The Secret of Creativity? The Soul is Shy

Paul Willis
The Startup
Published in
5 min readMay 29, 2019

How do you unlock your creative genius? This is a question for which there is no shortage of advice out there already.

Many of it coming from people far more qualified to talk about the subject than me — a mere freelancer whose access to his own creative genius can’t be that well-honed or you’d surely have heard of me already.

Why I feel qualified to talk about the subject at all is because while I don’t know what it’s like to succeed creatively I’ve plenty of experience of failing at it. And the reason for these failures has at least partly to do with listening to too much advice.

You don’t get to make images like this engaging in Twitter feuds all day. Picture: William Blake/Wikicommons

The problem with most of the advice directed at us is that it’s overly pragmatic: start work as soon as you wake up; read a novel a week etc. etc. Some of this can be helpful, especially the stuff about self-discipline, which my own romantic and indolent heart had always convulsed against.

But pragmatic solutions will only get you so far. This is because creativity resides in the soul and you can’t simply discipline the soul in to doing your biding.

As the Irish poet John O’Donohue once noted, the soul is shy. Elusive too. You can’t pen it in and milk it like a factory farmed cow.

I spent three years writing a novel that I worked incredibly hard to bring it to fruition. But the result was desiccated and lifeless and understandably got cold-shouldered by all the agents I sent it to.

Why? Because I believed all that verbiage comparing the creative act to running a marathon, climbing a mountain. I bought into the myth about suffering for your art. So that long after my enthusiasm for the subject matter had waned, I forced my way with gritted teeth to the end of the project.

I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I don’t know, maybe there was something meaningful in the effort but even if there was the state of creative constipation in which I wrote much of it all but guaranteed a dud.

When I first met my partner, an artist, she had a quote from Picasso pinned to her wall. ‘Inspiration exists but it has to find you working.’

As the Picasso quote implies, discipline is important but it’s no guarantee that creativity is going to show up every time you sit down to do whatever it is you do. But there might be certain conditions that help coax creativity out.

Pablo Picasso knew a thing or two about creativity. Picture: Wikicommons

To know what these are let’s take another look at O’Donohue’s idea about the soul’s shyness. Why is the soul shy? What is shyness usually a symptom of?

I would say that in most cases shyness is a protection against high levels of sensitivity. It’s no coincidence that turning shy is common in children and, as any parent can tell you, children are extremely sensitive. They’re also extremely creative.

So sensitivity and creativity are inextricably linked. I would go further and say that your sensitivity is the font of your creativity. This is perhaps why the biographies of many of the most creative people in history are often case studies of painfully sensitive humans.

But if you want to live a creative life you’re going to need to connect with this part of yourself as regularly as possible. This is hard to do in a media landscape that greets us each day with all the subtlety and restraint of a roadside beating.

Naturally, our beautiful, sensitive souls go into hiding in the face of these kinds of visceral assaults on the senses.

So don’t numb yourself out with media. Limit your screen time and be discerning about what you consume. I know there are lots of incredibly sophisticated TV shows out there these days but do any of them really speak to the soul in the way of Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle, for example?

But even the best art is only ever a substitute for the richness of lived life.

So if you really want to feel in to the depth of your own sensitivity then the best thing you can do is stop everything. Try it for a couple of minutes when this article is over. Sit still, breath in and out and bring your focus on to the sensation of your own body.

Sense how incredibly alive every cell of it is. Sense how emotions sit inside of you, where they are and how they manifest physically. Then start to revere it. Treat your own self with the sanctity you might reserve for God or if you don’t believe in God the sanctity you might reserve for a thing of beauty or wonder.

Because all the best creatives retain a sense of wonder at the every day — and what’s more every day than you?

William Wordsworth looking a tad glum it must be said. Picture: Wikicommons

Take this sense of wonder out in to the world with you and, I swear to you, your soul will ignite with possibilities. The most mundane things will become pregnant with meaning.

Of course, you’ll have to tolerate a lot more feeling, which includes feeling the pain of existence. But keeping in mind the poet William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” learn to trust those torrents of feeling, because they are grist to the mill for the creative life.

Do this and even if none of your creative endeavors gets you anywhere and you are left to eke out a living writing journalism or serving coffee or whatever, you’ll at least be walking through life awake to yourself and to the extraordinary world you inhabit.

And isn’t that the best we can hope for anyway.

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