Getting Out of a Creative Rut

It’s 2:30 on a Monday afternoon, and I’m sitting in front of my laptop with my eyes closed, trying to conjure up an image of lightness, brightness, and spaciousness. Those are the qualities of my creative spark, at least according to the meditation course I just took. It illuminates a limitless space where bright ideas and clever solutions float in the ether. I try to observe my spark growing and expanding, until it’s as big as I “can possibly imagine.”

Things are not going well.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a similar idea-free cavern, I have bad news. There’s no cure for writer’s block, or any other type of creative block. Most days, it feels like I’ve spent way more of my life stuck inside creative ruts than following my muse down smooth roads.  To be honest, my creative journey more closely resembles the Oregon Trail on a mud day than a freshly-paved superhighway. 

Don’t despair. Even if there’s no cure for creative blocks, there are treatments. And just like with other stubborn ailments, it’s sometimes just a matter of experimentation to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The experimentation doesn’t really end, either (sorry to wedge more bad news into the good news section, but it’s true). What helped last week might not help this week, and what solved the problem for your best friend might do nothing at all for you.  

At my lowest ebbs, I always come back to one quote from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. 

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

A lot of writers focus on the “write one true sentence” part of that quote, but I take comfort from the sentence before. You have always written before and you will write again. Humans are creative beings. You are a creative being, full stop. One solution not working doesn’t mean you’re not creative. Heck, ten solutions not working doesn’t negate your creativity. You will write again. You will draw again. You will paint again. You will compose again. You will create again.

My specific strategies for treating ruts fall into three categories—rest, feeding, and focus.

Rest

When I say “rest” in this context, I mean rest for the creative mind rather than rest for the body. Rest, in this case, is disengaging the mind from active creation and providing it the space to create new pathways.

The trick to breaking a rut with rest is to really embrace the concept of creating mind space. Playing a Candy Crush clone doesn’t really create space for creativity…it’s designed specifically to stimulate your brain’s pleasure centers all on its own. Watching television or reading a book or scrolling through Reddit don’t generally work either. Although those can all be perfectly relaxing things to do, they’re still too much of a diversion. The goal is to find something that occupies just enough of your attention to be slightly distracting, while leaving the largest part of your brain unengaged. You want something that’s just a little boring, without being so deathly dull you find yourself searching for outside distractions. Crafting hits the sweet spot for me. For Agatha Christie, it was doing the dishes. For you, it might be going for a run, baking bread, or sorting LEGO bricks or working in the garden.

Once you’re trained in it, visualization can work as a shortcut for putting your mind in this same state. Before I tried it, I thought of visualization as a type of actualization—basically imagining my creativity into existence like a basketball player visualizing herself making a free throw. The idea of having to somehow will my own creativity into being at the very time the well was already running dry was exhausting.

It wasn’t until I started exploring meditation courses on the technique that I realized I had it all wrong. Visualizations to promote creativity have more to do with creating space and granting permission than dictating an end result. They require a light touch, because, often, the effort of trying to be creative is exactly what stops us from succeeding at it. It’s helpful to have a guide, so check out any of the many meditation apps, videos, or podcasts available on the topic. I use Headspace Pro, but there are a lot of both free and paid options out there. Once you’re really skilled at it, you can use your visualizations to skip straight to your creative mind space without spending an hour knitting or pulling weeds.

Feeding

Sometimes, if you’re in a creative rut, it’s because you’re starving for material. 

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron introduced the concept of an artist date—a sacred time set aside for filling the proverbial well. Artist dates are trips to museums, walks on the beach, coffee in cute cafes, and ambles through new neighborhoods. They’re for, as Cameron puts it, “restocking the pond.”

My college-age son is particularly good at these. He’ll often say, vaguely, “I’m going out,” only to return hours later, having wandered through the park, bought himself a drink, found a shady spot to sit, eavesdropped on multiple strangers’ encounters, and filled pages in his notebook.

Feeding the creative soul has become more difficult in pandemic times. So much has changed so quickly that we might not even recognize how our everyday “pond restocking” activities have fallen by the wayside. It’s not easy (or, for many of us, possible) to go to a concert or movie theatre right now. Here in Los Angeles, we still can’t sit in a cafe or wander through a museum. We can still spend time in a park or at the beach, though. Long drives and take-out picnics are options. So is restocking the pond at home. Bake something unique and complex (different from the familiar, rote type of baking you might do for the “rest” strategy). Watch a movie from inside an elaborate blanket fort. Take yourself on a street art walk. Light a dozen candles, pour a glass of wine and listen to some Charlier Parker. Whatever you do, just make it intentional and make it special.

Focus

This isn’t always the case, but occasionally the best remedy for a block is to knock it out by brute force. 

The Pomodoro Technique (named for the classic tomato-shaped kitchen timer), involves setting a timer for 25 minutes, working steadily for that period, and then taking a five-minute break. Repeat four times, then take a half-hour break before starting the whole process again. The annual novel-in-a-month project, Nanowrimo, promotes a similar method called “sprints,” where writers set timers for focused writing between bouts of socializing. The Twitter writing community often refers to the brute force method as BIC-HOK—“butt in chair, hands on keyboard.” That’s probably self-explanatory.

These methods are simple and they work because sometimes creative ruts aren’t blocks at all. They’re turning points, like standing at a daunting five-way intersection, paralyzed by indecision. If that’s the case, it helps to just force yourself to pick a path and follow it. In fact, I’m writing to a 20-minute timer right now.

Another thing that helps with focus is physically blocking out distractions, either for the length of a sprint (or Pomodoro) or for a longer period. Noise-cancelling headphones can help. So can repetitive music like lo-fi or simply listening to the same song on repeat. Comforting soundscapes of things like cafe sounds or nature noises work for some people, as well, especially when circumstances prevent you from going to those environments in real life.

The most important thing to remember is that, be it rest, feeding, or focus, what works best doesn’t stay the same from week to week. The real and true treatment for creative blocks is being persistent and willing to try new things. As Isabel Allende put it, “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”