Writing Creativity and Soul Quotes

“In writing, as in life, perfectionism is not so much the quest for excellence as a response to fear. Fear of limitations. Fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“In the practice of mindfulness, there’s a saying: “When you’re walking, walk; when you’re eating, eat,”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“In order to turn my abstract idea into a concrete form, the first thing I have to do is dive into a sea of chaos. I never feel ready for it. I will waste a few days procrastinating with lame activities like relabeling file folders, but in the end I come around to the inevitable. I open several folders where I’ve collected Post-it notes and errant scraps of paper containing thoughts I’ve scribbled about the idea I’m contemplating. They might contain possible characters, bits and pieces of a plot, probable settings, musings on potential themes, images, sketches, postcards, descriptions, and a bunch of random ideas that could turn out to be inspired or rubbish. I read through the whole muddle, then amplify the content, jotting down whatever brainstorms and insights come to me. This interlude, which I think of as uncensored gathering, can go on for several hours or days or weeks. Whether it yields a fat pile of notes or a thin one doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that the pile emerges from inside me and represents the browsing and incubation of my imagination. Now the job is to sort all this. Visualize Psyche in the Greek myth sorting her gigantic mound of seeds. I spread out all the raw material I’ve collected across my desk and tabletops, and when I run out of furniture, I resort to the floor. I brood over the clutter and confusion. Using scissors and tape, I cut, paste, arrange, and rearrange the material into kindred piles. I make collages and scribble things on whiteboards. I discard and distill. At some point the whole thing becomes so maddening, so overwhelming, so nuts, I can hardly remain in the room. This is the moment I tell myself that everything is proceeding as it should. Chaos is good, I say. I remind myself that according to Nietzsche, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” I’m all about the dancing star. So I sit there and hold the tensions inside myself and tend the madness. I do this because my persistence at this critical, unruly, fragile phase of writing is the first step in imposing order. Creativity begins in chaos. That’s just the way it is. The challenge is to bring form and order to it. As writing teacher Leon Surmelian wrote, “In literature madness uncontrolled is madness, madness controlled is genius.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“the experience of empathy is nothing less than the breakthrough of a felt awareness that we humans share an intrinsic unity.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Along the way, I began to also focus on what my work served. I wanted my out-loudness to affect something beyond myself.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“French novelist Émile Zola: “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you, I am here to live out loud.” From the time I was a child, I wanted to live out loud by writing, to be audible, to be read, for my words to have an impact, however small, despite how intimidating and unlikely it seemed”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Now in the quiet Sandy sleeps and I write. I feel calmer. Almost ready. Almost brave.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“If we hold on to the image and keep it alive in our mind, it seems to function a little like a transducer, a device that converts energy from one form into another. An image can have the effect of turning fear, grief, confusion, or futility toward their opposites.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“when we write about our traumas and difficulties, we have access to a new vision and perspective that can lead to a change in mindset. When I write in the midst of pain and loss, I’m sometimes presented with healing images from my unconscious.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“This doubt, too, needed a hearing. Where had it sprung from? That was the question. Had it originated out of a genuine sense about what was best for the story or did it come from self-doubt and fear of taking a risk?”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Writers are fabulously paradoxical creatures, capable of believing in what we’re writing while simultaneously doubting it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“The creative act of writing has brought meaning into my life in myriad ways, but it made itself known initially in the experience of flow. I’m referring to the sense of personal fulfillment that comes from giving yourself over to something you feel you can belong to, setting a worthwhile and challenging goal, and then giving that goal your full attention, commitment, and energy.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“The depth of meaning we draw from the experience is often related to how hard we have to strive for it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“In the beginning, I, myself, thought that if I was meant to write, then why did it often feel like I was swimming upstream. Shouldn’t it come more easily? Actually, though, to be in a state of flow, hard work is involved.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Bradbury puts an unexpected emphasis on finding a relaxed state in which to write. He argues that it’s actually the hard work that gives you the experience and confidence you need in order to be at ease with what you’re doing. And being at ease is crucial.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“I found clarity, resilience, hope, and peace by pouring my thoughts and emotions into a story, poem, essay, book chapter, vignette, letter, or journal passage. Giving shape and expression to the narrative that was unfolding sent me into dark mazes inside to find the core of what I was really feeling and thinking, to grapple with it, and to return almost always altered.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Some of the most powerful written works are those created out of suffering and broken places. As Georgia O’Keeffe wryly observed, “I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.” There is an uncanny deliverance that comes from making meaning out of anguish.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Without an inner transformation, the memoir is a collection of happenings, experiences, anecdotes, and details, all of which may be riveting and wondrously told, but the soulfulness is likely missing.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Who we become because of what happens evokes the soul of the story.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“If what happened forms the bones of the story, the world in which it happened puts flesh on those bones.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Since what happens in a memoir must be true, Aristotle’s Incline can only go so far. It’s unlikely that life events adhere exactly to a classic story pattern. Life is messy and doesn’t follow neat plot points. Still, the Incline offered some useful suggestions.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“What happened The world in which it happened Who the narrator becomes because of what happened.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Chronicling the story of how my religion and spirituality collided into feminism in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter changed me. It freed me. It allowed me to recover something true in myself and made me a braver person.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“When I write memoir, I may be trying to resolve something, to heal a wound, or redeem some part of myself that has been orphaned or lost. Maybe I’m attempting to give voice to what has been silenced or make sense of who I became after a crisis. I may be trying to step into my truth, or reveal myself to myself.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“It’s the unexamined experience that wreaks the most havoc.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“if we distill an experience into meaning and then integrate that meaning into our lives through the creation of a narrative, we make it possible to move on without all the preoccupation and unconscious pull of the experience. It’s the unexamined experience that wreaks the most havoc.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“Yes, writing memoir is self-indulgent, gloriously self-indulgent, and I’m perfectly okay with that. Women, especially, have been told so many times to be self-less that it can actually feel uncomfortable when we attempt to write about one.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“discovered a desire, maybe even a need, to understand and express my life in the context of a story.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“The nonfiction pieces I wrote turned out to be autobiographical stories and essays entwined with self-reflection. I fell in love with writing personal narratives. I discovered a desire, maybe even a need, to understand and express my life in the context of a story.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul

“You may want to name your own favorite things about writing. We tend to excel at what we most love doing, or at least delight more in the trying.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul