Christine Poole

Scientist. Writer. Facilitator. Artist. Curious about what helps us grow.

creative process

  • 📚🐾The First Draft Beast

    I was chatting to my writing friend Anne about first drafts. We both agreed: they are hard. Not just a bit tiring hard. They are a beast of a thing. It feels a little like giving birth to some strange creature that you don’t entirely recognise. You have spent all this time creating it, feeding… Read more

  • A Small Experiment in Finishing

    Second post of the day, to satisfy the scientist-researcher part of me. Yesterday, I thought finishing would feel like sunshine. Today, I finished. And drew a turd. 💩  I couldn’t help becoming curious about what had actually happened. Why did reaching the end of something I’d worked so hard on not feel like the moment… Read more

  • The Practice of Stepping Away

    Yesterday, I was hopeful. The end was in sight. I had spent weeks writing, thinking, rewriting, questioning, changing things, finding new ideas and occasionally wondering why I had ever decided that writing a research paper was a good idea. But yesterday, I could almost see the finish line. There was a little bit of excitement.… Read more

  • 🧭 Following the Breadcrumbs

    Every now and then I go back and read something I wrote a few years ago. Recently, I went back through a series of blogs about writing my memoir and realised something I couldn’t see at the time. I had been leaving myself breadcrumbs. The first was on 25 October 2019: “I’ve decided I’m going… Read more

  • 🦋  The Courage to Finish

    For a long time, I thought my challenge was starting. I had ideas. Lots of them. Projects, notes, drafts, possibilities. My mind was constantly connecting things, noticing patterns, imagining what something could become. But recently I discovered something more uncomfortable. My challenge was not starting – my challenge was finishing. Because there is a strange… Read more

  • 🌙 The Work That Happens After the Work

    After writing about my Creative Operating System (COS) on Monday, I found myself thinking about something I had overlooked. We often focus on the work of creating — but what happens after the work is finished? I used to think finishing a project meant asking one question: What’s next? As soon as something was complete,… Read more

  • 🧩 From Post-it Board to Creative Operating System (COS)

    For years I’ve been trying to find a planning system that actually works for the way my brain creates. I’ve tried notebooks, digital apps, and endless to-do lists. They all helped for a while, but eventually they became places where tasks accumulated rather than places that inspired action. A few weeks ago I pinned a… Read more

  • 🌱 The Things We Bring to Life

    Reflections on Motherhood and Writing Today is my son’s 9th birthday, and it feels like a fitting day to reflect. There’s something incredible about watching a child grow—knowing that someone so full of personality, curiosity, and possibility began as something so small. A seed, in a way, needing time, care, patience, and love. A few… Read more

  • Go with the Flow!

    Last week I was singing the praises of my writing group ‘Write on’. We met at an online writing course in April 2021 called ‘Finding your flow’ – based on an idea by the Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’ who wrote in his book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” that during flow, people typically experience deep… Read more