The Creative Way (with Annie Ridout)
Newsletter (Digital)
Hello, I’m Annie, founder of The Creative Way. And I’m here to give you permission to be a greedy, lustful, gluttonous, slothful creative. This Substack is about both living, and working, creatively. Together, we’ll bite right into life.
I publish personal essays, self-development tools and creative business tips that will get you thinking and doing. I’m delighted to be a bestseller, named as a ‘Featured Publication’ and to rank in global top 30 under ‘Philosophy’.
(Scroll to the bottom for some of my most popular essays.)
My creative career
I’ve been a freelance journalist for over 15 years, writing for the Guardian, the Observer, Forbes, Grazia, Red Magazine, Stylist, Metro, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Evening Standard, Refinery29, You Magazine, Women's Health, iNews and more.
I’m also the author of three non-fiction books: Raise your SQ (Radar, 2023), Shy (Fourth Estate 2021), The Freelance Mum (Fourth Estate 2019). Plus, I’m a Sunday Times-bestselling ghostwriter for celebrities and I write poetry that goes viral on Instagram.
So writing is my thing.
But alongside writing, I’ve launched digital magazines and businesses that have boomed. Reaching 100,000 views a month; bringing in six figures a year. So I ‘get’ the online writing and creative business world and love sharing what I know.
I've created a business model called The Creative Way (using Instagram creatively, earning a monthly income from Substack essays, launching online courses and offering one-to-one coaching/consultancy work). I work this way, and teach it. Source
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesThorny branches and finding the berries
my studio window, in black ink There is a thick thorny branch reaching across the centre of my studio window, slightly obscuring my view of the garden. A few months ago, my dad saw it and chopped it off. But it’s back again. It grows fast. It would hurt, to touch it. This branch is becoming a metaphor for life. The window it’s growing behind is a big, beautiful wooden-framed window.
I bunked off work on my first day back
I’m writing this on Monday morning, the first day of the first full week back at school, and both my boys will need to be picked up at 1.15pm. They ease back into a new school term gradually, so every new term feels like starting reception all over again.
Changing habits.
I always had one rule about TV when my children started watching it: no TV in the morning before school. But when I moved back to London with my three children and without my husband, to live with my parents, I broke the rule. They watched TV every morning before school. It was a difficult time, trying to help three children to settle into their second/third school.
I don’t want the summer to end
a jug, two forks and a tumbler I’m staying at my friend’s house, near Frome, for a few nights. We had planned to go to Cornwall for a week, to see my mother-in-law, but just a week or so before leaving, a friend asked if we’d like to kitten-sit on the way back, so we extended the trip. Sat at her kitchen table, drinking tea from her mug and eating peanut butter toast from her plate, I feel like I have stepped into her life.
I got a pear tattoo.
We’re sat around the table, me and a family I’m meeting for the first time, because one of my children has joined their child’s class and they’ve kindly invited us for a playdate. The house is beautiful, the people are beautiful, the cheese is beautiful. It’s the winter and I’m wearing a jumper. “I’m going to get a tattoo right here, when I’m older” one of their children say. And the dad turns to her. “Over my dead body,” he says, his face stern.
This is my future life.
a handheld mirror from my future (past) life I’m in a coffee shop in Ilminster, a small Somerset town with lots of antique shops. And this particular coffee shop, No.57, which is maybe my favourite coffee shop in the world, is full of antiques, too. It’s a house, with a little yard. There’s a small counter with homemade cakes and the most delicious cheese scones, which they heat up for you and serve with salted butter.
It's cooler in Somerset.
the swing in Somerset, drawn on my reMarkable tablet We arrived in Somerset late afternoon on a day so hot that even I couldn’t help but mention it. I don’t like talking about the weather. When it’s raining and people say it’s raining, it feels the same as seeing a mug on the table and saying there’s a mug. Likewise when it’s hot. And of course, it has been quite hot lately.
I water the garden with bathwater
We’re in France, sitting around the table at the campsite, and we can hear fire engines in the distance. My sister checks her phone to see how close the wild fires are. Near or far, it’s worrying. People are being evacuated from their homes; nature charred. Soon after, my phone vibrates. A text from Thames water to announce the hosepipe ban in north London, where I live. I’ve never had a message like this before. I take this rule seriously and when we return to London, I don’t get out the hose.
On the days that feel heavy
I’m going to be sharing more poetry here, and also short stories. As I wrote in this Note, what you put out into the world (online) is what people see you as. In my heart, I’m a poet, storyteller and artist. That’s my calling. And that’s who I want to be. On the days that feel heavy, like the thickened air before a storm, as you grapple for something to cling to, to help you move through it, or to make it bearable until it passes, remember this: the rain will come.
Why I'm doing 1000 sit-ups a day
“It’s easier if you never had a flat stomach to begin with,” my friend said when I was talking about how my body had changed after the birth of my third baby. It had changed after babies one and two as well, but I’d exercised it back to ‘normal’. This time, I’d lost all control. No amount of running would shift the blancmange that had settled into my midriff.