The Scintilla Method
A four-step plan to build a thriving creative life
Build Your Habitat
Create a habitat for your goals within your physical space and your weekly routine. Given them the food, water, and shelter they need to thrive.
How to Start a Band
“How have you not started a band yet?” After twenty years as a musician and three as a creative lifestyle blogger, I’ve heard quite a few good reasons to start a band. Some of the best: Artists are people who make art; musicians are people who make music. The band...
How to Be More Creative: 5 Tips to Increase Creativity
This post was originally published on The Spare Room Project. Creativity has 'muscles' and needs exercise to improve, just like regular muscles. It isn't hard to get started, though! You can start small, and you don't have to buy a creative 'home gym' in order to be...
5 Ways to Establish a Habit of Creativity
Do you want to establish a lasting habit of creativity? There are five tips that can help form a habit. It doesn't mean it'll be easy all of a sudden, but it will be more likely to stick! 5 Ways to Establish a Habit of Creativity Habits aren't easy to create. It...
Keep out poachers
Some things have a right to your time, space, and attention. Other things are trespassing, and they will hunt your creativity to extinction if you let them. Know the difference and enforce it.
5 ways to waste less time online
Many of the resources you use to create are online, like reference photos or tutorials. But they’re next to a lot of things that distract you, like news feeds or notifications. This can be difficult, because all the time spent on an upvote, stream, or swipe is time...
5 Excuses Killing Your Creativity
And How to Be More Creative by Overcoming Them Odds are if you've found this blog, you're trying to be a more creative person. You've got a passion and a goal but for some reason every night finds you no closer to achieving it. In reality, there are five reasons,...
Downton Abbey and Backspace: First Drafts
Downton Abbey might just be the best argument for writing your first draft on paper instead of a word processor. Here's why. I don't know why I'm still watching Downton Abbey. I could blame the show's inexplicable allure on its ensemble cast of characters. I could...
Push the snowball
Live and work within your habitat by setting incremental goals and building on your successes.
How to Write Songs in 5 Steps or Less
Last year I took the February Album Writing Month (FAWM) challenge to write songs with a couple of friends. Within a few desparate weeks, we had recorded our first EP as 5% Savvy. We made a lot of good memories - evenings packing a wobbly electric drum set into a...
NaNoWriMo: A Habit of Writing and What’s Next
Editor’s Note: Seth texted me at 1:33 p.m. Mountain Time on November 30 with the good news: “I just hit 50k” This has been an experience I never thought myself capable of, and yet here I am, having written fifty-thousand words in thirty days. In that sense, I’ve...
NaNoWriMo: Kill Your Darlings
If you’ve been a writer for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the adage “kill your darlings.” It means you should never get so attached to things in your story that you aren’t willing to cut them out. But how much of a difference does that really make? Here we...
Recycle
Grow your future projects in the rich loam of your past failures and successes. Be intentional about the entire life cycle of a project, from idea to closure.
6 Ways Tabletop RPGs Make You a Better Writer
“I don’t think I could ever play Dungeons & Dragons,” I said. “That seems like crossing a line, maybe going a little too far for me.” My party’s Paladin is fond of reminding me I said that. About two years ago I crossed the last nerd threshhold and played my...
I was a Voice Actor for a Day: Here’s What I Learned
“The Blueberry is pretty sensitive,” the audio engineer told me, adjusting the height of the little black microphone. “Keep it at about your chin so we can avoid harsh plosives.” Bare bulbs and wood paneling surrounded me, and my own voice was crisp through my...
A Musician does Inktober
I’m only kind of an artist. But I’ve learned before that artists are people who make art, not just people with great talent. So when Inktober 2017 came around this year, I decided to get on the bandwagon. Launching Scintilla Studio means I need a lot more visual...