This is a conversation between myself and Sheryl Garratt, a coach for professional creatives based in the UK. We talk about the issues of being a successful professional in creative fields, as well as the role of creativity in personal health and the wider culture.
Sheryl began as a journalist, writer, and editor and now coaches professionals in fields that include music, film, theater, art, cooking, writing, and design. Her focus is on productivity and professional enhancement She does not heal the sick, but helps solve questions, foster growth, and clarify opportunities.
Sheryl’s books include:
Adventures in Wonderland: Decade of Club Culture;
Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: True Life Stories of Women in Pop;
David Bowie: Starman – a Colouring Book.
Her website is https://thecreativelife.net/
In this conversation, we shared our interest in the importance of creativity. She leans toward the professional while I lean toward the therapeutic. Here are excerpts from our 45-minute conversation:
“With the inner critic, I get them to write down everything it says, because it tends to lose its power when you write it down. A lot of the inner critic’s dialog are things we’ve internalized since we were kids. When I wrote all mine down, I realized my English teacher from when I was 14 had been living in my head rent-free for thirty years.”
“It’s about balance all the time, and you learn so much in the doing and the making. There has to be periods where you’re exploring and thinking what’s next for you… but there has to be a point where you stop and actually start making something, you start writing for yourself, or you start painting, or playing some music to see what’s there. And if you never get to that stage, first of all you never make anything, but second you miss all that learning that you get from going down wrong directions, from trying something and it not working, and all of that is part of the creative process… If you try to produce one perfect thing, I can guarantee you that you will never produce anything.”
“If you take care of the quantity the quality will, to an extent, look after itself. You have to take hundreds of pictures to make five great photographs. You have to write a lot of songs to have 20 good songs on an album. It doesn’t have to be perfect; you just have to begin.”
“Ideas in their early stages are very fragile, and you can ruin them by talking about them and sharing them with other people, and not letting them breathe and grow.”
“I think the world right now is quite a difficult and joyless place in many ways and the more creativity we can put out there and the more sense of it is okay to be your weird and wonderful self… it feels like the only way I can affect things. I cannot stop the wars that are going on in the world at the moment, but I can help people be more of themselves.”
“Making stuff is part of who you’re supposed to be. So get on with making it, even if it’s awful. Most stories have been told. Most songs have been written, but they haven’t been written by you. They haven’t been filtered through your hopes, fears, experiences in the world, and that’s what we have to offer as creatives: ourselves! And all the things that make us up, including all the messy dark bits, and all the tangled up and I don’t know what I’m doing bits. It’s all fine.”
— Sheryl Garratt, The Creative Life, January 2024
https://thecreativelife.net/
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