Kickstart Your Courage! Creativity Coaching by Allen Snook

My wife got a discount for family admission to the Renaissance Faire this year, and in the continuing spirit of “let’s kill the television,” we bundled into the SUV and headed south. A forgettable lunch at a mediocre restaurant later (we should have waited for the turkey legs at the faire), we were in, transported back to an approximation of the 15^th century, give or take a few hundred years.

There were people walking about in period costumes, even the kids, with long wooden swords at their sides (and some not so wooden swords.) My son wanted one. Not five minutes at the faire, and we were in purchasing mode. I let it get to me, I wanted to walk around and look at the different spectacles and vendors, but the kids wanted to buy-buy-buy. Booth after booth after booth.

We got to one booth, where there were a few wooden swords in a bin, but tables and tables full of “real” swords and daggers and lots of things with sharp “here-let-me-cut-you” edges, along with little signs at 8 year old height that said you must be ten years older to buy a weapon.

Sean fingered a long knife, looked up at the scruffy haired, slightly in period costume merchant, and asked him, “Is it a real sword?”

“A real sword?” asks the merchant back. “Yes,” he replied hesitatingly, “it is.”

And in my mind, the critic chimed forth, silently to myself. “All this is fake. We’re not in medieval England, we’re in a farmer’s field in the middle of Western Washington.” My internal critic began sizing up people and thinking “Hmmmm, Mr. Pirate over there probably works on computers all day” and “Ms. Saucy Wench over there is probably a librarian or something.”

The internal critic of the creative. Ready when your defenses are down to pounce and call your creation and everyone else’s creation into question. “Is it real music?” “Am I really an artist?” “Am I a fraud?”

So what’s the antidote?

To recognize it when it’s happening.

You may recognize it right away, or it may take you a day, like it did me in this case. I could have really enjoyed the faire, even though I’m not exactly a costume person, but I let it all get to me.

All the swords at the fair that day were real, and none of them were made in medieval times.

All the artisans and people at the fair that day were real, and none of them were from the renaissance. But the artisans were artists nonetheless.

Don’t let your critics, internal or external, call you the fraud, call you fake. Keep practicing your art, your writing, your music. Yes, mastery takes practice, but the practice is what “real” artists do.