Holly Ringland: ‘Adult’ pressure to make money stopped me from doing what brought me joy and made me successful

“Adult” pressure to chase money stopped Holly Ringland from doing the one thing that made her happy – until a moment of realisation put her on track to extraordinary success.

Her debut novel, The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart, became a global bestseller and is now a big-name show on Amazon. But, HOLLY RINGLAND reveals, it might never have happened – and her new non-fiction book is all about helping other people in the same situation.

When you were a kid, what did you love to do purely because of how happy it made you?

Maybe it was dancing, or painting, or singing. Collecting stamps, or rocks, feathers, twigs, and shells. Maybe you built Lego or perfected how to make a banana split. Maybe you lost and found yourself in books, reading stories which somehow, miraculously, became your own.

My question is: what did you love to do so much as a kid that you lost all awareness of time and the outer world around you? Because you were consumed by the joy of paying attention to what brought to life the vivid and enriching inner world inside you. Your imagination. Your creativity.

Another question: when did this change?

Stop slaying and start creating … take it from best-selling Aussie author Holly Ringland, pictured on a recent trip to Sydney. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

It’s a common story for so many of us that as we grow older the ease, instinct, and capacity we have in childhood for our creativity – our inner world of imagination – begins to wane. For a myriad of reasons. An authority figure might cause us to doubt our creative instincts. The family/community we belong to might not prioritise creativity as a worthwhile use of our time. The culture we live in might consider creativity to be something that should be put away like childhood toys we outgrow.

At the same time, our responsibilities increase, and others depend on us more. We’re surrounded by societal messaging about ‘hustling’, ‘slaying’, and ‘smashing’ through our days. To this productivity-obsessed mindset, the pressure to constantly be ‘on’ and ‘doing’ can quash the value of daydreaming, pottering about, following our creative instincts. We forget the value of doing what brings us joy.

It’s about more than money … even though Holly’s debut novel The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart became a global hit and a big-name Prime hit starring the likes of Leah Purcell and Sigourney Weaver, the author argues that doing creative things is, at heart, all about joy.

Ever since I was a kid, creativity has mostly meant writing to me. My mum taught me to read when I was three years old and gave me my love of stories. Since then, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. As I became a teenager then a young adult, I was asked a universal question: what do you want to be when you grow up? Which I’d answer truthfully: a writer. The response was almost always the same: you can’t make any money from writing.

By my early twenties, I’d internalised the message that my creativity – my writing – was pointless if it didn’t earn me money. My imagination, that lush, inner world full of stories that I’d dwelled in since I was three, became a distant, almost-forgotten place to me. One I willed myself not to long for. I told myself there was nothing useful for me there. I didn’t write for much of my early adulthood. At that time, the incomparable joy that writing gave me wasn’t a valid reason to do it.

Over the years, I’ve learned this too is also another common story we tell ourselves: creativity isn’t worth our time as adults if we can’t monetise it. So, we drift far from that inner world, uniquely ours, full of hope, value, grief, joy, stories, wonder, anger, contentment, trauma, courage, and awe. We forget how enriching and empowering being connected to our imagination is. We leave that part of ourselves behind.

It’s all the in the title. And subtitle … The House That Joy Built by Holly Ringland.

But. It never leaves us. The light is always left on.

I was 34 years old when I reckoned with myself: denying my creativity – my writing – was not helping me. It was holding me back. No matter how afraid I was of all the ways I wasn’t enough to write, I reasoned that my fear couldn’t be worse than how awful and exhausting it was to continue to stop myself writing. I found the courage to try to write, and, slowly, learned to follow the joy I remembered it brought me.

I’m 43 now, and often find myself wondering about what I’d go back and say to myself in those years I wasn’t writing, full of unexpressed creativity and unwritten stories, dreams, hurts, and longings. My answer is always the same. Write. Write like your life depends on it. You can’t even dream yet of how the power of the joy it brings you will change the way you live. Most of all, I want to say to myself, write what you love, your joy is the reason.

Most of all, that’s what I want to say to you now.

Create what you love. Your joy is the reason.

Holly’s new book, The House That Joy Built, is all about harnessing your own creativity: and it’s on sale now, published by HarperCollins. Drop by the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook to tell us what gets your creative juices flowing.

And check out our new Book Of The Month, Trent Dalton’s Lola In The Mirror. There’s 47 per cent off the RRP at Booktopia.

She’s coming for you … Holly Ringland is on a mission to help us rediscover our creative spark. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Originally published as Holly Ringland: ‘Adult’ pressure to make money stopped me from doing what brought me joy and made me successful