Creative Act: Developing a writing practice

How my career has helped deliver me to the practice of writing, and what I'm hoping to achieve through it

Experiences and observations

In 2017 I went through a career change. The first 9 years of my career, from 2008-2017 had been grounded in publishing—my jobs included being an editor at my university’s newspaper, a graphic designer, and ultimately an art director of internationally distributed books and magazines; I also did a lot of photography, and often wrote and/or illustrated how-to articles for some of the magazines I worked on. 95% of my work evolved around printed media and creating physical products that could be seen and picked up from newsstands and book shops around the world.

I loved working in pubslishing. I had some brilliant opportunities in the early days to be in complete control of the creative output of magazines like Stitch Craft Create, a magazine I co-created with a very small and talented team. A little later a couple of super talented editors and I formed our own media company, Rebel Craft Media, and created a digital magazine called the WhipperCrafter. I was so lucky to be involved in these highly collaborative, creative projects so early in my career.

Ultimately, however, my work on Stitch Craft Create and other craft and sewing titles came to an end when the publishing company we worked for downsized; and Rebel Craft Media needed far more than its three founders could invest at the time in order to keep going. These projects ultimately died out. And while I was able to maintain a good working relationship with a few publishing companies for many years as a freelacer, the creative aspects that I used to enjoy slipped away.

Ultimately, with the digitization of print media, my job on those books and magazines became more like coding than the rich and creative graphic design experience I so loved early on; and the freelance projects I had been picking up to fill the gaps weren’t quite the right size to form a career around. And by this point, I felt like I needed some new challenges.

So I shifted gears, and started to look into UX and digital product design—I had transferrable skills and a good grounding in human-centered design approaches, and felt confident I could apply myself in this type of work. So I applied for a few jobs and ultimately landed in a UX role at a company that built software for banks and building societies.

Shifting perspective

The shift from print-media to technology was really difficult at first.

The environment was completely different. I was suddenly being hit with jargon and processes like SCRUM, Agile and DesignOps; and of course the media of software is completely different than print—I found myself sat up at night reading about front-end frameworks like Angular and React, and design principles and guidelines like Atomic Design and WCAG Accessibility.

In print-media, the processes and techniques were well established and baked in to everything that we did—the print industry is old and runs like a well-oiled machine, so much so that you don’t really need to second guess the inner workings or technologies behind making a successful (and accessible) magazine. But to build a useful and accessible digital interface required constant discovery and careful adherance to an array of constantly evolving guidelines—the work is anything but concrete, and you never get the satisfaction of picking your product up off a newstand at the end of the day.

Learning how to learn again

It was during my first couple of years in this new environment that I had to learn how to learn again.

Eight years in publishing meant that the knowledge I had gained had become tacit—it had become so embedded in my tools and my intuition that I couldn’t even articulate it, it was just there. And honestly at first, it felt like I had some kind of amnesia—I felt like a total imposter, especially when I had to speak about the work we were doing.

But over time, I discovered principles and created mental frameworks that enabled me to grow as a UX and digital product designer. And honestly, once I learned how to think and work from first principles and concepts, I gained momentum and felt less and less like an imposter over time.

In 2020, I moved from that first tech company to a much larger enterprise called Autodesk. It was a nerve-wracking move due to the trickiness of living and working on a visa in the UK—and a difficult one at first because two weeks after starting my new role, the pandemic hit and we went into lock-down.

But I found my groove, and appreciated that my manager at the time gave me a lot of freedom to do creative exploration and research that enabled me to get my head around the subject matter and the technology at play.

I lived alone during lock-down, and while that was difficult for me at times, it also gave me a lot more free time to dive in to the knowledge space of digital media and design—I took some online courses on digital media and eventually stumbled into cybernetics and systems thinking which really helped me to solidify and connect the dots on everything I’d been experiencing and learning.

Developing a mental model

It was during this time that a lot of things clicked into place for me. I had created my very own mental model for viewing the world, my work and creativity itself—and this model—this framework—I held inside of me was something I could add to, like an intellectual scaffolding.

I think we all have this inside of us, and I believe I had this scaffolding before but I hadn’t been aware of it. Now I was not only aware of it, I could articulate it on paper. I created a mind map that I could use as a reference that helped me to dip in to an array of interests and curiosities so that I could continue building that framework. I hung it above my desk, and it became like a syllabus for this education I was getting during the quieter periods of lock-down.

Ultimately a couple of threads started to develop in my mind that I wanted to explore: One was the topic of creativity, the other was the topic of my day-to-day work—digital product design. I knew I could write about these things, and was writing and sketching a lot in my journals about these topics at the time, but I was struggling to formulate any of my ideas into articles.

Finding the confidence

There was a hundred things in my head that I knew I could write about, but I had no roadmap for distilling those things down into individual topics for articles. And I was feeling some pressure too. I work in an industry where writing and publishing is encouraged, because it sets you up as a thought leader—a very attractive position—but I found it so difficult to get a single article out.

I was still feeling very much like an imposter at this point, so even asking for feedback or guidance was a difficult thing to do—its especially hard when you’re new at something and you’re not even sure what questions to ask.

I wrote two articles in 2020, each one felt like a huge lift and took me a long time to write. I felt good about the direction I was taking, but wasn’t sure how to formulate a practice around writing.

I wrote a few more articles and blog posts during 2021-2022 and published them, but didn’t put much effort into drawing attention to these pieces.

But then I had a really positive experience, it was a talk I gave in 2021 at the Sheffield Women in Tech meetup. I had been writing more about tech than creativity up to this point, but the Women in Tech meetup actually helped me to hone in on what I care about most—creativity.

It happened because they asked me, initially, to talk about Design Thinking—but I had ultimate freedom in how I presented this. So, I decided that instead of talking about Design Thinking as a process and methodology (which anyone can find a thousand different articles or talks about online), I decided to talk about the importance of nurturing your own creativity, no matter what industry you’re in—because the world simply needs more creative people. We’ve got a lot of complex problems to solve, and we need people to build confidence around their creativity and ability to express their creativity, in order to uncover more innovations.

You can watch a recording of that talk from 2021 on YouTube. My tips on ‘behaving like an artist’ and nurturing your own creativity start around the 15:00 mark.

A seed got planted then, and I started exploring the topic more, and as I tuned in to this idea, I became more aware of creativity as a practice.

Building a writing practice

So, I decided this was the angle I wanted to take but it took me a long time to reach the point I’m at now. I started writing about creativity off-line, in my journals and notes, but had some major distractions and life events—like moving job again, as well as buying and renovating a house. But now I’m grateful for all that time, because once the seed was planted in my mind, it framed how I interpreted events around me, and while I was on my journey I was realizing some of the stories I’m now able to write.

At the start of this year, in January, I began writing on Substack. I liked Substack because it was clear to me that it was a writer’s platform and community—and frankly it had a vibe that I found far more welcoming than Twitter (eventually X). Writing hasn’t come easily, the first three articles I wrote this year were published over the course of 6 months—not a great pace. Then I started taking a writing class on Substack and have built a once weekly writing and publishing schedule—this will be the 8th once I’ve posted since starting the class.

The class I took was Holly Becker’s Blogging Today course. Holly Becker is someone I’ve been familiar with throughout my career. I’ve watched from afar as she’s built a business around blogging and writing, becoming a best-selling author and interior design influencer. Her blog (and Substack) is called Decor8. The thing I loved about the class was the community that got built around it, and even though the class has ended we still have a private Substack channel where we can chat and share what we’ve been up to. And Holly has been a really lovely host for all of that.

My biggest take-aways from the course have been:

• Do work from your heart, don’t try and force the work you do to fit some other standard or formulation—the best work you will ever do comes from the heart. Business models and strategies can come later.

• Be consistent—publish at least once a week. Consistency builds trust with your audience, and helps me to build discipline and confidence around writing and publishing.

The practice

I know that if you want to achieve success in anything, it takes commitment and practice. A willingness and determination to show up day after day, to arrive to your tools and surrender to the work. So the practice I’ve developed is:

• I like to wake up early, between 5-6 am, so I use the first hour in the morning to write. My scene is a quiet, dark room. I make my coffee, I open my laptop and I write.

• I decide how much time I’m willing to write before publishing, right now I’m giving myself a generous amount of time to write—I know my articles are long, but this is working for me right now. I’m writing 5 days a week for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.

• I proof-read a couple of times but am not killing myself over perfect grammar and spelling. The most important thing right now is simply the practice and discipline of writing. My favorite way to proof-read is to read my article out-loud, so I tend to do that a couple times before publishing.

I thought about finding some cute writing stock photos for this article, but thought — eh, why not just take a selfie while I’m sat here writing with messy hair. At least its real ☺️

My goals

• Over the next year or so I’d like to write and publish two books. One on the topic of creativity—creative process, creative living, creative wellbeing. Another on the topic of product design—to share everything I’ve learned and the frameworks I’ve developed for thinking about and designing for complexity, in particular.

• I have a third book in mind that will be a coffee-table book containing all of the 500 paintings that I’ll complete next year. I had hoped to finish my 500 project this year, but this became untenable with the renovation work I had going on at home. However, I’m so close to wrapping up that project, it will definitely happen next year. And from those paintings I want to create a beautiful coffee-table book showcasing all 500 paintings, with some bonus content woven in.

• Throughout this journey I hope to gain more and more subscribers, I have so many things I want to share; and I hope that my sharing inspires others to be more creative.

Mr. Rogers, one of my heroes, said something like (paraphrasing) ‘Make good look good.’ He exhibited this in all of his work and interactions with people. I hope I can do the same—because I think we’re always going to be contending with a world that has plenty of darkness and bad energy, but each and every one of us has a little light in us; and so, I believe, the best thing we can do is work to shine that light outward.

So, I hope you will join me in making good look good :)

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If you’ve read this far, thank you. I appreciate you being here with me. I would love to hear from anyone who has been through a career change, too—as I’m keen to know if my experience sounds similar or resonates with anyone!

If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share it with your friends! I’ll write again next week with more insights on the state of the art.