Hi and welcome to art juice this is honest, generous and humorous conversations

to feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me Louise Fletcher and today that's all you get it's

just me Alice is taking a break and I am here just to talk this will probably be a much

shorter episode than normal but I want to talk this will probably be a much shorter episode than normal but I want to talk about a

quote that has really stuck with me and this is a quote by not a painter it's a quote by a writer.

It's stuck with me so much that I've folded it into my upcoming

Find Your Joy course, which we are going to start mid-September. We do have, by the way, a free workshop coming up from

September 1st to September 8th, which is like a taster to find your joy. So if you're

interested in that, the link is in the show notes or on my

website at Louise Fletcherart.com. Totally free, no obligation to do anything else

but come and have some fun. I'll get into what the purpose of that course is as I talk about

this quote because Cheryl Strade is a writer who was a problem columnist as far as I

know and it also writes novels.

So the quote was in response to a person who was creatively blocked and Cheryl was talking

about her experience of writing a novel and she said you have to ask yourself not who you

aspire to be but to reckon with who you actually turn out to be, who you actually are. And what I realized is that I couldn't

any longer adhere to the narratives that had got me this far. I had to relinquish all of those anthems of greatness and dreaming big and aiming high.

All of those beautiful, powerful, important things that had really gotten me there. They weren't serving me anymore and so I had to come up with something that would.

The truth that rose up at my humblest, lowest moment was

forget the great the greatness,

forget if anyone would ever read it.

I had to write a book,

...