EXPRESS YOURSELF

Why I Wrote a Book About Creativity

And how you, too, can get unblocked

Yesterday, I released my first book with my publisher Holloway: Creative Doing. The book contains 75 prompts to unblock your creativity, focused on practicality, action, and time flexibility. I wrote this book for content creators, creative independents, creative hobbyists, and people working in companies in creative teams or needing to solve problems. You can learn more about who I wrote this book for here. If you can spare 15 minutes per day to be creative, this book is for you.

This is the first post in a series exclusive to Medium, where you can get to know me. This post will not be about the process of actually writing the book (I talk briefly about it in this post and plan to write a much more comprehensive one), but about the creative journey of how I actually got to this point.

As you can probably tell from the scroll bar, this will be a long post about my personal and professional life. I took a long, scenic, route through my life. If you want to write a book, you’ll probably find that putting the words on the page isn’t always the hard part — it’s riding through the creative blocks, emotional tumult, and making meaning that’s more difficult. That’s what I’m going to write about here.

It didn’t start with me

One of my strengths or weaknesses (depending on who you ask) is that I have a huge variety of interests. Some come and go. One that has remained with me, though, is my passion for books. I really love books, bookstores, and libraries. As I mentioned in Fast Company, for many years, my mom would take me to the library, and I would borrow 50 books (which was the library’s limit). My dad would take me to the local bookstores on the weekends, and we would just spend an afternoon there reading each of our books. At home, I didn’t have any siblings and mostly kept to myself, so I spent a lot of my time in the worlds that the authors created. Sometimes I would read entire novels at the bookstore or library, so my parents didn’t have to pay for it.

My parents were born and raised in Hong Kong, and immigrated to Canada as young adults. My dad worked as a professional engineer for his whole career, and he…