Creating creativity
He feels darkness. The push of cold wave against his chest. A hand pulls away—he sees it, but he does not think to grab it because the water is pressing and numbing. His eyes flicker shut. He succumbs to the darkness.
He knows fear.
Hello. It’s been a minute since I’ve popped into your inbox.
The past few weeks have been long and short and tiring and energizing. We got two puppies—Whiskey and Rye. I’ve been discovering more music and learning how to write poems and playing my guitar again. I bought plane tickets to meet my sister halfway around the world. I started planning out a big, exciting side project.
Yet something is bothering me.
I remember myself a few months ago, on my couch in our living room, writing the first draft of Fluent. I made sure to sit on that couch almost every evening around seven p.m., and I wrote—no matter how I felt about it. After a few days of sitting there and getting words on the page, I didn’t have to force myself to create—the habit of sitting there every night, a Star Wars movie (most nights) playing in the background, created creativity.
I miss that.
I need that consistency, that challenge to create and create on demand.
Creativity requires a bit of forcing at the beginning. Because if you wait for it (and wait some more), it will come—but in gigantic spurts. Then it goes dormant. Though you shout and scream and beg and stare at the page, it won’t come back. So you have to sit there, on the couch, with that page in front of you, and you have to make the creativity come to you by forcing yourself to create when you don’t feel creative.
Creative people don’t finish their projects by waiting on that gigantic burst of inspiration. They show up daily, and then they do their work, and then creativity will come sit down next to them at the same time every day and help them out.
I think consistency, discipline, habit is needed in every area of our lives if we want to do anything worthwhile.
If you want to get better at guitar, play daily.
If you need to wake up earlier, get up at an earlier time several days in a row, and when it starts to happen naturally, push your alarm back even earlier.
If you’re writing stories, sit down, every day, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes, and write. Regardless of how you feel about it.
The creativity will come. But you’ve got to show up first.
I’m not always able to be as creative as I wish. The words don’t always come. I don’t have an ever-flowing supply of inspiration.
But I know creativity is a muscle. It is built, daily, by habit.
Here’s how I’m going to build my habit of creativity again:
Set deadlines for the projects I need to work on and finish (right now, that’s Fluent [my novella] and my side project [more on that coming soon]).
Find a time where I can work on each project every day. For me, this is the evening, when work is finished and my family is relaxing.
Work on my projects every day during that time. Some days, I may only have ten or fifteen minutes. On other days, I’ll have a few hours. The important thing is to work on them every day.
Continue the third step until the projects reach an end point.
P.S. The (very short) section of story at the beginning is part of a short story I started a few weeks ago about an island known as the end of the earth. Included just for fun, because leading with story is always a nice idea.
P.P.S. Rye says hello.