So Committed: A Memoir of the Artist's Road features dozens of artists I interviewed on a 2010 cross-country road trip. Last week one of those artists interviewed me for a podcast on her Boise, Idaho, radio station. Singer/songwriter by night and DJ by day, Rochelle Smith also posted a review of Committed on the radio …
Continue reading Road to Publication: The Story Comes Full Circle
"Patrick, why are you so obsessed with artists and their creativity?" I've been asked that question a fair amount during my years as an artist's advocate and a creativity and writing instructor. There is no simple answer to that question, but if the top five answers were on the board, one of them likely would …
"Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole." So said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing of creativity. The author of The Golden Notebook, who passed away recently at the age of 94, said this five years ago when describing …
Think with your entire brain and you'll be as creative as Albert Einstein. That is perhaps an oversimplification of the latest scientific research on the brain of one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century. But as The Washington Post reported on Sunday, the developer of the theory of relativity did in fact physically …
It is one of my greatest fears. I have abandoned my creativity before; this blog is my chronicle of returning to an art-committed life and working to stay there. That is also a central theme of the travel memoir I am in the process of polishing to final. But it is so easy to drift away …
Continue reading 3 Steps Off the Path of an Art-Committed Life
I savor the comments readers leave on this blog. But often they are apologetic in tone, along the lines of "I'm not really a writer," or "I aspire to be a writer." In the technical sense of the word "writer," at least as I see it, these statements are a lie. They "wrote" a comment, …
Every artist on some level understands that the actions of an artist are dictated by technology. Before Gutenberg invented the printing press, writers were far more limited in page count with wound codexes. The sound amplification technology provided by a piano allowed compositions intended for far larger audiences than a harpsichord. We focus on Kindles …
For the last decade I have repeatedly emphasized a correlation between the encouragement of creativity in childhood and professional, personal and economic success later in life. I have done so here on this blog, and previously as a think tank senior fellow and artist's rights advocate. I have not been alone in this belief. I …
Here in Washington, D.C., we are all swept up in amazement and wonder with the Redskins' rookie quarterback, Robert Griffin III. He is as flawless off the field as he is on. It becomes difficult after a while for writers to find new ways to describe how amazing he is, but in yesterday's Washington Post, …
Few unpublished novelists or memoirists are able to convince a publisher to consider their work until it is complete. But it can be daunting to spend months or years bringing a book to completion with no assurance it will ever be published. Established authors can at times secure advances based on book proposals and a …
Continue reading Is Kickstarter the Answer for Aspiring Authors?
The Artist's Road 