Art isn't an end in itself.
It is a place to practice quieting the mind so that we may hear our Muse whispering to us.
Writing, drawing, playing music, dancing, taking pictures, cooking, painting all bring us to the present moment.
This is the same 'zone' as an athlete enters when they are fully vested in the game or the race or the downhill run.
Yoga, meditation, mountain biking, and horseback riding can bring us to that place where all the extraneous thoughts are not heard and our senses are filled with what is in the moment.
When we create, we are invited to enter this state.
As long as we are here, the critic is less likely to stomp around in our thoughts.
Whenever I sit down to write, there invariably is a moment when thoughts flash through my mind of, 'What do the readers want to read?', 'How can I make this different from anything else that is already in print?', and 'What would my mother think?' Occasionally, as I'm writing, the critic slips in and tries to make the character do or say something that they wouldn't do or say.
I pause and breathe.
The more attention we give to those thoughts, the longer we are derailed from our purpose of authentic creating.
That is not to say that the critic never has anything of value to add.
Lay out several paintings, play different pieces of music, look at a series of photographs and notice what is consistent in each, what might be the strength and weakness in the set, and then see if there is maturity from the first piece to the last.
This is the presence of the artist, their particular style, the mastery of a technique.
This is when the critic can evaluate our art and offer, hopefully, feedback that is useful.
One hurdle creatives must overcome is the thought, given by the inner critic, that there should be no mistakes.
A chef will burn a meal, a painter will use a color that distracts the eye in a piece, a writer or poet will use the passive voice or one synonym instead of another, a photographer will print a photograph with the incorrect white balance, and that is alright! These projects aren't failures, but opportunities to decipher where it is we're going.
They let us know when we've stepped off the path.
Not the path of creativity, but perhaps the path that we are on for that project.
These detours, what some call mistakes, allow us to deviate into the unknown.
It might work, it might not, or it might be something we come back to and revisit later.
A way to help us along our artist journey, and keep the critic quiet for a while, is by utilizing a sketchbook.
Writers aren't the only ones that could benefit from this practice.
Jotting down ideas, sketching our thoughts or things we see during our daily rounds can be recorded in this one place.
It doesn't need to be an expensive journal, and shouldn't be.
Then we might believe that we shouldn't make 'mistakes' in it, that what we record must be used in some future project.
That isn't the purpose.
It is a place to capture thoughts and ideas, a messy kind of 'office' that we can return to for inspiration or direction.