Creativity for Life: Practical Advice on the Artist's Personality, and Career from America's Foremost Creativity Coach

by Eric Maisel

Book Overview

Over the years, Eric Maisel has worked with thousands of creative people, including writers, musicians, artists, dancers, and actors. He knows firsthand the struggles they must face, and through his many books and professional practice he's helped them find balance in their lives while pursuing their artistic endeavors. Firmly grounded in psychology, Creativity for Life explores all the challenges confronting an artist: deciding if you have...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1577315588
• ISBN13: 9781577315582
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: New World Library
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Eric Maisel is simply great!

This book addresses, with great honesty and comprehensiveness all aspects of the artist's personality and the artist's life. It provides insight, validation, support, inspiration, besides providing just good facts and information about the world of the artist. I love all of Eric Maisel's books. His knowledge of the artist's temperament and life is profound and comprehensive. He does not balk at the hard stuff. And having the hard stuff out on the table makes me feel understood and supported and inspires me to keep moving forward with my work and life. Whenever I feel alone in my life's goals with writing, I read any of Eric Maisel's books and immediately feel better and encouraged. He really has a great writing style and a beautiful way of pointing out the truth with heart. That's a rare gift. Thank you Eric!!!

A good overview of the creative personality

The author presents a fairly detailed and good overview of the artistic personality and the challenges that the artist faces, both in terms of internal challenges via the personality of the artist, and career challenges that can also occur for the artist. The author also includes exercises at the end of each section that can the artist can use to help him or herself out by answering some good questions. Additionally creativity coaches can also use the exercises to help clients. A couple problems I found is that the exercises weren't really integrated into each chapter. The writing is also fairly dry, which occasionally had me feeling that I was slogging through the book. Overall, I'd recommend this book as a resource to both creativity coaches and artists who are looking for some understanding and help.

Midwest Book Review, May 2007 Issue

The latest from Eric Maisel is an amazing and wonderful book that any writer, musician, artist, or performer would benefit from reading. In CREATIVITY FOR LIFE, Maisel brings together concepts and ideas he's discussed in previous books, but here every part is synthesized and complete. It's a smorgasbord of examples and tactics. He breaks new ground in detailing the artist's personality in ways that that the non-psychologist reader will instantly understand, and the book is highly accessible to anyone from beginner to master. In the introduction he distinguishes between the "artful life," which is the way many people wish to live; the "art-filled life," which includes the joy that art brings; and an "art-committed life," the process of actively choosing to be creative. It's this latter that's the focus of the book. "As soon as you decide to be creative in a particular domain and that you mean to live as a novelist, biochemist, actor, or sculptor, you introduce a set of profound challenges that you would not have confronted if you had `settled' for artful living and an art-filled life" (p. xii). In four major sections, Maisel thoroughly examines the challenges faced in seeking an art-committed life: The Challenge of the Artistic Personality, The Challenge of the Work, The Challenge of Relationships, and Strategies & Tactics. Each section is brilliantly detailed and will make sense to anyone at any stage of invention, innovation, or imagination. Because creative folks face major obstacles that non-artists do not, Maisel spends a great deal of time giving hints, ideas, and suggestions. Just a few include ways to silence negative self-talk, using visualization, focusing, and practicing one's craft while bringing to it skills such as regularity, honesty, self-direction, intensity, joy, discipline, and more. He tells us, "Creativity is the act of making one choice after another" (p. 120). Living an art-committed life is the same. As Maisel says late in the book, "Lifelong creativity isn't given to you. You must earn it and attend to it every day... You will have to dig deep to find the requisite honesty, courage, and resilience to live an artful, art-filled, art-committed life... You must really want it and really commit to it in order to have it... to crack through everyday resistance and create for a lifetime" (p. 319-320). I approach every new nonfiction book by Maisel with giddy excitement, wondering what fresh aspect of the creative process he'll unearth, dust off, and show around. Sometimes I feel like the man must personally know me and the challenges I face in writing - but we have, of course, never met. Maisel is just an amazing creativity coach and counselor who knows the secrets and insecurities, triumphs and tribulations of those who seek the creative life. This book is the next best thing to personally experiencing Maisel's creativity coaching, and I highly recommend it. ~Lori L. Lake, Midwest Book Review

Comprehensive and Enlightening,

As a trainer of creativity coaches, I felt like this book was a delightful feast. The information is both exceptionally intuitive and timelessly helpful to both those who work with creative people and the creative individual themself. If you are a creative person all you need to do is open this book to feel validated, understood and inspired. It is a motivating reality.