is deep caring, too. No matter what packages or programs we design to help writers, the true service we are providing is that we promise to care.

And debating the difference between the two shades of blue you might paint your bedroom wall? Deep caring.

Maybe letting ourselves care about what we each happen to care about is a solution.

Today, anyway, it feels like one.

Where this wandering ends:

• I feel drawn to put more art on my walls. Maybe there will be paint soon, too, but I think the art will lead me to the color.

• I have my eye on a particular piece that is about words and ideas, and color and form. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s in the cart.

• I signed up to take a class on color. It starts in April and I have a giant box of art supplies waiting for it to kick off. How I landed on this particular class is a goof story and a topic for another day.