"I learned early on that the biggest enemy of creativity is fear. One of her goals for the book was to pass on some of her own advice—to impress upon people that creative endeavors are living, reactive things, and that they shouldn't give up in the face of rejection."
"Sometimes when you're doing something creative—for me, that's writing—it feels like you're conducting electricity. You're channelling something that comes from outside of you. My favorite books are the ones where you can feel the author's DNA on them, but also feel, at the same time, like they almost came from elsewhere."
"Rubin's answer for some of these is that you just have to be willing to get out of your own way. If you get hung up on what people think of you, or fame, or fortune, or 'You've got to stick this in here because it's popular right now,' you get further from whatever truth it was within you that motivated."
Patricia Cornwell, author of over forty bestselling crime novels totaling more than 120 million copies sold, attributes her prolific success to conquering fear as the main enemy of creativity. In her memoir "True Crime," she emphasizes that creative endeavors are living, reactive processes requiring persistence despite rejection. Cornwell recommends Rick Rubin's "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" as valuable guidance for maintaining creative flow. The book addresses how to channel creativity by removing distractions and self-doubt, comparing the process to conducting electricity from an external source. Rubin's approach, similar to "The Artist's Way," provides both philosophical insights and practical solutions for overcoming writer's block, advocating that creators must remove ego-driven concerns about popularity and external validation to access authentic creative truth.
Read at The New Yorker
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