Vanessa McKay

Your Creative Affair

What if you treated your creative practice like a passionate love affair? What if every moment spent with your writing felt like stolen time with a secret lover—exciting, invigorating, and impossible to resist?

In her book Big Magic (2015), Elizabeth Gilbert draws this striking parallel. When someone engages in an affair, they mysteriously carve out time from nowhere. Time they claimed not to have for other pursuits. They send furtive text messages, prepare meticulously for meetups, shop for special occasions, and craft elaborate excuses to disappear for hours. All while maintaining their normal life obligations.

Your creative work deserves this same devoted attention.

Dating Your Creativity

Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, introduces us to the concept of ‘Artist Dates’, which are regular, scheduled play dates with your creative self. These solo expeditions are meant to nurture your creative consciousness, like tending to a relationship that matters deeply to you.

“An Artist Date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist,” Cameron writes. “In its most primary form, the Artist Date is an excursion, a play date that you pre-plan and defend against all interlopers.”

Like planning a special evening with a lover, these dates aren’t optional—they’re essential to maintaining the spark. You might visit a museum, take a walk in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, browse a bookstore, or simply sit in a café with your notebook. The only rule is that you show up, fully present, ready to be inspired.

The Time Reality Check

When we examine where our time actually goes, the truth emerges. Take out that pen and piece of paper now. List everything you do in a day, then divide these activities into three columns:

1. Things I have to do – the non-negotiables
2. Non-urgent things I need to do – tasks with flexibility
3. I can leave this – activities the world would survive without

That third column reveals your potential creative time. Just as someone having an affair finds time because the relationship matters deeply to them, you can find time for your creative work when you recognise it as essential rather than optional.

Committing to the Relationship

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver

Your creative work is waiting, ready for your attention, eager for you to prioritise the relationship. It doesn’t demand hours – it thrives on consistency and devotion. Ten minutes of fully engaged writing carries more power than an hour of distracted effort.

Begin your creative affair today. Send your inner artist a love note. Schedule that first date. Show up consistently, even when it’s challenging. Because, like any meaningful relationship, your creative practice will reward your attention with joy, growth, and fulfillment far beyond the time invested.

The question isn’t whether you have time, it’s whether you’re ready for a love affair with your creativity that will transform your life.

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary oliver