Play is an important part of a creative practice and creating for a living. It's also hard work (that doesn't sound right, does it? But it is!). Collaboration can be a form of play for creatives and has it's own set of benefits aside from play. Collaboration and play (together or separately) can have a huge influence on keeping our creative well filled and burn out at bay. And that's what I'm talking about this month!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Play is an important part of a creative practice and creating for a living. It's also hard work (that doesn't sound right, does it? But it is!). Collaboration can be a form of play for creatives and has it's own set of benefits aside from play. Collaboration and play (together or separately) can have a huge influence on keeping our creative well filled and burn out at bay. And that's what I'm talking about this month!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Speaker 1:
Hello everyone and welcome to another premium subscriber only episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I appreciate all of you being here so much. It is the joy that keeps me going and you all make the podcast possible, so it is very much appreciated. This is the April premium subscriber episode, and and today's episode was inspired by a podcast episode that I listened to a few months ago and that has been percolating in my brain ever since and, frankly, it's still percolating. I haven't quite got my head around all of it yet, but there was some really interesting points that I pulled out of this show that I wanted to talk about today. The episode is from the Creative Pen Podcast.
Speaker 1:
If you listen to the show regularly, you know that this is one of my favorite podcasts. I'm a big fan of Joanna Penn and the work that she does and I've been listening to the show for years. This particular episode is the February 19th episode and it is called the Hard Joy of Writing and in this episode, joanna interviews Sharon Fagan McDermott and MC Benner Dixon, who are two authors who collaborated collaborated on a recent book that came out called Millions of Sons and the interview was very interesting. They hit on a lot of very big themes, and I do recommend you go listen to the entire episode. Joanna's intros to her podcasts are very long, and so I think the actual interview starts about half an hour in somewhere in there, but it's worth a listen, and a couple of the themes that they talked about that really piqued my interest were play and how important it is for us as working creatives and how hard play actually is it's hard work and they also talked about how collaboration is a form of play, which was very interesting because their book was a collaborative effort. They talk about other things. They talk about the use of metaphor.
Speaker 1:
This is a book by writers for writers, and Joanna's podcast is a writing podcast, and I put that in quotes because, although I am a writer, I do find a lot of what she talks about in her show to be very relevant to all creatives. There's a lot of creative mindset episodes in there that I think we can all benefit from, and so, anyway, this interview was very interesting and these two women had collaborated on creating this book, so they talk about the use of metaphor, the use of place, which I think are things that other artists besides writers can use, and they also talked about jealousy, which is a fascinating topic to me as a creative, and we have done an episode on jealousy on the show. If you haven't listened to it, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's one of our earlier episodes and, yes, I think jealousy is an emotion that all of us deal with as creatives, whether we want to be honest about it or not. But today's episode is not about jealousy.
Speaker 1:
The two things that really piqued my interest that I wanted to talk about today were this idea that play is necessary and it is hard work, and that collaboration is a form of play that all creatives can benefit from. And play as hard work, I think, is something that I don't think we necessarily associate the word play with hard work. I certainly didn't until I listened to them speaking on this episode, and one of the examples they used is when you watch a baby playing on its own, whether it's with blocks or a mobile or those sensory boards that they have where they can press buttons and make noises and all those things. If you watch that child, it's working really hard. It's working to make the blocks sit the way they want them to. It's thinking about how it. I shouldn't use that. But they are thinking about, they're trying to figure out how things work together. They are so focused on examining things in detail and working out what is happening with them, and I think the same could be said for children as they get older.
Speaker 1:
If you ever walk by a playground a school playground at lunchtime and you watch the kids out there playing, you realize how much hard work is going on in that playground. Those kids are figuring out A how to interact with one another. They're figuring out how to negotiate things. They're figuring out how to make the most of their surroundings with their imaginations. They're learning how to handle different types of terrain and different types of physical obstacles, and they're learning how to interact with nature. There's a lot going on when children are out playing in a playground with very unstructured play, and even in a structured play environment, there's a lot of that going on. If you have kids together for a Lego play date or whatever, they are very intent on their blocks and looking for the block that they need for the thing that they have in their head, that they're trying to bring to life. And whoa, that sounds like creating, doesn't it, you know? But it is. It's very much about learning how to use these new materials that they're being exposed to, whether that is the dandelions and mud that we used as kids at lunchtime to make mud cakes, or it's Lego blocks that they are trying to figure out how to build a camera or a spaceship, or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1:
So I think we think, as adults, of play being something that is pure enjoyment and yes, there is a huge amount of enjoyment that goes into play but we don't associate it with hard work. I think we tend to associate hard work with the things that either result in something we can sell for money or with the jobs that we need to do in our business that aren't very fun. So, for me, bookkeeping is hard work. Getting to sit there and draw something that's not hard work, that's fun. I don't associate that with work that's playing, and yet it is work. It is hard work.
Speaker 1:
There's a lot of hard work that goes into creating a drawing, but because I find it enjoyable, I don't view it as work, and so I think, as adults, we often put play to the side, because all the hard work things need to be done first, like the bookkeeping, the answering the emails, getting something to the printer or the framing shop or whatever the case may be. That's the hard work that we need to do, and so we put off the idea of experimentation or play or creating all those fun things. We put those off to the side until we've done all the hard work things. And I think this just came to me as I was talking about this. Actually, I think sometimes we do recognize deep in our hearts and our heads that play can be hard work, because sometimes we will do all these quote unquote hard work tasks like bookkeeping and emails and stuff, in order to avoid the creation part, because we get stuck in our own heads about creating and the perfectionism creeps in and we don't necessarily appreciate our own hard work or we're afraid to get started, or we get stuck in a comparisonitis trap. And then the play stuff, the creativity, does become hard work. That just came into my head, so I may not have talked that out as clearly as I would have otherwise.
Speaker 1:
But you know, play is really about trying new things. It's about trying new materials, it is about going new places, it's examining things in detail, it is following threads and rabbit holes and allowing ourselves to go places that we wouldn't normally go, and this is all really crucial to us as working artists. And I want to make it clear when I'm using the term artists, I'm not just talking about painters and people who draw, like me. I am talking about photographers, musicians, people who craft or make things with their hands or design. We're all artists, so I'm using it as a very general term.
Speaker 1:
I think those of us who are artists, who work for a living, who create for a living, we need those moments of play in order to stay inspired, to have a full creative well when we're required to call upon it. That's one of the hardest parts about being a working artist is we have to create on demand. When we create for a hobby and I've talked about this many times when we create as a hobby, it can be something enjoyable that we do to decompress or just because it's how we like to pass the time, or whatever the case may be. But we can put it aside when the moment is not right or when it's not coming to us or we've just lost interest. But when we create for a living, we always need to be able to keep creating on demand when a client or a customer requires it or when it is time for a new product launch, or we want we have to show up at a market with new things to sell, or when we're thinking about whether what we're creating has any commercial appeal.
Speaker 1:
Those are all things that can cause us to burn out or to sometimes feel like the well is empty, or to sometimes feel like the well is empty. And so, for us, play is critical. We need to make time for it. It is work, it is hard work, and without it we run this risk of burning out, of getting stuck, of not being able to create anything new, of being in a rut, and those are not good things when we have to create for a living. So, in order for us to keep that creative well full, we need to make time for play, and the play can be directly related to creating. The play can also be periods of just rest and relaxation, and for some of us, that rest and relaxation is actually a very hard thing to do, so we need to be able to put things aside and have that downtime as well. So in my mind, there's two kinds of play, but it is a necessary part of being a creative, that act of play and the joy that it brings and it should bring joy some of the time is crucial for, as I said, combating burnout and always having that full well of inspiration.
Speaker 1:
Now, I know this can be a little bit tricky because for a lot of us, we need that joy. We need the joy to keep us going and to feel like we love our work. But for a lot of us, creating can also be a way that we work through big, sometimes scary, sometimes upsetting, sometimes difficult things that have happened to us or emotions that we're experiencing and that may not be joyful, although I think the end result of doing that can be joyful, because it allows us to work through things that would otherwise be stuck sitting on us like a weight and preventing us from doing things we need to do. And I do think that a lot of great finished products can come out of working through and processing those big things. So, while it may not be a joyful thing that we are processing, I do think the act of processing it can be very cathartic and that can lead to a feeling of joy or a feeling of calm or a feeling of peace, which are necessary in order to feel joy. One of the things that they said in this episode is that joy can be a radical act of resistance, and this is something that I am still working very hard at thinking about, because I have never thought of joy in this way and I think it's a very interesting way to think of it.
Speaker 1:
And if you follow my work, my creative work, if you follow my work, my creative work, then you know that I basically throw up color wherever I go. I embrace bright, bold, candy store color. That is very joyful to me. That is why I create that kind of work. It brings me great joy. I love seeing other work like that. I love seeing other work like that, and I've read some articles over the last couple of years on how color has slowly been disappearing from our day-to-day lives over the last 50, 60, 70 years, and it's so interesting to me If you look at homes like the quintessential mid-century modern home from the 50s or the 60s, even the 70s, there was so much more color in our homes. And I've seen a few things lately where people have associated the use of color with clutter, and I don't get that. I think you can have a lot of color without a lot of clutter and for a lot of people, clutter is very oppressive. So I think that's a very interesting thing that people have put those two together.
Speaker 1:
Personally, I love color. I incorporate it into my life. It makes me feel better. It helps me deal with depression when I am going through a depressive episode. Just having color around me brings so much more to my life. But we have slowly started to embrace more and more neutral palettes. We see it in our homes, we see it in our clothing. We even see it in the cars we drive. You used to be able to see a bright red Corvette or a powder blue Studebaker or whatever in the 1950s and we don't really see that anymore today. You can kind of choose from white, black, dark gray silver, maybe navy blue, and in my case I drive a burgundy red car because it was the most colorful car I could get in that model and I had to wait a long time for it to get that. I never thought of the way that I go through life with color to be a particular act of resistance, even though it's very joyful to me. So that is something I need to think about a little bit more.
Speaker 1:
I do think it is a way for me to stand out, whether that's conscious or subconscious. I think it's a little bit of both. Maybe it's hard to miss me, which is interesting because I'm very introverted and shy and yet I do sort of have my own way of being seen, if that makes sense. So I'm working through this one in my head still, but I do think it's important. I do think play and joy very much go hand in hand and we need both of them to be successful working creatives. They are not things we can put off to the side when we are not experiencing joy in what we do. It comes across in our work. It comes across in our customer service. It comes across in just everything. You can feel it when somebody is not feeling what they're doing. We talk about it being they phoned it in or those kinds of terms where it's just they phoned it in, or you know those kinds of terms where it's just they're just not feeling it. We can tell it's hard to disguise that, no matter how good of a job we think we're doing of disguising it. So the next thing they moved into was collaboration and how collaboration is a form of play, and I love this because I am a huge fan of collaboration.
Speaker 1:
When you listen to the show regularly. You know that. You know I talk about it all the time and I think it's really important for all of us, as creatives, to understand that we don't succeed in a vacuum. Nobody succeeds in a vacuum, creative or non-creative.
Speaker 1:
When we have a success, it is never 100% all us. Some of it comes from inspiration from people that we follow. They may be living, they may have passed on, but you may have seen an incredible painting by Michelangelo and thought to yourself oh, it know, it sparks something in you. You hold that. Or it may be a song that you heard or a poem that you read. Those contribute to what we create, the people who help us. You may have been the one that sat down and did the illustration or wrote the words or came up with the melody, but I guarantee you there were people who helped you get it out to the world, whether that is people in your network or friends. Or you have an assistant who has done some of the heavy lifting of the things we don't like to do, like your bookkeeping or answering your emails. It might be your spouse or partner who helps with the day-to-day running of your house or looking after your children All those things. Success doesn't happen in a vacuum and this is really important for us to recognize. We collaborate every single day. It just may not be a formalized collaboration, but we have people who are helping us every single day get our work out there and finish work and create work.
Speaker 1:
All Nobody succeeds in a vacuum, but collaborating like an actual conscious collaboration, where we decide to work with somebody, can be so rewarding when I think about this podcast, this podcast was born out of a collaboration. This was me and my friend, lisa sitting down and deciding that we wanted to do this together, and when Lisa eventually decided to leave the show, the podcast kept going because of collaborations with other amazing women. I had people like Angelina Brogan and Gabby Payton and Puneeta Chitwal Varma who hopped on to help me out with co-hosting for months at a time in order that I could keep this show going. And then, of course, heather Travis, who was also one of those women back in the very early days, and Heather has stuck with me and she pops by on the show every month or every other month as our schedules allow, and that collaboration brings me so much joy. All the women I've had on the show as guests. They are collaborators. This podcast doesn't exist without them.
Speaker 1:
Getting to record with Heather makes this podcast so much fun for me. I wouldn't necessarily find this fun or enjoyable if it was just me talking to the microphone every week all by myself. I would feel very much like I'm in a vacuum. As I've mentioned, the show doesn't get podcasts, don't get a lot of feedback. So getting to actually do this with somebody whose company I really enjoy and who I have a lot of fun with brings me joy and I hope it brings our listeners joy. I think it does, because those tend to be the most consistently listened to episodes. So I hope it brings you all joy.
Speaker 1:
But my point is that without those collaborations this podcast would not be the same thing. It would not be as fun for me, it would not be probably as interesting for all of you and it would just have a completely different vibe to it. That's what can make creating so much fun is when you get to do it with somebody whose company and whose creative philosophy and creative abilities sparks joy in you when you get together. I don't think it has to be necessarily an actual collaboration where the two of you are physically creating something together. I think there are other ways to collaborate.
Speaker 1:
When I think about, two of my favorite ways come out of my mastermind that I'm a part of. I'm in a mastermind with four other women and I would never have said necessarily that that brings me joy until I started thinking about this episode, and actually it does bring me joy. I love getting to meet up with these women once a month. I love that when I have a question or I'm stuck, I can put the word out to these women and get feedback from them, and that does bring me joy and it is a form of collaboration. They help make my business better and I certainly hope that I help make their businesses better.
Speaker 1:
I also co-work three mornings a week with one of the women from my mastermind, and a few of the other women pop in now and then as well. That co-working has been directly responsible for some of my greatest productivity over the last year and some of my greatest successes over the last year just sitting down and and some of this is about the accountability of working with somebody, even though it's via Zoom, which is how we do it, and having to report in at the end of the session as to what I actually accomplished that I said I was going to accomplish at the beginning, off on, at either the beginning of the session or the end, where we start talking about something that we're stuck on or something that we saw, or just something that we need to get off our chest, and very often that winds up in the two of us going down these rabbit holes. We never expected to go down and coming up with, like, some ideas for things that that could work or that would be interesting. And so, while me and this other person don't necessarily directly collaborate on a project where we put it out into the world and say, hey, we did this together, there is a lot of collaboration going on behind the scenes, in that she gives me a lot of ideas, she encourages my ideas and I hope I do the same for her, and we often go down rabbit holes for each other. You know, we'll be having a conversation about something, and, even though it's not something I'm going to follow, I'll go down a rabbit hole looking at things that I think might help her, and she does the same for me, and so it's a very powerful form of collaboration. And that kind of brings me to my next point that I don't think collaboration has to be about a monetary end.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes it can just be for the joy of creating something together that you've always wanted to create, and if, at the end of the project, that turns out to be something that is saleable, that's great. But that's not why you created it. You just wanted the opportunity to work with somebody to create something really cool. You see this very often with musicians. Musicians are so good at this. They'll sit down just to jam together or to write together or perform together, and it's not because they're necessarily trying to create a song at the end of it that they can sell or anything like that. It's just because it's for the pure joy of sitting down together and creating something new, and I think more of us could do that.
Speaker 1:
Maybe you're an illustrator and you work with a writer to come up with a children's book or a comic book or a graphic novel or something along those lines. It may not have been a collaboration you would have initially thought of, but you make this thing happen and it and it brings you this joy and fulfillment. And it will be hard work because, as we've just learned, hard work is a form of play, or play is a form of hard work, however you want to look at it. So I think it's really interesting. I don't this isn't new by any means. If you've, if you follow Julia Cameron and the artist's way, you know she talks about this all the time about how play is so crucial for creatives and how our inner creative is really just a small child who can be very petulant at times, and that's why she is a big proponent of the weekly artist's date, where you take your inner creative out on a date that has nothing to do with work. It's just about having a good time and playing, and so I think you know a lot of people swear by the artist's way.
Speaker 1:
I've done it several times and it always is a tremendous boost to my creativity and my ability to be inspired and come up with new ways to fill my creative well. So I think there's a lot to it, and I think, if you found this interesting, I do highly recommend going and listening to the Creative Pen episode and potentially even finding a copy of the book of the two guests that she had on the show. It is one that is on my list to read because, like I said, they do touch on some really interesting topics, including jealousy, as I mentioned. But yeah, so this is this. Yeah, I just wanted to talk to you all about this this week. It's been on my mind for a couple of months now and, as I said, I'm still thinking through it and even just recording this episode you know a new way of looking at it popped into my head. So, you know, I hope this is something that you sit down and think about and let it wander around in your brain a little bit and think to yourself you know, am I making room for play? Am I working to collaborate? Could I collaborate? Is there somebody out there that I really want to work with or that it would be really fun to just make something with?
Speaker 1:
We don't have to work in isolation. We shouldn't work in isolation. We are social creatures and we need to get out there and we need to interact with other people, and I know, as adults, this can be really hard. It's hard to make new friends as a grown up. Kids do this so naturally, and kids create naturally. And for us, as adults, I think sometimes we forget how to, how to do these things. So, yeah, give it a shot. That is it for this month. I would love to hear. If you have any feedback on the episode. I'd love to hear from you. You can drop a note in Patreon or you can email me directly at andshelookedupatgmailcom.
Speaker 1:
I also just wanted to say we are coming to the end of season five of the show. We have about another month of new episodes coming your way and I am already thinking about what I want season six to look at, and I do think the show needs to go through a bit of a change. Season four ended on such a high note and I was so happy with the way things were going, and with season six things haven't gone in the direction that I hoped they would. We have lost a lot of our listeners, which was very disheartening. When you're consistently growing your listenership and then you have a big drop, it's obvious that something isn't resonating right, and I have some ideas on what that would be, but I haven't actually heard from any listeners. So if you have some feedback on this last season, I would love to hear from you. I would also love to hear from you on any ideas you might have for season six and where you'd love to see the show go, or which types of episodes are your favorite or which types of guests are your favorite. I would love to hear from you on that.
Speaker 1:
In the podcasting world, as I mentioned, we don't get a lot of feedback. We kind of are ruled by our download numbers, and when those are going up we know that we must be doing something right, and when they are going down, we know that we must be missing the mark somewhere, and trying to figure out where that is can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. So I would love to hear from all of you. Um, there will be summer episodes for premium subscribers. I will still be delivering episodes in June, july and August for all of you, um, and if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to hear, please let me know. And I think that is it for this month. So until May. Thank you all. So much again for your ongoing support. It means a great deal to me and I will talk to you all soon.