How? Well, I share videos/posts as a roadmap and a process. You’re welcome to start at the beginning of the oldest and work your way forward or you can dip in and out, but each question, each thought, each video is designed to help you think about yourself, your life, and what you want from it -creatively- and how we can help you get to that point. Creativity thrives in community! Not as I write or paint, but the conversations, the readers and audience, the collaborations, the inspiration and ideas we share... Get Creative is a small group at this point, but we'll expand out and become what we all need: a creative cohort. Stick around, make this work for you, take the questions, sit with them, play with them and be inspired by each other. Here you will find tutorials about creative writing, workshops both live and recorded, one to one coaching, daily writing prompts, and all things creative as part of a supportive community. I hope that this helps. Please introduce yourself in the comments below and let us know where you live, what you create, and more importantly what you want to make this year! I want to celebrate the process with you so add a few photos of a recent project.

Simple as this - Look at your sentences. Are they all the same? I suggest you read your work, bit by bit, aloud. Listen to the rhythm. Is it monotonous? Poetic? Erratic? Momentum builds? "This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important." Gary Provost (100 Ways to Improve Your Writing). My suggestion then is this: Read a section aloud. Then go back in and vary length, tone, rhythms, paragraphs, white space. Read it again. How does that feel?

Okay, so I had to talk to a now former member about what is and isn't being creative. It made me realise that I need to clarify what I mean and what is the focus of this cohort. For me, creativity is an expression that comes from within, a drive to bring an idea, image, story, sound, taste, and more into the world. It's hand-crafted, experience driven, coming from a deep source within each of us. A human sense of self and the world around us. Frida Kahlo (Mexico) said, “I paint flowers so they will not die.” Pablo Neruda (Chile) wrote, “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.” I have a lifetime of making, "creating" something from nothing. As a kid, I made candles, finger puppets, put on magic shows for my parents (!), wrote stories with sketches. In my twenties, I learned to take photos, to document the subculture (and how we lived) in the East London squatting scene, earning myself entry into an 18 month professional program in the city with shows and projects that lead to me teaching photography to kids in the States. I've acted and performed, clowned and toured solo and in small groups. I've written, photographed, and sketched my life since that point. I have to. It comes from a need to share what I have observed and experienced in a variety of ways. Nick Cave (Australia) described it like this, “Your imagination is the divine spark that animates your work—follow it, even when it frightens you.” So, I tell you all this to remind you that this community we're building here comes from that. It is NOT Artificial Intelligence. It is not 'content creating'. It is a human-driven expression of self and soul. A form of connection. “No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.” ― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

The reservation book was still open on the host stand. Vivian Cross had stopped taking reservations six weeks ago — there was no point anymore — but she couldn't bring herself to close it. The last entry was February 14th. Valentine's Day. Table for two. Hargrove — 7 p.m. They had ordered the braised short rib, shared the chocolate lava cake, held hands across the white linen tablecloth. She remembered because she had watched them from the kitchen doorway and thought, this is why I do this. This exact moment. Right here. That was the last night every table was full. Now it was March, and Vivian's — thirty-one years on the corner of Maple and Fifth, thirty-one years of handmade pasta and slow-roasted everything and bread that people had once driven forty minutes to eat — was going down. Not with a bang. Not with a scandal or a health code violation or a grease fire. With something far worse. Silence. Vivian had never posted her restaurant online. Not once. Not a single photograph of the food she plated like artwork, not a single response to the reviews she didn't know people were trying to leave, not a menu, not a Google listing, not a Facebook page. Her daughter Maya had begged her for years. Mom. Just let me set up an Instagram. Just one post. Just one. "My food speaks for itself," Vivian had said. Every single time. Proud as a ship's captain who refused to check the weather. What she didn't understand — what she couldn't see from inside her beautiful, fragrant, dying kitchen — was that the world had stopped listening for food to speak. The world was looking at screens. And on every screen, Vivian's did not exist. The new people didn't know. The tourists passing through didn't know. The young couples on date nights, phones out, searching best romantic dinner near me — they didn't know. They found the places that showed up. They went there. They posted photos. Those places grew louder. More visible. More alive. And Vivian's grew quieter. On a Tuesday in March, her head chef of fourteen years, a soft-spoken man named Gerald who could make a tomato taste like a memory, sat down across from her at table seven and slid an envelope across the linen.

I know, I know, it's not my favourite either but there are so many ways we can approach it. I'm going to share once a week five tips for what to do and how to take a One Pass at a time. Anyway, here's a video and if you want I can find the text or transcripts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ7_kDldCno