Consistency for the creative

A guide to keeping the muse on speed dial from someone rawdogging motherhood

Maybe you know this already but perhaps you’re new around here.

I am one of those women they say is rawdogging motherhood. I’m attached to my baby about twenty two hours a day. No crib, no pacifier, no daycare. A new mama in a new city with zero village extending past babydaddy. Just 236 nights of my favourite 10kg weight sleeping on my dead left arm, rocking my overflowing / deflated milk bags, persistently messy hair, exuding a whole lot of joy, surrendering to the occasional breakdown & thanking my gorgeous man for taking our double-y gorgeous cub out for a little walk most days so I can catch the occasional shower in peace or do anything whilst not ceaselessly multitasking, which most recently is — write, write, write.

Two essays a week. A note or two a day. Two books in progress. Classes being sequenced & filmed. A paid deep dive philosophy / practice series. The framework of a new series forming in the back end of my brain & my documents. All of it built in the margins of a life that gives me, generously, maybe forty five uninterrupted minutes once every day or so.

Most recent weekends the big love takes the little love out & ensures that free time stretches to a whole couple of hours — which has been wild.

& so I guess unsurprisingly a lot of people here, in comments & dm’s are asking me about creating consistently.

Which tells me something & it’s not a reflection about me — it’s about what most creatives are telling themselves regarding what consistency requires. The muse as a constant houseguest, a clean aesthetic desk in a silent, undisturbed home. The ability to write with both hands because one isn’t bouncing wooden blocks to & from an adorable nose a la ‘boop the baby’ — keep him giggling so he doesn’t meltdown about the fact that you’re also trying to do something else. A version of life that well, I don’t know about you, but for me definitely isn’t currently reality.

Here’s the thing. I write about consistency in general — for people working on their wellbeing, their yoga practice, their creative acts, their positive habits, their many different missions. The broad thesis that showing up in small steady acts builds the life you’re after. Because it does.

But this one is specifically for you.

Yes you there. Substacker.

Grinding away to churn out an article or two every week & from the best that I can gauge, making it much harder than it needs to be.

In seated postures in a yoga class I often cue those feeling a bit heavy, experiencing rounding in the low back, struggling to hold themselves upright — to place their hands behind them on the floor & use their arms as a second spine.

An extra backbone that makes it easier to breathe fully, to have solid form. & in time, with consistent practice, they stop needing their arms to hold themselves there.

That’s what I’m offering here. An extra backbone for your content. Not a strategy or a systematic hack. Just some things equally of your own creating that you can lean on. A few practices that hold you up when the blank page & the busy life & the brain fog of trying to do too many things at once are conspiring to make you feel like you’ve got nothing.

You’ve got plenty friend. You just need to stop starting from scratch.

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Titles first. Pounds of flesh later.

Recently I discovered that most people write their article & then figure out a title.

& my first thought was — Wait. Am I ass backwards?

Maybe. In fact probably. Could be it’s the Instagram captionista in me. Possibly the remnants of a seventeen year old who was convinced she wanted to be a journalist so learned early on that the hook is everything. Either way I can confirm where my articles here are concerned I have never once sat down to write without knowing what I’m writing towards & I think this might be one of the most useful things I can hand you.

I have a note on my phone. At any given time it contains ten to twenty title ideas I’ve scribbled on a stroller walk, voice annotated while making dinner or — & I will not pretend this hasn’t happened — typed one handed on the toilet while wrangling my son away from the roll of toilet paper with the other.

Inspiration hits when it hits okay.

No full ideas, not a nice polished outline. Just titles. Some provocative catchy thing. The thing my brain spins out between loads of laundry that I think might make me stop scrolling & go — ooh I want to read that.

Far beyond the fact that a good title is better for catching your readers eye, having a title first tells you what you’re writing about. It gives the piece bones before you add enticing, voluptuous curves. It means you sit down knowing where you’re going rather than staring at a blank page & dealing with that horrible feeling when the blank page refuses to tell you what to write. We all know blank pages can be bitches.

So start there. Next time you’re walking, cooking, existing — notice what you’re thinking about. What’s inspiring you, annoying you, interesting you, surprising you. Turn it into a title. Voice note it. Scribble it. Chuck them in to a note on your phone or your journal & leave them there.

When you next feel really inspired & sit down to write, you can just open the note & pick the one that’s pulling at you most. The title can always be edited once you have the piece done, just let it be a visible sign post directing you first.

Let it hook you, the writer before it hooks a reader.

The blank page problem dissolves. Evoila, you have ideas you can always to return to.

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The bundle of bones exercise

Say you’re not feeling particularly inspired but you find yourself with a whole hour — even half works — open your notebook or your pages app or whatever your favourite place to spill in is.

Write down six to eight of these hook / title ideas from your notes. Just one line.

A message you want to get out. A cool fact you think might serve someone beyond you. Something beautiful & poetic if that’s your thing. Doesn’t really matter what, I could put a thousand different examples here, it’s going to be different for everyone.

One line, with space left beneath each, no pressure on where they’re going.

Drop five to six bullet points under each one. I really suggest limiting the amount of time you spend on these bullet points, mind dump all over them, get messy, free flow. The flavour of your Substack applied to this idea. A direction to take it in, a sense memory that links to it, a question it raises, a quote, a piece of science, an unpopular opinion — whatever lives at the crossroads of this idea & your voice.

Six to eight titles. Five or six bullet points each.

If you’ve got eight & you’re a one article a week kinda substacker, you’re staring at the bones of two months of content.

Now pick your favourite & start expanding the bullets into paragraphs. The decisions have already been made. All that’s left is the writing — which is the part you’re actually good at & the part that gets lost when you’re using all your energy deciding what to make instead of making it.

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Notes for value, notes for freedom, notes for friends

Okay confession time. When I very recently started my Substack I didn’t even know notes were a thing. I genuinely thought this was the antithesis of social media, when in fact it’s just social media with a longer attention span, a more wholesome feeling to the community & considerably more room to breathe.

I know, I know. Notes, notes, notes. Everyone’s saying it & I’ll admit I find things on repetitive spin cycle mildly grating, maybe thats just me, maybe it’s you too. But I’ve accumulated over 500 organic-to-substack subscribers in the month since I arrived here & only recently discovered three quarters of them came in through notes. In fact damn near half of them came in from one. single. note.

So, there’s that.

Luckily I like a short form message — hello (ex?) IG captionista — so on day one I settled on a format I could lean on. One valuable note & one personal note a day, with full permission to share just one or neither whenever I feel like.

Your format may look different but have mercy on yourself — decide on a format.

Same as with your articles, give yourself something to fall back on so that when the text cursor is blinking at you in an empty box & you just want to share a quick note but don’t have a flying fig of what, you have framework to get inspired within.

A valuable note in my framework is something I think might ground, empower, inspire, bring an interesting reframe or a slow moment of peace / a pause to someone. For you value might be making someone feel something with your poetry, getting someone hooked on a character in your novel or offering a recipe, who knows!?

Well you do, it’s your substack.

A personal note in my framework is where I get to just be messy lil me, currently somewhere between a hot nomadic mess, a milk stained fluffy bathrobe & a domestic fucking goddess. Not the version of me thats an authority on consistency, resilience & creativity, not a yoga teacher or a breathwork coach. Just a woman stopping in awe or frustration at the outrageous, occasionally maddening beauty of existence, frequently sleep deprived (hello 7 month old), always caffeinated. Some small spill that serves up a slice of me & allows me to make friends with other similarly human humans.

So like we have a note for title ideas & practice pages for fleshing them out in bullet points, we too write note drafts. I think I have about 30 — some are great, legitimately some of my favourite recent writing, others are near nonsensical, some exist only to be deleted. Quality amongst note drafts genuinely doesn’t matter. What matters is you have them, you don’t ever have to stare at the blank box unless you’re inspired to write something new in to it.

Build the spine. Lean on it when you're slouching.

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Kriya & the creative muscle

Kriya is both a Sanskrit concept & a powerful array of practices, Kriya Yoga is even it’s own style. It sounds ancient because it is — & if you’ve ever practiced it you’ll know it feels exactly that. There’s a quality to the surge of energy it ignites that feels older than any room you’ve ever been in. Kriya means a purifying action. Internal movement sourced through meditation, breath & body. It’s designed to turn the senses inward & evoke evolution — of the mind, of the body, of the spirit. In yoga, Kriya practices are precise & deliberate sequences that clear what’s stuck, move what’s stagnant & create the conditions for something in you to shift.

Here we’re applying that to creativity.

Because the creative act is its own form of Kriya. While we cannot expect the muse to move in permanently, wouldn’t that be nice — we can steadily stoke the fire, take consistent action, evoke our intent by continuing to create. Masterpeices & total trash alike. Action taken not because inspiration showed up but because you showed up & in doing so, cleared the channel enough for something to move through it.

You grab the muse by the hand when she’s there & when she isn’t, you sit down anyway & trust that the sitting is the work.

Which is, gorgeously enough, exactly what the neuroscience of habit confirms.

Repeated behaviours shift — gradually & measurably — from conscious effortful processing to automatic processing. The brain stops treating the behaviour as a decision & starts treating it as a given. The energy required to repeat the action begins to drop. The resistance softens. The creative act gets cheaper to run the more consistently you show up to it.

Not a metaphor. Actual measurable change in how the brain routes the behaviour.

Every time you sit down to write — even badly, even briefly, even with a baby on your arm & the vague memory of having last showered sometime this week — you are making the next time fractionally easier. The creative muscle doesn’t get tired with use, it gets more efficient.

So Kriya. Not trying to recreate the article you’re most proud of. Not studying notes that went viral. Definitely not perfectionistic procrastination or metaphorically scrunching up a page that is in fact digital. The ordinary faithful act of inciting something to move through you. Just getting things out of your head & into something tangible.

Creativity is a muscle. & muscles are best built through steady nourishment & progressive load.

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Less time = more efficient?

Weirdly enough — or maybe not so — I’m discovering having little to no time can focus you magnificently.

When you have unlimited hours it’s all too easy to spend a significant portion of them deciding what to do with them. Topped off with an excessive amount of them spent procrastinating & doubting the ideas that you do have.

At the very least I’ve had plenty seasons like that.

Now I have forty five minutes & a title already in my phone & I sit down & I write because if I want to spill with no interruptions — Uff what a luxury to have a single point of focus, the mamas here will just get it — it’s this window of time or nothing, it doesn’t matter if it sucks, it just matters that it’s out somewhere I can edit it later. It’s no longer dancing around in my head waiting to get buried under laundry, groceries & all the other ideas doing the funky mambo up there.

Parkinson’s Law — work expands to fill the time available — runs beautifully in reverse for the creative with real constraints. The work contracts & in that contraction it becomes more essential.

Maybe you’re swimming in time so set a timer if you must, treat your creativity like work you love showing up to — with hours on as well as off. Give yourself deadlines, you will meet them.

& more importantly, remember, the clear desk & the quiet house are a trap. I’m not sure they actually exist outside of reels. You could wait a very long time for both & produce nothing in the waiting.

So, lovely human, stop making things harder for yourself. Sit down in the margins. Make the most of the time you have. Write your hooks. Play with your bundles of bones. Expand on them with or without inspiration. Do it again tomorrow.

Creativity doesn’t have to be the outlier in your practices of consistency. You just have to set your system up to keep the muse on speed dial.

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