The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
 | Format: Hardcover List Price: $25.00 Our Price: $16.50 Your Save: $ 8.50 ( 34% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Average Customer Rating:   |
Editorial Reviews:
Creativity is not a gift from the gods, says Twyla Tharp, bestowed by some divine and mystical spark. It is the product of preparation and effort, and it's within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it. All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life: In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative. In The Creative Habit, Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow -- whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew.
When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities.
Tharp's exercises are practical and immediately doable -- for the novice or expert. In "Where's Your Pencil?" she reminds us to observe the world -- and get it down on paper. In "Coins and Chaos," she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order and peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind and body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," she shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight.
To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost). Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing. And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!
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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: A dance genious shares her discipline for creativity
Comment: This is a great book for anyone who wants to cultivate the habits of good discipline that consistenly lead to creative ideas.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great!
Comment: It's the kind of book I would want everyone to read. I want to buy a lot of copies and share them with a lot of people. I just loved it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Twyla shares pearls from her life's creative adventure
Comment: A refreshing and inspiring glimpse into the creative habits employed by a successful artist, generously shared in a well thought out, intelligent, down-to-earth practical way. Twyla shares her personal experiences and keen observational skills in a way generalizable to nearly any creative field. A pleasure to read and re-read. Practical, not just fluff. She shares behind-the-scenes step-by-step insights into the preparation for some of her more successful projects (Movin Out, etc). Puts to bed the idea that artists are supernatural beings who simply sit still and wait for bolts of lightning to strike them with inspiration. Reading this book is highly conducive to inspiration. I bought a second copy as a gift.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Art Making and Hard Work
Comment: Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit" is at once inspirational and practical.
This well-known dancer guides the reader through some brass tacks of the
studio work ethic while allowing and encouraging the mind to soar.
This is an honest, no-nonsense book for all artistic disciplines.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Creative or not, this book is for you.
Comment: This is THE book to have when you curl up with a glass of wine. The last third was especially relevant to me. It not only encouraged me to be okay with my obstacles and failures, but also it caused me to actually appreciate and celebrate them. You don't have to define yourself as "creative" to get a great deal out of this book. There's something in it for everyone.
Technical Details
Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 153.35
EAN: 9780743235266
ISBN: 0743235266
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2003-10-01
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
