A few months ago, my wife Evelyn (who is an artist) applied for an art fellowship in a nearby city. The city was looking for an artist they could have “in residence,” meaning they would provide space and funding for the artist to work.
Before she applied, we discussed how we’d make it work as a family. The fellowship lasted for a week, and someone would need to watch our daughter Bella (then 21mo) during that time. We agreed that if she got the fellowship, I would take the week off to watch Bella; this seemed preferable to putting Bella in daycare for a week. I wanted to support Evelyn’s art, and I looked forward to spending the time with Bella.
Unfortunately, Evelyn wasn’t chosen for the fellowship. But the discussion of me taking a week off to support her creative work got us thinking: both of us could make good use of more time to focus on our creative pursuits (for her, her art; for me, my writing). Taking a week for creativity could be energizing to us individually and as a family. Furthermore, creativity is something we want to cultivate and defend in our children—we want to model autonomous creativity ourselves and provide opportunities for them to pursue their own creative endeavors. We believe creativity, like agency, is something intrinsically human, not something learned. But modern life can so often get in the way of it.
That led us to an idea: a week where the primary focus is providing time for all of us—my wife, myself, and our children—to pursue creative endeavors. If it went well, we could do it yearly and make a family tradition out of it.
In future years, we hope to rent an Airbnb for the week, to provide a clearer separation from the stressors of daily life and a novel environment to get our creative juices flowing. But for this pilot run, we stayed at home.
We decided to alternate being the “Bella buddy” and going heads-down on our projects. Since Bella is still taking a nap around the middle of the day, this meant each day was conveniently divided into two halves. We decided to each take one of those two halves to spend with Bella, making a point of doing fun, creative, and explorative things with her. In the times we weren’t Bella’s buddy, we’d be writing or painting.
I took the third week of October off of work for it, and a few days before we sat down after Bella was in bed to plan simple meals that would give us the most time with Bella and with our projects.
We also planned to do a few things to boost our energy back up from the weeks before, in which we’d been eating too much junk (as is common this time of year), staying up too late, and sleeping in as late as we could. We decided to aim to give ourselves nine hours of sleep each night, and agreed that we wouldn’t watch TV or movies in the evening (which had been the cause of many of our late nights). If we wanted to unwind after Bella was in bed, we’d read a book together or talk.
We also made a point of holding loose expectations about what we wanted to accomplish in our projects. We set “input goals” instead of “output goals,”1 focusing on putting good effort into our projects rather than getting a specific set of things accomplished.
Overall, the week went well, with the structure we had created holding up nicely. Evelyn finished a new painting, a fun one featuring a family of bears amid a scattering of bubbles on a whimsical purple background. (I’ll update this post to include a picture of it once we’ve got it up on her portfolio site.) And I made substantial progress on a polished draft for my next Innerhelm post.2 I found that I was mentally unprepared for having so much time to write, and struggled to actually start writing, but once I did, I made good progress.
I also deeply enjoyed spending more time with my daughter than I typically get to. We went to the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium a few times, listened to “Sticky Gecko” from the Bluey soundtrack (her favorite song at the time, which she would immediately request anytime we started driving somewhere) until it was thoroughly stuck in my head, and spread out a big sheet of paper on the coffee table to draw on and decorate.
Also, my wife and I succeeded in our goal of not watching TV in the evenings, instead reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist together, which was enjoyable (though I found that I don’t entirely agree with Coelho’s philosophies). And while we didn’t quite give ourselves the nine hours of sleep we aimed to, we did get substantially better sleep, which was nicely restorative.
We’re looking forward to continuing this tradition in future years (from an Airbnb instead of from home, as previously mentioned). I think, for my writing, I’ll do more to “prime the pump” before the start of the week, to make it as effortless as possible to start and continue writing—probably a combination of free-writing about my writing topic, starting a draft and then putting it down it mid-sentence to get the Zeigarnik Effect working in my favor, and the Right Now List technique described by David Cain.
I’ll do a similar write-up after future years’ Creativity Weeks. And if this inspires you to try something like this yourself, please do comment and let me know how it goes.
Footnotes
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I was introduced to this idea by a blog post by Amy Hoy, but for the life of me I cannot find that post again. Sadly, it was before I used Readwise Reader to save and annotate the things I read. ↩
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This post is ready to publish now, but as it is part of a series, I’m intentionally waiting until I have a completed draft of the next one before I do so. I don’t want to paint myself into a corner with the first part done and subsequent parts only sketched out. ↩
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