The Ball Will Return: Thoughts on Creative Work

"the original" painting

There was a post I wrote on this blog years ago. It’s so old I had written it back when this blog was hosted on Blogger (jeez, remember that?). It was about the concept Neil Gaiman mentioned in a commencement speech in 2012: the concept of throwing your work out to the world like messages in a bottle, and hoping that the bottles wash back to you.

At the time I wrote my blog post, I didn’t mention it, but I had a kind of fatalistic view of the bottles – I thought that when I threw bottles out into the sea, they would never come back. I would post work, work, and more work, and get no return out of it.

It wasn’t until I came across Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert that I revisited this idea of throwing bottles/work out to the world. Continue reading “The Ball Will Return: Thoughts on Creative Work”