Have you ever struggled with putting more of yourself into your job than it's giving you back? Or do you have a somewhat-creative day job that leaves you with little creative energy left for your writing and podcasting? This episode's for you. In this personal essay inspired by the "iceberg technique" of Ernest Hemingway, I reflect on a lesson about "guarding my heart" that it took me way too long to learn — and experiment with a slower, more pared-back style of narration and sound design.

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Show notes:

• A great feedback partner can help you uncover additional layers in your work that you hadn't managed to differentiate yourself, and that's what Jacob did with this draft. My thought was there is no such thing as a perfect job (i.e. role or workplace), so accepting that can help us maintain the emotional distance we need to preserve creative energy for our own projects. But what Jacob pointed out was the duality in that original statement: no such thing as a perfect job" could also mean accepting "good enough" in our own creative projects — because it's creative living, not the individual creative projects, that are the real point. We'll return to this latter idea in another episode, working title "The artifact is not the point."
• Hemingway's story "Big two-hearted writer" is what this episode title riffs on, but it's his novel The Sun Also Rises that I've read multiple times.
• Another creative input that has prompted me to keep evaluating my delivery and narration is First Person Story. It's been a delight to collaborate with Harriett, and each other creative medium we interact with can help us enrich our perspective on podcasting, creative writing, or whatever our expresion of choice is.

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Storyscaping exists to inspire the next great narrative podcast: yours! The goal is to cover a wide range of creativity-and-podcasting related topics, a sort of curriculum that doesn't feel like a curriculum:

• Finding, and keeping creative motivation
• Story elements and structures
• Sound quality and connecting with listeners
• Your unique narration and voice
• Defining boundaries in creative work
• Accepting messiness in the creative process
• Sustainability and how not to podfade