Amie McNee's We Need Your Art and the Imagination Facet (O1)

Amie McNee built a huge following encouraging people to make their creative work instead of waiting for permission to be allowed, and We Need Your Art is that pep talk in book form. Her reframe strips creativity of its performance anxiety, on a page of lines from the book: "The point of art is the doing of it." The rich inner world all that making draws from is, in the Big Five, one facet.

The inner world you draw from is Imagination

That facet is Imagination (O1), under Openness, the richness of your inner life and the ease with which your mind invents, wanders, and makes things up. McNee's whole book assumes a person with something inside that wants out and keeps being talked down by doubt, which is O1 looking for permission to move. A high scorer has plenty of raw material and mostly needs to stop waiting to be picked. A lower scorer, more anchored to the concrete, may find the well fills more slowly, and McNee's encouragement matters most once there is a live inner world for it to encourage.

The load-bearing idea is that making is the point, not the applause, and that treating art as a process rather than a product frees the imagination from needing to be validated before it is allowed to exist. The voice that says you need to be chosen first is the thing that keeps the work unmade, closely tied to the fear of being seen and judged. For a high-O1 reader the gift is permission to make something ordinary today instead of waiting for a masterpiece worthy of an audience, since the imagination stays alive by being used, not by being admired. You do not need anyone to pick you. McNee's whole argument is that the making was always yours to start.

Read your O1 to know what this book is unlocking. If it runs high, We Need Your Art is guarding a resource you already have plenty of, and the value is the shove to stop waiting for permission and make the thing. If it runs low, the more useful question is whether the creative work is one you actually want or one you feel you should, since the making only pays off when there is a real inner world on the other end. The permission you keep waiting for is not coming from outside. McNee spends the book handing it back to you.

Read the book: We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something by Amie McNee.

See Where You Fall

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