30 Days to Rediscover Your Creativity with Sharon Mashihi

Creative Collaborator, Consulting on Production, Story Editing & Project Management on an Audible Original 30 Day Creativity Guide. Listen on Audible.

From Sharon Mashihi (award-winning creator of Appearances), this guide (re)introduces you to your inner creative self through bite-sized 5-10 minute daily episodes over just 30 days.

This project was Sharon’s baby, and I was lucky enough to be a part of its evolution: from being a beta tester to a collaborator with an eye towards big picture story, structure, and project management.

The premise of the project is that creativity is core to being fully alive for everyone, whether you want to be a professional Artist or just want to access a creative lifestyle.

The promise of the project is that it will help you be more human. In a moment where we can lean into machine-generated productivity, we show you how to access human expression, connection, play and creativity instead.

Where Sharon Found Me

Sharon and I first met on Three Prisons, another Audible project for which she was my story editor.

I was well into a career where I could produce projects with exciting creative challenges and tight deadlines for other people. But when it came to my own independent creative work, I was struggling.

I would get started on an idea and then be met with what Sharon calls the “Army of No”: all the reasons you can’t do something, and so…I would procrastinate.

Meanwhile, Sharon was developing this 30-day audio guide to help people get back in touch with their creativity and work through their blocks. She was coming up with daily prompts for listeners and she needed some beta testers. I became one of them. For 30 days, while I was on a cross-country road trip, Sharon gave me creativity prompts specifically designed for me.

Ava Ahmadbeigi · Something Out Of Something

Part 2

Evolution of the Guide

After testing some of her prompts on me, Sharon asked if I could help bring some new perspective to a draft of the guide she was developing for Audible. I joined the team as a collaborator, sometimes story editing, sometimes project managing. My goal was to be there for Sharon in the final stages of production, bringing the energy we had built from our beta testing to the final product.

I helped shape episode order and structure, pointing out things she had put down and forgotten to pick back up, reminding her of the structure she might have been going for, and parsing whether or not her intention was coming across in the series. I also helped process feedback from a focus group of test listeners and from Audible, translating corporate goals into a deeply creative project.

Along the way, a little of my own journey made it into the guide too.

Approach to Creative Work

Unlike some of my other favorite creativity books (like Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way), in this guide we get to experience Sharon working through many of the same doubts and roadblocks we do in our lives.

Sharon gives us very clear steps to ideate on projects, set ourselves up for success, actually do the work, and everything in between. At the same time, she gives us tools to investigate our own desires and doubts, helping us put together a personalized user's manuel for how we work.

I find that this kind of self-knowledge is helpful in knowing other people too. Issues with clients and collaborators? They’re not that different from you and your doubts. Not sure how to manage a big project that’s not artistic but touching a nerve anyway? The creative process can help.

This guide is about much more than making Art. It’s about cherishing our human imperfections, and I lean on its lessons almost every day in all of my work and ambitions.