It might be one of the worst feelings: trying to work on a project, and feeling empty. You’re just stuck.
There are no new ideas, either for projects to start or how to solve a problem with a current work-in-progress. At the very least, it’s frustrating. At its worst, this feeling can be demoralizing, amplifying the self-doubt in your head that keeps whispering that you’re not good enough to do this work, that you’ll never succeed. I’ve written before about dealing with creative burnout. But what if there were a way to prevent creative burnout altogether?
Now, I’m not here to tell you that you’ll never get a creative block again if you try this tip, but I do believe it will help you. I can tell you that it’s helped me in my writing life. And it sounds so simple, you may dismiss it at first:
Don’t ignore your creativity.
What do I mean by that? You might think, “I’m a writer/actor/painter/whatever, of course I won’t ignore my creativity!” But it’s easier to do than you might think. For one thing, ideas always seem to come at the most inconvenient time: right as you’re falling asleep, when you’re driving, or when you’re bending down to scoop up your dog’s poop. Or maybe it’s a longer form of being busy, like being in the middle of the project and not wanting to be tempted by new ideas. So you might start pushing these ideas away, wishing your creativity would wait until you actually had time to listen to it.
This can happen particularly when you’re new to actively doing creative work. When I committed to writing regularly, at the beginning I forced myself to focus on only one idea and ignore all the rest. I also wasn’t as good about having a way to capture ideas when they came to me at inconvenient moments. But instead of being focused and productive, all that meant was that I was pushing away my creativity and not letting my creative well refill.
If you kept offering someone encouragement, ideas, or friendship, and they continually shut you down and ignored you, you’d probably stop trying, right? Our creativity is the same way – the more we ignore it and push it away, the less it shows up. But if we welcome it in, offer it a cup of tea, and listen to it talk, it will show up more and more with overflowing ideas.
This is how you keep yourself creatively energized. You welcome creativity and ideas as they come. Watch movies, play video games, go outside, and let the inspiration in. It may not always be a flood; sometimes it’s a trickle, or it may even go temporarily dry. But the more you welcome in the ideas, the more they will arrive. You’ll begin to notice things and get inspired by something that used to be an ordinary part of your life. But now that you’re thinking about ideas and actively working creatively and welcoming creativity, it won’t let you down.
Of course, there’s a balance to all this. When I say “don’t ignore creativity,” I don’t mean that you should abandon a project every time a new idea pops up to chase after the new shiny project. You’ll never get anything done that way, and dealing with Shiny Object Syndrome is a whole other thing.
But be sure to capture your inspiration somehow. Whether it’s keeping a note on your phone of quotes you like or taking a picture of an interesting tree or emailing yourself links to weird science articles, let it all in, keep it all recorded, and then refocus on your current project. This is how you welcome creativity without letting it derail your work. Sometimes these pieces will fit in with your current project, like finding the missing piece of a puzzle that slots in perfectly. Other times, you may not use these tidbits for months. But when you say to an idea that appears, “I see you, you’re welcome here, this is where you can live,” it makes a nice habitat for other ideas to show up. Eventually one of them will be the thing that fixes your creative block, and over time, you’ll find that creative block happens less and less, because you’re always seeking out and receiving creativity.
How do you prevent or treat a creative block? Have you ever struggled with ignoring your creativity? Let me know in the comments!
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Featured image by Debby Hudson