Pencil Dancing : New Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit
by Mari Messer

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Book Reviews of Pencil Dancing : New Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit

Book Review: The Giant Squid of Confusion
Summary: 5 Stars

Mari Messer delves into "hurry sickness", the psychology of "devoted attention", the relationship between our creative and logical minds, playing, collecting useless information, visualization, "practice without purpose", taming your inner critic, and facing the giant squid of confusion(!).

All sorts of things are expressed in terms of weird, extensive, ongoing metaphors; this gives us an idea of just how creative and weird you can get if you try. It does get a little ridiculous (I suspect deliberately so), which might tweak your sensibilities a little if your inner critic is raging. (But then, perhaps that's the point.)

Ms. Messer is honest about some of these lessons being not only tough to learn, but difficult to remember. She isn't shy about explaining the times when she's fallen down. She uses interesting examples from her life, her students' lives, and famous people's lives. These make the principles she discusses come alive.

I've learned a lot in here that's been directly applicable to how I live my life, how I work, specific projects I'm working on, how I deal with people, how I let other people deal with me, and so on. The discussion of criticism, constructive criticism, and their place in the creative process has convinced me to be less harsh and critical in my judgment of others' work. Criticism does have a crucial role to play in creative work, but it's also important to be careful not to apply it too early.

Before I read this book I had forgotten what it was like to have so many ideas for material to write that I constantly had to carry a notebook around with me to catch even a fraction of them. I got halfway through this book and I had to make a trip to the drug store to pick up some pocket-sized notebooks to catch the sheer flood of ideas! It's hard to give the book a more glowing recommendation than that.

Summary of Pencil Dancing : New Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit

Creativity Books

• Books > Subjects > Self-Help
• Arts & Photography > Drawing > Pencil
• Literature & Fiction