We recently connected with Carey Wallace and have shared our conversation below.

Carey, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Like many of us, I know how to work. When I went to college, I formed a powerful habit: writing two hours a day. But at some point during my sophomore year, I ran into a snarl in a story that I couldn’t solve through brute will. When my writing time was done, I got up from my desk, threw myself into a chair, and stared out the window.

And a few moments later, the answer that had eluded me for hours arrived—and experience I suspect almost all of us have had.

But I wasn’t grateful. I was furious. I knew how to work, but I hadn’t been able to arrive at the answer by work alone. It had only come to me when I stopped work and let go. It was an event of grace, not my own act. And I found that both frustrating, and terrifying. It pierced my illusion that I was in control of my own talent, or my own world.

But it also opened the door to some of my best work as a writer, as I began to realize how central inspiration is to our art: not our talent, or our technique, but that element that seems to come from beyond us, that cuts against what we thought we were doing, that operates outside our command — and calls forth all the real fire and life in our work.

Work is part of what we do as artists–a huge part. But our most central work is welcoming that inspiration when it arrives: not just to show up and grind, but to form ourselves to be capable of surrendering to something we may not understand, that takes us somewhere we’ve never been, to do things we didn’t dream we were capable of. Inspiration is what draws us all to create in the first place, but it’s easy to ignore or forget in the press of life.

And it’s been my life’s work to think about and seek it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Almost everything is promising us inspiration these days, from football games to real estate to pho places.

But I see it as something that doesn’t really come from the things around us, or even from ourselves: it’s the spiritual force that prompts us all to create, whether that means throwing a different spice into an old meal, or writing the next scene in an opera.

I believe it’s always speaking, and it’s speaking to everybody, and that when we follow it, it can turn anything into a work of art, from a watercolor to a spreadsheet to barbecue.

For professional creatives, it’s easy to lean on our talent — the fact that we’ve just got a better eye for color, or it’s easier for us to sing in tune, than it is for other people. Or to solve our problems with technique: the skills we’ve learned over long hours spent in the studio.

But I believe the best things always emerge from the presence of inspiration—and that there are practical things we can to do learn to recognize it and welcome more of it to our lives, which is what I’ve been working on both in my workshops and my writing.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

The stats on who makes art after art school are harsh: at least 90% of art students stop making in any regular fashion as soon as they step out the door with a diploma.

But I don’t believe that most artists really want a lot of money or a big name in art. When we say we want to make it, we mean it literally: we just want the time and the space to make and share our art. And we can have that in the context of all kinds of lives, not just as “professional artists.”

And the only thing we need in order to do that is to create a habit of creation in our daily life–one that’s flexible enough to shift as our lives change, and durable enough to last a lifetime.

But almost nothing in traditional arts education talks about how to create those kinds of disciplines in our lives — which is why I’ve been working to create the kind of communities where that can happen.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When I got out of college, I was heartbroken to see how many great artists I knew were not making art. I didn’t have any money—I was working as a waitress myself so that I could write, and only had two weeks of vacation a year. But I did have access to a small cottage on a lake that was shared with my extended family, and I knew people loved to go out there. So even though the cottage only had a single bedroom with a single bed, I started inviting people to bring their tents and sleeping bags and stay for a week. The only price of admission was that they had to make something during the week. And over the course of the more than a decade that my brother and I ran it, we saw people record entire albums on the mobile recording studio in the garage, finish plays that were put on in NYC, and record time lapse of the stars. It’s where I started both my first novel and my most recent book, The Discipline of Inspiration.

Seeing other artists create more has been one of the most rewarding things in my life as an artist. And I think it’s a good example of how all of us, no matter what we’ve got, can support artists — by considering that what we have doesn’t just belong to us, but to all of us, and using anything we’ve got to create a space where people can form a community, and create.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thedisciplineofinspiration.org
• Instagram: @disciplineofinspiration

Image Credits

Author Photo by Ira Black