Being curious about everything and anything, questioning things, experimenting with words, colours, stuff, this is the perfect place for a creative person to sit with their mind. I feel that we are the most creative when we are children. I remember having piles of dirt in the sandpit being a mountain fortress, a stick being a sword. As we go through high school and into the workforce, that wonder is beaten down over the need to remember dates and facts, find a job, earn money, and participate in capitalism. We need to find that childlike wonder in life to fire up our creative selves. We all need a sense of whimsy, not just to be creative, but to smile at life.
The Inner Child
There is a well-known creator and writer, Julia Cameron, who brought us The Artist’s Way. This article is not a sponsored post, but a lot of what Julia says feels true to me. She says that it is our inner child that is the source of our creativity, and you should encourage it and celebrate it. I do have to say that I have tried doing the 12 weeks of The Artist’s Way three times, and the furthest I got was week 8 before I fell off the wagon.
Psychologically speaking, our Inner Child is a part of our psyche that has brought the feelings and emotions from our childhood with us. It has been seeing the world before we discovered language. It knew how to play and create before we knew logic, before we knew that we could only fly in our imaginations, and not literally flap our arms and soar through the skies.
Some may say that being an adult is all about mature decisions and mature ways of being. Working the clock 9 to 5, going to the hardware store every weekend to work on your house, paying bills, working yourself up the corporate ladder, wearing sensible shoes. However, if we shut down our inner child, we run the risk of failing to see the joy in life.
And for me, joy in life includes writing stories, building Lego, admiring art, watching animated shows on television, yeah?
Creatively speaking, tapping into your Inner Child, your Inner Creator, helps you see things differently, allows you to imagine, to visualise what-if, paint that scene in bright pink rather than washed-out greys. What if my main character was actually a werewolf? What if dragons did exist?
I doubt a super serious adult who had shut down their Inner Child would be able to write fiction, nor enjoy fiction. When they choose to write or paint or draw, they struggle with inspiration, can’t think of what to create, because they’ve stopped listening to their Inner Child.
A Sense of Whimsy
I am a huge fan of whimsy. And according to Gretchen Rubin, it seems to
be in vogue at the moment. Whimsy is a quaint behaviour, something playful, innocent, something said or done on a whim. Googly eyes on book covers, rabbit ears behind friends in photos, wholesome pranks, bringing inanimate objects to life, with names and personality.
People usually think whimsy is not productive or useful. The happiness a sense of whimsy brings can be very productive for you, very useful for the happy chemicals in your brain. It can help you see the world differently, interact with people on a different level.
Which is a good thing.
We need Positive Reinforcement
All through our childhood we need positive reinforcement from those who are important in our life- parents, teachers and friends. If we don’t get this, we drag this self-doubt and low self-esteem into our adult life. Our inner child is curled into a ball inside us, crying, looking for something or someone to tell them they’ve done something good.
That may sound clumsy, this is because I am not a psychologist. It is much more complex than that, but I have read and talked to many of them, and yeah, our craving for external validation as an adult, for our lecturers to say we wrote a good essay, for our bosses to praise us, rather than criticise us, stems from our childhood, in general.
This is part of the reason for Rule #2 in Written Off- you’re not allowed to say anything negative about yourself or your writing. It also leans into Rule #3- if someone gives you a compliment, even if you don’t believe it, you say thank you.
Learning to play with your inner child again can be strange. Childlike behaviour, as an adult? Consider this- all those great kids’ films? Written by adults, made by adults. Lilo and Stitch was ‘based on an idea by Chris Sanders’. How many of you cried during Toy Story 3 when Andy goes off to college and gives his toys to Bonnie? He sits there and plays with her for a little while, reliving his childhood. Adults wrote and created that.
I say these things because for me, this was permission for me to play with my inner child. When someone gives me side-eye at my behaviour, I can shrug and say- all the cool stuff we loved as children were made, written by, and designed by adults. Lego? Adults. Saturday morning cartoons? Adults coming up with simple but fun stories that girls and boys loved. So why not embrace it?
I often find myself giving reassurance to people who do something they think is “silly”. What’s wrong with being silly, being whimsical? Does it hurt anyone? Does it bring anyone down, make anyone sad, insult or offend anyone? No? Do you get a cheeky little grin, a sense of joy? Then embrace it!
Look at the photo of me in the About Us section. I’m there in a t-shirt that says- Badass Magician of Words! I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I am wearing my signature jester’s hat, which is my writing hat. I still get strange looks from people who don’t know about that hat, which I just shrug off. It is something funny, colourful, and also symbolic of my writing.
Why do we need Whimsy?
As creators, you need to investigate, poke and prod into the corners, the nooks and crannies, and show us what you find. We need to go on adventures of the mind to far-off lands and worlds, and show others the way there.
We need to ask questions like a 3-year-old who doesn’t know all the words but still has that desire to know stuff. If you don’t know the words, make them up, Shakespeare did.
We must imagine how things might happen, might look, or could never be, and show this to the world. It is our role as creators to go places, to hold the hands of our inner child, and return with fantastic stories. Otherwise, we’ll only write white papers and reports, only draw logos and straight lines.
Do not be afraid to embrace your whimsy. Share it with the world, create something beautiful that takes us away with you. Respect your inner child, give them some butcher’s paper and crayons and free rein to show us what they see and how they see it.
What’s the worst thing that could happen? Bad art? That is just called a first draft. Go make something awesome!
