A few years ago, life pulled me deep into my creativity and away from social media and the outside world. Today, I’m not only a painter, but also a romance writer with three books under my belt — and a salsa dancer. I emerged more grounded, more passionate, and with new stories to tell. In this episode, I share the story of how it all started but it’s only the beginning of a creative journey, the lessons I’ve learned, and the joy of following passion wherever it leads. Thanks for joining me on the ride!
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TRANSCRIPTION
CreativeCurious Season3 Ep001
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
You are listening to Creative and Curious, a weekly podcast made for creative seekers who are compelled to let your inner artist reign free. Here we explore the mystery of how creating makes us better humans and artists. I’m Marika and welcome to today’s discoveries.
Begin Again and Again and Again.
Hey, welcome. So good to be back. I don’t know, it’s been three or four years since I broadcasted this podcast and here I am again. And I guess I have a story to tell because it’s been a while and it’s not like it’s been a black hole of nothingness. Quite a bit has happened. The funny thing is, is that I left this podcast a painter and I’m coming back a romance writer, a painter and a salsa dancer and more thoroughly grounded in my creativity, which is really exciting.
It was not for not that I decided that I leave this podcast, but not only this podcast, social media and quite a bit of my social life for the last few years. It sounds like I went and I lived in a cave and it wasn’t really a cave, but it was a deep dive into my imagination and a new understanding of my life. And in a nutshell, it was a deep dig into writing, which surprised me.
I had actually given up writing and painting was going just fine, but it all started with a movie, which is funny because I don’t watch a lot of movies. I sat down with my family and watched The Hating Game around Christmas time, which is probably why I did it was to sit down and spend some time with the family. And The Hating Game is a feel good romance started as novel and, and it makes you laugh. And I really enjoyed it. It’s also very much like Pride and Prejudice, which I didn’t know going into it. I don’t think that would have changed anything, but a dark secret shadow part of my personality is that I love Pride and Prejudice. I have fallen for that book so many times. In particular, when I was pregnant with my son, I became super obsessed with Pride and Prejudice. I watched all of the movies, the ones from the sixties, the Keira Knightley version, the beautiful cinematography and music at that book And at the time I could tell you exactly which movies were the best and for what reasons, because they’re all very good. I’ve also read the books. I’ve read a lot of Jane Austen and first Jane Austen was considered one of the first romance novelists. Her literature is considered sort of high literature because it’s old and it sort of sounds funny. It’s intellectualizing love too. There’s definitely a feeling place in it, but, but in the end, especially in her books, it’s about the romantic tension.
It’s about love. And that is what gets me almost every time. And of course, The Hating Game is a modern day version of that.
And it sparked that sort of obsession in me again, which I had sort of tamped down, but this time I appreciated the love story more than I had before because I have learned an openness to just enjoying the fun and enjoying the things that feel good. I don’t know. I felt a lot of shame about even enjoying these kinds of stories.
And even though I could let go of it, I still felt some shame in the fact that I started, I read The Hating Game and I really enjoyed it. And then I started reading a lot of books, a lot of romance novels, and just really enjoying them and also feeling a little ashamed that I was really enjoying them, but I still love them so much that I was really enjoying them. So there’s sort of fight in me the whole time I was reading all these books.
I was listening to books and I was painting while I was listening to books. And it was an obsession. And I haven’t really had an obsession like that since maybe middle school, where I used to read books like through the night, I couldn’t even sleep.
I had to finish these stories. And it’s a wonderful feeling to be obsessed. It’s a wonderful feeling to be so into something that it’s sort of like occupying your life, your headspace, and making you feel like just really good and engaged and in love, even if it is like a book, you know, a story.
And I had no idea what the outcome was. I thought I was a little like hormonal. I thought, I don’t know what I thought. I just, I thought I was a little, maybe going a little crazy. Maybe it would go away. And it was so compulsive that I just had to keep reading these all sorts of different writers and romance novelists from Christie Miller and to Allie Hazelwood, to Megan Quinn and all these other writers in between. I loved Laughing Out Loud. I loved The Emotional Intensity. After a while, I identified some of my favorite writers.
And I started reading some of their older things. And it was clear that some of these writers had self-published because some of the writing was not very good. And the stories were not very good. And it was kind of fabulous to see this, to see these writers that, you know, maybe honestly, like 20 books later, I was really enjoying their books. And then when I went back and read The Very First Book that they published, they had come so far. They had put themselves into the public with a not very good book and continued to write. And that was really inspiring. You know, we see these other writers that sort of pop up into this, into the scene. And they’re instantly, they seem like they’re instantly successful.
But if you listen to their stories, a lot of the times they’ve written a lot of books until they finally hit the one and they meet the right person and they get the good break and they finally get the book published. You know, that’s one way to do it. And the other way is to just write, get it out there, keep writing, and you get better. Like, you’re just going to get better. The more that you write, the more that you do anything, you’re just going to get better. I was really inspired by seeing some really bad writing and just the persistence too.
And it occurred to me that being terrible in the beginning is exactly where to begin. And there’s absolutely no pressure on that, that I can, you can start and you can be horrible. And that’s not the end of the story, right? As I was reading all these books, I started to believe that I could do it too.
And that I had a story I could start with. And it made me feel good that I could do that. But I had also, you know, I have an English lit degree. I’ve taken writing classes. I’ve tried to write multiple books that didn’t feel good. And I put them down. I wrote a book and all the way through. And at the end of it, I was like, this is too dark. It’s not very fun. And I’m not enjoying it. And I don’t want to go back. And I don’t want to edit it. And I don’t want to make it better. I don’t want to do anything with it. And I thought, well, maybe this isn’t for me.
I mean, painting’s going fine. And I could just keep doing that. I really do enjoy painting.
So when I started getting these ideas of what you could do this, there’s a story, there’s a story. I kept like, pushing it down and pushing it down. Like, no, I can’t do this. I’ve already, I’ve already tried. It’s not for me. And then it wouldn’t go away.
I had this voice in my head that would not go away. And I kind of had this conversation with the voice, like, okay, fine. I will write an outline just to appease you, just to show you. And I wrote an outline. And it was so fun. And I got really into it. And it was really long. It was not a page outline. It was like a 10, 15 page. And I was really into this story that was unfolding in front of me, and just in an outline. And it felt great. And it’s the thing to do.
You know, if it feels good like that. Romance novels are fun, lighthearted reads, and writing one is exactly the same. And there’s something to that, you know, we need to have more fun. You know, if everybody invested more in their fun, we’d all be a lot less likely to be judgmental, critical, unhappy with other people, if we were all just a little bit more inside of our own fun, and realize that their power struggle is not fun. But the things that you love to do are fun. And for me, writing a romance novel is really fun. Painting is really fun. Dancing is really fun. Even podcasting is really fun. And there’s no reason to block that. Aside from these dumb things like, you know, being ashamed because you like romance novels, and some people think that’s low art. Thank God for romance novels They make me feel good. And I have always wanted to be a writer. When this outline came out so well, I decided I needed to keep going.
I kept writing. And I did this on my cell phone, by the way. I started the outline on my cell phone. And then I started writing on my cell phone in Google Docs. It was a really safe place to write because you can’t take it that seriously. It can’t get too heavy. There’s not a lot of editing. It’s a very wonderfully big creative space that just by virtue of being kind of cramped and hard to really sink that critical mind into, it was just a really easy place to let everything sort of flow out of me. And it flowed. Once I started writing, I was obsessed. I was writing easily 5,000, 6,000 words a day, probably more some days. And it was wonderful because I could do it anywhere. I could do it on the beach. I could do it at the airport. I could do it sitting in the car. I could do it at home on the couch with my dog. I feel like I was getting through making progress, which is important to me, but not taking it too seriously.
Because for me, taking it too seriously is a really good road to blocking myself, to creating writer’s block, is allowing that critical voice in. The critic does not belong in the beginning. It does not belong in that creative process in the beginning at all when you’re just sort of wading through all of this, all the ideas. The idea in the beginning is to just let it out. And finding a space where that felt safe was really important for me, which was on my phone. And by the time I had written my first draft, I realized there were two more books in the book that I had written and that I was having way too much fun to stop. And if it was going to be this much fun, I couldn’t stop. I needed to do it. It was so easy. It was flowing.
So I became so obsessed now with writing in the same way I was obsessed with reading these books. I wasn’t making dinner. My husband would try to talk to me. And I’m sitting down with my cell phone. He tried to talk to me, and I wouldn’t even respond. And he’d be like, when’s dinner? And I’m like, I’m not even hungry because I’m just writing this little novel.
And everything became about this book. It kind of felt like magic. I felt like flow. It felt like important, too, because it felt like magic and flow. It felt like something had totally unlocked inside of me, something that had blocked the writer in me, the romance writer in me, which was so surprising that I was writing romance. I never thought that I would be the kind of person who would write that. But I loved it. And apparently I always was. After I wrote that first draft, I wrote two more outlines and two more drafts and let them be my life.
I did not let anything else in. I didn’t let this podcast in. I stopped painting. I stopped a lot of social media. And because I really felt like I needed to invest in the momentum that was coming towards me, that was sort of filling me with these stories. And they’re really fun. Like, I know that they’re not the perfect novel. But they are fun, spicy romance novels that were really fun to write. I have now finished all three of them.
And it feels a little like I’m coming out of this cave. Like I took this deep dive into this creative process and really utilized the momentum of it to become more grounded in my writing. So that by the time I finished my third novel, my life was much more balanced. I mean, I could not carry that, like, total focus energy for two or three years. This last year, it feels like it was kind of an experiment in learning how to balance my life. There was a lot of change in my life. And I was writing this book. And it did not disrupt me the way that it would have. Some of the things that were occurring this year occurred a few years ago when I wrote the first book, which was Dear Mexico, I Love You.
So now I’m ready. I’m ready to come out and talk about it. And that’s why I’m dusting off this podcast and returning to the real world.
This season, season three, a couple years later, is going to be all about the lessons that I’ve learned in reimagining myself as a creative, as a writer, but also still painting. And even as a dancer now, too, in the middle of all this, I reclaimed my salsa dancing life. And I feel like there’s a lot to share.
And I’m excited that you’re joining me here.
Thank you for spending this time with me and for spreading the word about creative and curious. You can find me here every Thursday with new thoughts and insights on creativity, curiosity, and life. Tell me what you think. Email me with your comments and questions at marika at marikarenki.com. And if you feel inclined, leave a review. They mean the world to me. And they’ll help this podcast reach people just like you. And the best thing you can do, keep creating. Thanks again.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.