Creative Space Mastery Resources

Posted on by taniacreations

I’m writing the content for a Podcast I’m creating, Creative Space Mastery.

As I’m doing this, Creative Space Mastery, I have been thinking of my favourite resources in building my creative process…

I thought it would be useful to share:

Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert

For me, the best lesson Elizabeth Gilbert writes in this book is about the creative genius being outside of the creator, that we just have to make space and hone the artistic ability to make it justice. 

This book is the one I would make a must-read to anyone in the throws of creation. It stokes a fire into the desire to create, bursts any perfectionism away, and stops you from delving into any failures of the past.

I think another lesson and the reason she was so successful with Eat Pray Love, is to bring to the world the concept that artists do not have to be tortured to create, contained in Big Magic. That lesson alone is a great kindness to the world, and the fact that she has been heard, is for me the connecting of the dots, the reason why everything happened for her the way it happened.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

This was my first encounter with the concept of the resistance that creating something can impose on an artist or creator. How hard it can be to finish something, and how just reaching completion is already an achievement.

The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? Seth Godin

Seth Godin explores in depth the concepts of resistance and completion, and talks about pushing boundaries and pursuing audacious goals, this was a book that stayed with me and I call it my Green Book, it’s a sort of a bible on how to push through, and separate lack of inspiration from resistance.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

Stephen King gave me another piece of the puzzle, my favourite part is when he talks about writing as archeology, the writer uncovering a story, not creating it, similar to Liz Gilbert, the story is outside the creator.

These authors are always great at showing us how they are just people like us, who started from nothing and grew through much work and even though success seems obvious from the outside it didn’t feel any obvious from the inside. 

The Novel Project: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your Novel, Memoir or Biography, Graeme Simsion

Graeme’s is a practical guide, and what I liked about this is to show how there are many more steps to creating something than just the one part, for example, to create a novel, the writing in itself is only a little bit. 

When a person is creating anything, you can’t consider just that one little part you like the best. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert calls that the sh$t-sandwich. There are parts you will love and parts you will not like so much, it will come with all crafts and choices.

The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase, Mark Forsyth

This is for writers, but also for anyone who needs to write as part of their creative process. And if you like language, this is a fun and funny read!

The Elements of Eloquence is hilarious, I expected a dry book impossible to endure and it made me laugh out loud, I learnt a lot, it took my writing to another level and at the same time explained why I write in a certain way and use certain elements already.

The Truth, Terry Pratchett

The Truth is fiction, in a fictional world full of vampires and goblins, and it’s the 25th book in the Discworld series, but Terry Pratchett is a master at stripping the world of its trimmings and bringing reality to its bare bones and showing it to you outside of our assumed conventions. 

The Truth is about the invention of the press and the power of the written word. It contains so much wisdom in wit and comedy that you have to read it with your brain turned on or you could just laugh and miss the best of the book.

“The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what’s in the public interest is not what the public is interested in.”

“You cannot apply brakes to a volcano. Sometimes it is best to let these things run their course. They generally die down again after a while.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Truth

The Word is Murder, Anthony Horowitz

In another work of fiction, Anthony H. Makes himself a character interacting with a fictional detective and through transforming himself into the narrator we are given insights into his creative process. A fun way to be immersed in an artist’s humble and self-deprecating, day-to-day struggles while creating.

While you know his interactions with his frustrating detective aren’t real, the writing process, and filming interactions,  are definitely based on his reality. I loved being there, being part of it, and knowing how frustrating it can be and that being famous and making it doesn’t make any difference to the process itself. The struggles are the same.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It is a favourite for many people for a reason, it teaches us to see the world with creative eyes, with inspiration, with possibility; it is the book that taught innovation before the word was trending.

It is the book that taught us to see the elephant inside the boa constrictor instead of a simple hat.

Inspiration for Writers, Emily Darcy

I have a collection of mini-books around me, Inspiration for Artists, Quotes about Coffee, Never Stop Dreaming, It’s Going to be Okay, mini-books that spoke to me, some I bought from used bookshops and others new.

I read a quote here and there to inspire me, or when I’m stuck. 

They help. They push me forward. They provide guidance, sometimes, they are an oracle too!

Making Time for Stories in the Dark

Posted on by taniacreations

You don’t need to be validated to want to make time for your passion. To be a published author to dedicate yourself to your writing. To be a recognised painter to find half an hour every week to paint without judging your colours.

To find time for what makes your heart sing, forget what others feel is valid, just listen to the song coming from within, and make time for the music notes.

I may not be traditionally published yet, but I am very good at being creative. Rain or Shine, in happiness or in sickness, in abundance or depletion. I can create through too much inspiration or when I’m at the bottom of the well looking up, when it’s so dark all I can feel is the walls around me. 

I’ll hold myself up on the walls and tell stories to the darkness. Incoherent, bleak stories as they may be.

Don’t worry about the quality, as long as there is creativity and there is passion in the creation, that is all that matters.

Bloody Writing

Posted on by taniacreations

This is something I’m writing in my book… a manuscript now in the second draft. Something I hope to have ready to send to publishers by the end of the year or early next year.

The book is written in second person, the older me, talks to the younger me, putting in perspective the conquest of the consistency in creative process I have achieved and how I have gotten there.

This is an extract:

“Do the best writing that you can with the time you have.

It will always be a work in progress.

The second level of brain dump is the first draft. You must hear what all the famous writers say about this. It will never be any good, you can’t be worried about making it good or it won’t come.

You have to let it free to be bad, so it can be born, dirty and bloody and screaming into the world. This messy ugly thing, that will become a work of art one day, when it is fully grown.

It has to be completely free to cause pain, and to burst blood vessels, to make you scream yourself hoarse like only childbirth can.

Remember that this level of freedom in the writing is the most enjoyable time of the writing journey if you let it free. Remind yourself of that daily while you are in that part of that journey because it doesn’t last.

Soon enough you will get to the revisions, editing, criticising, workshopping and the freedom will be curtailed.

Remember what you want to achieve with your writing, you want to set people “on passion” about their artistic pursuits. Remember and write until the blood taints everything and the child comes forth.”

Where the Ripe Fruit is

Posted on by taniacreations

My writing intuition is pushing me towards writing about dancing and publishing old writings I had about the scene. I’m not sure why.

I’m overflowing with ideas suddenly.

I’m working on so many projects, it’s hard to fathom where the energy should be focused on, so I trust where the inspiration goes.

I take note of the ideas, I capture what comes. I trust.

And deliver what is ripe to be collected and proudly displayed.

Sensuality abounds.

www.taniacreations.com\the dancing bug

Going Verbal

Posted on by taniacreations

I think most days you forget that with each action, reaction, decision, word, you make, take, utter, you are deciding who you are that day.

Most days you function in the automatic, being the same person you were yesterday and the same person people around you — based on the image you have created of yourself externally — expect you to be tomorrow.

In reality, every day, at every moment, you are deciding who you are to be. Every day I can decide, for example, if I will be a powerful storyteller, or if I’m a being amidst chaos at work. 

Week after week, I’m choosing the storytelling path, and recently, I woke up inhabiting the same body, in the same bed I had gone to sleep, but with an idea so powerful, that it has been transforming my life since.

This idea is making my storytelling going verbal, oral I mean, like our forefathers. I have several projects cooking up, watch this space, (this is a keyword, more on that later) and I am preparing for it!

First Autograph Breakdown

Posted on by taniacreations

The life of an artist is made of intensity of emotions. Nothing is felt in half measured pints.
When you feel you are in a rink and people are throwing punches of invalidation, disregard and bias at you, suddenly, there is someone in your corner, seeing you as the international best seller writer that’s lurching within, you feel like Rocky, and suddenly you are punching back!


An interesting tool available to writers “in construction” is to create the cover of your next novel, as it is going to be when it is published, adding all the desired seals of approval. It may be prizes, academic accolades, “international best seller” labels, it may be a seal of “notable book”. The trick is look for the adult you want your child-book to be, and follow its example. For me it would be Big Magic meets Bride Stripped Bare.


I created the cover of my next book about metaphors for the writing process, a sort of memoir of how I came to be writing it, chose the real title and the font for my name, put the real logo of the publishing house I would like to publish it, and the seals of best seller I would like it to have. I had one copy of it with me at work and showed it to one friend, the one day I went to the office this week. I also created the first page of that book, that black and white one that comes with a space where the authors sign their autographs.


I then imagined myself signing books for people including all the people who are not really paying attenting to my messages at the moment, all the ones that are invalidating me.
This friend asked me to make a copy and sign it for her, those pages of a novel that doesn’t exist in physical form yet, it’s but 82 thousand messy words in a messy file. I did it, I signed it, as I would, with a dedication and love, but a bit worried that the copy didn’t come out perfect.

Later that night the importance of that moment hit me. I was in the shower and I saw myself giving my first autograph. It hit me so strongly that I bent down crying, it surprised me, the power, it was a punch to the gut, I had no idea it was even there. Gratefulness washed over me.


Part of me knows life isn’t certain, I could die in the next moment, part of me isn’t sure of anything, of any achievements, of any deserving, and another part knows the future, knows that it is just a matter of time, and a lot of persistence, and that I take with coffee, every morning.

Feral Child Uncaged

Posted on by taniacreations

I went deep, open heart surgery, opened the ribcage, wrenched up the organs and found, behind layers of civility and order and logic, over explaining, proving myself worth it, my overdoing of everything well done, my dissecting of all meanings and rage at anything that doesn’t make sense, behind all that I found a Feral Child.

Wild, raw, naked and barefooted, long, tangled hair, a child who runs with the wolves, fearless, unbidden by past or future, by civility or reason, unworried about consequences or niceties. Elemental, she roars.

She doesn’t care who sees or doesn’t see her value, she doesn’t care of other’s judgement, all she wants is to run in the forest and to swim in the river…

From her, the words coming forth are brutal, animalistic, and as powerful as a beast. Let her come… 

Finding inspiration amidst the chaos

Posted on by taniacreations

It is easy to find the thread of inspiration when your life is a constant. When your eye hurts, your head hurts, every aspect of your life is in turmoil, threads are whisping all around, grasping at smoke in the blaze seems impossible. But I go into the idea within the idea and write about finding the idea of finding the idea inside the chaos…