Working With Your Genius

Jan 10, 2025 | Art, Inspirational, Uncategorized, Writing

Pencils in a container, an old school camera on a stack of papers. All ready to help you unleash your creativity

Both Steven Pressfield and Elizabeth Gilbert speak of daemons in their works The War of Art and Big Magic, daemons being the benevolent outside forces that guide our thoughts and hands to create art and stories and music… Our muses, if you will, but in a very personal sense.

It is called flow or being in the zone in modern speak, but these two descriptors fall, in my opinion, short of what’s expected of us to get into those states. Because reaching peak flow, or hitting the zone, sounds like it’s highly controllable, when, in fact, my experience is that it’s by releasing control–essentially handing the reins over to my daemon–that I produce the most (and most satisfying) words, that I can play the most beautiful sonatas on the piano, that I can illustrate the most touching images. Whereas, when I try to control the creative process, or focus on the technique, that’s when things get bogged down, or when my fingers stumble (to my piano teacher’s great distress at the time, which is why she spent more time threatening to throw me out the window than actually complimenting my playing!).

Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic,

“In ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means “well-daemoned”–that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide.”

I repeat: The Highest. Degree. Of Human. Happiness.

The Romans called this same external, magical presence at your sides, your genius. And, as Gilbert highlights, the key here is that you work with your genius (as opposed to you being a genius). Divine inspiration is a gift received through a contract with the Universe, whereby you agree to work with your genius on a particular set of ideas, to give them life through whatever medium you choose, and the Universe in return keeps feeding you more manna for your work. Until said work is complete (often leaving you in a state of stupor, and telling yourself, “Wait, I wrote/drew/played that?!”).

It is on this same premise that Dean Wesley Smith talks about the Creative Voice vs the Critical Voice. If you want to keep creating stories/art/music/etc., you need to give yourself up to your Creative Voice, and put the Critical Voice (the one that tells you it’s not good enough, you need to plan everything, you need more practice, you need to correct everything again and again) in the back seat.

The Critical Voice is the one that beats up your lucky daemon. And the more you give it amplitude, the more your daemon is going to flinch away from you…and potentially run away.

But this Critical Voice, which Steven Pressfield calls Resistance, is strong. Very strong. Because it plays on all of our deepest fears, even the ones that are so deep in our subconscious we don’t even know they’re there. And the more time and energy you give your Critical Voice, the stronger it gets (as you reinforce those “negative” brain patterns).

So how do you go about telling your Critical Voice to F off so you can be in the flow and let your creative genius work through you unimpeded?

There are many ways to go about it, but here are some methods that have worked for me (and sometimes you need to bait your Critical Voice differently, depending on the day):

  • Tell yourself that it’s OK to be scared. Your worries are noted. But you’re still going to go through with your creative goal.
  • Find ways to make the process more fun (even if you’re redoing the intro for the 27th time).
  • Congratulate yourself for every positive step forward (doing so aloud is even better!), no matter how small (teaches your brain to be less afraid of the Creative Process).
  • Create a ritual to get yourself into the right frame of mind. A ritual is a habit with deeper meaning you attribute to it (which is why it’s important to know why you want to create this particular piece), and habits are processes that are so ingrained in your subconscious that your body resists less to it. For instance, your ritual could be to have your cup of coffee, light up a candle, be in your special thinking cap, and put on some death metal music on, then pick up your quill to write in your notebook, then doing so every day will get your body into this automatic set of movements and thought processes so you get to writing right away.
  • Do daily meditation. There are many benefits to meditating every day, but one of them is that it teaches your mind to calm down and focus on only one thing at a time. Because you train your brain to do so already through meditation, when you sit down to write or paint or play the trombone, your mind already knows how to focus on only one item at a time, instead of trying to distract you with your email, and the news, and social media, and–oh, is that a spot I see on the countertop?!
  • Be careful what you say–words have power! Reframe how you talk about yourself and your creative projects so you always talk about them in a positive light. Even if you’re currently on an early draft or thumbnail sketches stage that you wouldn’t want to share with anyone else. Not even once you’re dead! This also means that instead of talking about your creative endeavors as “work,” you should talk about them as quests, or adventures, or play. Anything to convince your brain that advancing on your projects is a great way to spend your time.

    By complaining, “you’re scaring away inspiration. Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended.” ~Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.

  • Remind yourself of how grateful you are to be able to create at all. This instills and maintains a sense of awe inside you about what you’re accomplishing, which means, again, you’re more likely to get back to your project, even when it gets hard (because it will get hard–that’s a huge part of the business, a huge part of being human!).

Finally, remember that one of the first things fascists and dictators want to do is kill human creativity (along with human compassion and connection). So consider yourself a rebel, a Robin Hood of the arts, and dare to enjoy being creative!