I recently found some older books that I had and was pleasantly surprised to see Eric Maisel’s “The Creativity Book” among the titles in my boxes. The book is aimed at those wishing to get inspired for creative projects and contains a year’s worth of inspirational and creative activities, some of which are definitely better than others. Most of the activities are geared more towards writers than visual artists.

I can’t claim that this book fares well against Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”, but there are some nuggets of wisdom in the pages that make “The Creativity Book” worth taking a look at.

Eric Maisel’s book is divided into different weeks with individual activities within each section. A fair portion of the activities seem to be more general than specific as the author tends to list some activities that I would consider more as advice you would expect from a self-help guru than from a creativity coach. Examples of this include  “Pardon yourself” and “Shorten your list of enemies”- truthfully good advice, but not necessarily as specific as you I was hoping for.

One  of his more unusual methods for fostering creativity includes buying or getting out an old textbook that has little value to you- monetary or otherwise- and shredding it to pieces. I culled my text-book collection long ago, so was unable to try out this particular exercise.

By this point, you are probably wondering if there is are any useful exercises in Eric Maisel’s “The Creativity Book” that might actually inspire you to create something of value. Fortunately, as the book continues, the exercises get less vague and deeper into the art of creating meaningful writing.

Most of his advice is not earth-shattering, and is not unique, but reminds us of some simple truths we need to face about writing: even when we don’t share it with many others, writing about personal pain often gets to the core of our being and forces us to write at a deeper level than we would ordinarily and  our writing improves when we force ourselves to open up to the possibilities of writing about new things.

Some  specific creativity exercises Eric Maisel suggests are:

• People watch and write an interesting list complete with an entire back-story about the people you have seen.
• Surround yourself with other artists.
• Walk blind-folded with a friend.
• Practice your writing by posing a question about something in the world and responding to it with your deepest truth.