If you’d asked me at the beginning of 2024 what I thought my most influential book of the year would be, I would have told you with 100% certainty that it would be Rick Rubens ‘The Creative Act: a Way of Being’. I’d had by eye on it for a while, reading quotes, listening to the interviews, it was on my Christmas list! My sister obliged and there it was on Christmas day.
Like many creatives before me, I’d been struggling with the ‘creative act’. I wouldn’t call it so much ‘writers block’, but I’d fallen out of the habit of creating. When I did sit down to create, it always felt like such an achievement but then I’d go weeks, even months without creating again. It was beginning to stress me out which in turn didn’t help my creative juices!
I began taking the book on my commutes and making notes in the margins, highlighting passages and even writing small poems in the blank spaces. I’d read it at night in bed, pencil in hand, it felt good, like my creative engine was beginning to splutter and start again.
Truth is it took me a year to get through the book and whilst it definitely seemed to get me started it was actually another book that really kicked things into gear.
I tend to read more than one book at a time, sounds fancy right? Not really, I just like to mix things up, if I’m reading a non-fiction book I like to read a little fiction alongside it. Towards the back end of the year I picked up a copy of Luigi Pirandello’s ‘One, No one, and One Hundred Thousand’, specifically a modern translation by Kevan Houser. Then things really kicked into gear!
In the book, the protagonist Vitangelo discovers that everyone he knows, indeed everyone he has ever met, has a constructed a version of him shaped by their own imagination and interactions with Vitangelo. None of these versions correspond with the image he himself believes him to be. And what a rabbit hole this takes us down. I don’t want to spoil it, but wow did it get my creative cogs whirring! I found myself thinking and mulling over the themes of the book and started putting pen to paper. This helped move that spluttering engine into second then third gear.
Alongside this, I finished Rick Rubens book, and this inspired me to pick up a copy of ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield. Of course whilst also reading ‘Coming Through the Slaughter’ by Michael Ondaatje, a book I’d found on the tube a few years ago and had been sat on my bookshelf unread collecting dust. And that’s how I started 2025, I devoured both books, feeling inspired, I moved on to Steven Pressfields follow up ‘Going Pro’. All whilst my creative engine slowly but surely made its way into fourth and then fifth gear, not quite sixth yet, but it’s getting there. Now I’m back writing and creating daily. My only goal is to do exactly that, to create daily, whether five minutes or an hour. Just get something down, bad or good, keep moving forward!
Whilst I wasn’t sure whether Rick Rubens book was my most influential of 2024 as I’ve type this I can’t help think it certainly got things moving, it turned the key, it restarted the engine. Now Steven Pressfield is helping me keep that engine running. These aren’t self-help books, these are inspiration, these are a call to action.
This year, let’s just keep things moving forward, one day at a time.
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