Don't let the muse soil her gown!

I have a dear friend who shames me with her perfectly clean house. She's an accomplished and successful artist--with two kids!--and she once said to me, "I simply can't create unless I'm comfortable in my space." Stephen Pressfield, author of "The War of Art" echos this sentiment, saying, "The professional [artist] will not tolerate disorder. He will make sure the threshold is swept...so that the muse may enter and not soil her gown."

I have to remember two things: My friend does not have ADD (but I do), and Stephen Pressfield had no kids.

Finally letting my housework drop down a few notches in priority was essential in maintaining any sort of schedule for my art. If I'm going to get up early and greet my muse, then meeting her had to take priority over the dirty dishes. In a house with two small kids, the domestic work will simply NEVER be done. If I insist that there must be order (when my brain doesn't have the proper structure to dictate that order to me) for me to create, then the creation will never, ever, ever get done.

People with ADD are lacking essential structures in their brain. It's almost impossible to filter out distractions and focus on the task at hand. If we *are* able to focus, we very well might end up in a state of "hyper-focus", where we zone out for hours at a time and focus on one specific thing to the exclusion of all else.

That's not good if the toddler is trying to eat her pencil.

However, a good compromise seems to be to get OUT of my house in order to write. I've been pretty successful at writing at Starbucks, and now I'm 1/4th of the way through my first feature-length screenplay. Here, it's someone *else's* job to sweep the threshold, which may be why the muse so frequently greets me.