On Creativity and Loneliness

Quest Digest #31 👁‍🗨 12 days left to join our final Quest of the year. It's Pay What You Can.

Hello Questers,

It’s great to see October’s Quest spaces are filling up! You still have 12 days left to join us.

A Creative Quest is for you if you want to:
👁‍🗨 Discover illuminating new perspectives on the world around you.
🌐 Become connected to creative people around the globe.
⚡️ Learn ways to invite big inspiration into your day to day life.
✍️ Make creative work with support of others.

One theme explored throughout October via:
workshops ~ creative challenges ~ guest speakers ~ city meet-ups ~ worldwide creative community

Pay What You Can
(minimum £1)

“The best kind of thought-provoking book club -- just a bit weirder
(in a good way).”

“Creative Quests manages to bottle up curiosity, playfulness and community magic to help you explore the creativity you didn't know you had!”

“I have found my people. People who love to explore, do new things, play, connect and have adventures.”

A creative life can be lonely. Maybe you’ve felt it too?

Whether you are exploring the things you want to make or if you are already putting work out in the world - it can feel like a solitary uphill battle. The emotional toll of making something real, not to mention the time spent on it, can be thrilling and exhausting.

The blood rush of confidence, the free fall of doubt.

Releasing creative work into world - hell, even posting on social media or releasing a newsletter each week - even if you aren’t alone, it can feel like it.

The comparison. The expectation vs reality. The self promotion. It’s lonely.

Why does it have to be like this?

What if our creative lives and output were more collective in approach and support?

This week I joined a 3-week cohort based writing club called - Lonely Writer’s Club which is exploring these very questions. A project by the brilliant Metalabel. One of their main goals is to reshape the way people perceive and organise themselves within the creator economy. To make being releasing work more enjoyable and less lonely.

In our first meet up last night, Metalabel founder

Yancey Strickler

introduced us to a phrase he’s coined called Lonely Creator syndrome… and I feel very seen.

Images courtesy of Yancey Strickler / Metalabel

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It took me back to how Creative Quests became the community it’s become.

Long before it was called Creative Quests or there was a community. It was just me - Sam (who writes these newsletters each week). Exploring themes month by month in my spare time. The video below is our origin story.

While I loved the fact it felt like my little creative secret - I always had a gut feeling this concept could reach other people in a meaningful way. I would often think…

“I know how much I can learn, do, create in one month with one theme as my focus. Just imagine that times by 10/20 + other people? What would that feel like? Would could we achieve through collective curiosity and knowledge exchange?

Fast forward a couple years and we are 10 Quests / 1200 Questers deep. I can safely say it’s been a collective effort.

After yesterday’s Lonely Writer’s Club I feel I have come away with new vocabulary to describe this evolving community of practice.

Creative Quests is place for your curiosity to never feel alone again.

Whether we are exploring themes together or you are exploring your own theme on a Quest - the generosity of this community will always back you.

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Joining Lonely Writers Club has been part of a personal experiment this year to make creative things I would usually do alone, more communal.

This year I have joined:

🗣 A Social Singing Choir - Writing/Performing music is my true creative love. But my musical confidence has hit an all time low in past years. So I joined a choir! A cool one. There is 100 of us and we are currently learning Creep by Radiohead. It sounds incredible.

🏃‍♂️ That Running Club - A brilliant running crew local to me. 30 or so of us each week running 6km. It’s super supportive and more about community than personal bests. Before this I would only run on my own. These runs are a highlight of my week and have made movement a communal practice.

🛹 Old Skaters - A Discord community for older (30 y/o +) skateboarders. There are 12 tricks to complete over a 12 week season. Everyone posts video of their attempts. It’s wholesome and amazing.

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My questions to you this week:

1. What areas of your creative life could you actively make less solitary and more collective?

2. Do you have something creative you’ve worked on / released in the world you want people to know about? Share it in the comments so we can support each other!

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A round up of illuminating discoveries from our world…

🎵 Orbit Live, a one-day music conference in East London on Sept 22nd. Creative Quests community get FREE tickets using this link.

🕸 This week I started reading

Naive Weekly

an ode to the quiet, odd and poetic web. I particularly liked this project: https://urlpoetry.club/ I discovered.

🗣 Delve into the promises and pitfalls of human-machine-nature-and-more relationships with an incredible selection of talks from this years The Conference in Malmo, Sweden.

💃 It’s Berlin Art Week. I wish I was there! It looks like an amazing curation of pieces. If you’re going - check out this Grief Discoteca by artist Annie Nicholson.

🎨 The Art Assignment is a video series that introduces you to innovative artists, presents you with assignments, and explores art history through the lens of the present.

😑 Life’s too short to have boring conversations. FCK the Small Talk (and go to an event!)

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Finally…

It’s one week till our REMIXER event in London. Come and celebrate the power of collective creativity and meet other Questers! Final few tickets available now.

Creative loneliness be gone!

from, Sam x
🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

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