If you want to live the creative life and are looking for inspiration as well as practical advice, check out these four excellent books...

1. Creating A Life Worth Living by Carol Lloyd.

Billed as 'A practical course in career design for artists, innovators, and others aspiring to a creative life', there's a clear message right from the start that creativity can take a vast number of different forms. Simply assigning someone the label of 'creative' is a serious generalisation. Your version of creativity might be making art, teaching, generating ideas, inventing objects, interpreting music... and Carol Lloyd is most helpful in encouraging you to understand your own unique brand of creativity.

The book begins with a section somewhat similar to Julia Cameron's Artist's Way programme - a process of search and research through your childhood desires, your timeless inclinations and present needs. From there it goes considerably further into the dreaming, planning and design stages for a new way of living. And on into the development of a down-to-earth action plan for your day-to-day life.

There's a chapter on the various kinds of day jobs which can support or undermine your long-term creative goals. Another on how to deal with indecision and competing interests. And one that asks you to analyze your current lifestyle and build a new model for your everyday creative process.

This book is an excellent tool if you want to undertake some self coaching. I have learned much from it to enhance the life/creativity coaching that I do. So if you want to redesign your life in a way that will support and inspire your creativity, this is the one for you.

2. Your Life As Art by Robert Fritz

What a great concept! To take the nuts and bolts of the creative process and apply them to creating your life. Your Life As Art takes that idea and explores just how you can make it real.

The interesting thing about this book is that it concentrates on the structural processes that make up the creation of works of art, be they paintings, musical compositions, films, novels, poetry. It's not about ways to find inspiration - in fact it advises strongly against relying on inspiration. The theme is more about conscious creation through the application of appropriate structure, and how to achieve it in your life.

The first half of the book looks at the concept of structural tension as it applies to both creating works of art and achieving life goals. This involves having a clear and realistic sense of where you are now, combined with a vision of what you want to achieve. The structural tension is the gap between the two and it's what pulls you towards your vision.

The second half of the book looks at the structural patterns in our lives. Some people have structural life patterns which lead them through one successful project and onwards to the next, and the next. Others have repeating life patterns which take them round in less successful circles. Fritz describes how the self concepts you hold can block your success and steer you frustratingly into a repeating pattern. He also explains (hurrah!) how to stop going round in circles and to change the structural patterns in your life.

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