Looking for inspiration? Sometimes we need new tools to help us get through a creative rut. Are you feeling uninspired lately? If so, don’t beat yourself up – instead, be proactive and realize that as easy as it was to fall into that rut, there is also an easy way out. All it takes is a little effort, and you’ll be on to your next creative idea in no time.
Here are a few simple steps.
10 Steps to Break Out of a Creative Rut
1. Pick your battles
You can’t do everything. Mentally sorting out all the things you want to do with your photography, music, art, or other creative goals can easily lead to a type of action paralysis. Most of us have been there and it’s an unhelpful state of mind.
For example, try imagining all the food you’re going to eat over the next year placed in front of you, stacked high on your kitchen table. Feeling overwhelmed? Of course. Even if you do happen to have a year of meals planned, you still have to digest one thing at a time.
This works for creative projects too. Pick your battles (or snacks) for the short term. Mise en place is the french culinary term for “putting in place” your ingredients and the required set up before cooking. Pick your battle, put in place only what you need, and set up your area for today’s work.
2. “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.”
I’m not too sure who originally coined this quote, but all memes point to Groucho Marx, so we’ll go with him — a good role model and someone who certainly seems to be having fun. It’s easy to forget he’s even working. Let’s face it, being creative is a process, so why wait for the end product to enjoy it. It’s a verb, an action. So is happiness. Recognize that the most successful people enjoy the process and love taking action.
Of course, there will be frustration and other forms of suffering along the way, and not every minute will be without challenge. Remind yourself that creative work is enjoyable and reward yourself for achieving incremental milestones along the way.
3. Percolate
When I really need to buckle down, block hours aside to work at my computer, woodshed, or focus on a project, song, or other creative challenge. And then I often find myself heading straight to the oven to preheat it. There’s actually a term for this, I recently discovered, called “procrastibaking.”
Electronic artist and author of Pink Noises, Tara Rodgers recently said she does the same thing — a form of percolating, a simultaneous baking in parallel play. Maybe some people bake to procrastinate, but for us, it’s a way of calming the creative process by multi-tasking.
Try throwing something in the oven for an hour and write, practice, or create in that time. Be sure to stop when you hear the “ding.” A teapot or coffee maker works for a smaller time frame. And in the end, you’ll have a reward.
4. Nothing is original
If you’re reading this you’re probably like me and want to create something wholly original. Some artists are even cited as the “originals,” but how did they get to that place and what do we learn from them? There’s nothing more debilitating than staring at a blank page or white screen waiting for an original or genius idea to strike. And sure, ideas can be original, but even the best ones have ancestors and descendants.
In the book Steal Like An Artist, the author addresses the originality dilemma, suggests nothing is creating in a vacuum, and offers an alternative way to think about building new ideas. For example: a term called “good theft” includes acknowledging your influences, remixing, deep studying, transforming, and giving credit to several artists. “Bad theft” includes plagiarism, direct imitation of an artist without credit, skimming, and stealing directly from one artist.
5. Garbage in, garbage out
Many musicians and other creative people I know write in journals, notebooks, and make lists every day. I call it a form of brain-drain — a way of getting rid of accumulating daily stresses by writing them out in order to make room for something more valuable.
The biggest concern I hear from people starting out on garbage-in-garbage-out is the worry that the writing won’t be good. But that’s exactly the point: write out your boring subconscious thoughts, get out the thoughts muddying up your time, and take the trash out.
The most seemingly unflappable artists I know work this way. Keep in mind that this is not to be shown to anyone, and if someone does see it, they should be bored enough a few sentences in to not want to read further. Do you proudly show anyone the tossed items in your garbage before you tie it up and take it out? Why would you? Now more than ever we need a safe place to drain out the daily stimulus, advertisements, and other distractions. Often this is a place to create new ideas too, since once in a flow, ideas tend to spawn additional ideas.
6. “Write drunk, edit sober”
Another quote and common meme, this one often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but not verified, can be metaphorically used here to describe the process of separating your work into two discrete paths. The first creative path is where you aim for speed, quantity, loose threads, exploration, and the freedom to have plenty of terrible ideas. This is a place where you simply try to capture as much material as possible. Keep recording, disable your delete button, and don’t look backwards.
The second path is the editing process. This allows you to ultimately subtract material from your composition as you need to. Remember, it’s much easier to decide if something is “bad” if it exists in the first place. The stress of having to do things right the first time can be crippling, if it happens at all. But merging the two, and having a process can be the key to finding a brand new surge of inspiration and productivity.
7. Find something new in the ordinary
Force yourself to find one creative thing to photograph in your everyday environment. Think you know your walk to the deli? You even know everything they have in there, right? On days I feel like I have zero creativity, I force myself to photograph something from what I consider my mundane daily walks. The ten minute run to the store to get cat food in the rain is an opportunity for a good shot.
A moody photograph of a tree bursting through concrete, something I pass unnoticed daily, came out of that assignment. Make yourself be creative in a small amount of time instead of waiting around for it. Use the image for inspiration – musically, literally, or visually.
8. Give yourself a comically short deadline
Is one minute short enough? For the women’s band classes I coach, there was trouble with overwriting songs and endless changes and additions. So we used the “one minute song” method. This consisted of taking just sixty seconds to throw some chords on paper, choose a drum rhythm, a quirky bass line, and pick a random subject. Then we’d buckle down and play it. Bam. No time to judge or worry. The temporary foundation is there, the accessories can be added later. These turned into several new songs that we workshopped and completed.
9. Aim to fail 100 times per year
I constantly go back to this article by Kim Liao. She emphasizes the power of collecting rejections. If you shoot for one hundred rejections in a year, you’ve have put yourself out there enough to also receive several acceptances. She cites the example of a pottery class divided into those who aim for quantity – make as many pots as possible – and quality, those who are to focus on one, albeit perfect, pot. Who did the best work in the end? The quality group since they continuously churned out work and learned from their mistakes.
10. Stop trying
Forget being creative. Work on technical specifications of one important thing. D-BEAT on the drums, the perfect major bar chord, something you know you should really be effortlessly doing by now and clean it up. Get repetitive while watching a movie. I once played the open C chord for a month because it was driving me crazy. I read somewhere that doing something for eight days in a row makes a habit, eight weeks makes a lifestyle. However long it takes, creativity will find you if you’re prepared for it, or so it’s said. And if not, at least I can play a perfect C chord now.
