If You Want To Be More Creative, You Have To Stop Forcing It
You’re just scaring it away
There are days when it feels like I’ve got nothing to say. Days when I’ve got no new ideas and the words just don’t come. Meanwhile, my feed reads like everyone else seems to be doing great with their writing. One article that came up just this morning shared that the author writes an average of 100,000 words per week. Another tells me that their Medium stories pay the mortgage. It’s enough to drive you batty — the pressure to compare, to produce, create, publish, post.
The Productivity Beast requires more and more from us, bigger, faster, better. The urgency to create can feel like a full-time job, and for many it is. So you build a schedule to stay disciplined. “Just Do It!” becomes your mantra. And so the cycle goes: feel pressure to make something happen, crank out something inauthentic or half-hearted, beat yourself up for not creating something better, rinse and repeat.
I want to share with you that you don’t have to live like that. You don’t have to make, do, produce, or create under that kind of pressure. In fact, if you’re forcing yourself to, you might be doing yourself a great disservice.
On days when I feel like I’m being pulled into the Vortex of Creative Doom, I stop. I just stop. Stop reading about how so-and-so says I should be creating. I stop doing the thing I’m trying to make happen. I remind myself that creativity flourishes when it has space, not when I’m forcing it. In that moment I get to choose to be a friend to myself and to my creativity.
Choose to be a collaborator, not an adversary.
Writer Elizabeth Gilbert offers us in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear a way of understanding creativity, ideas, and inspiration that embraces their enchanting and mystical quality. Put simply, we can be collaborators or we can fall prey to the trappings of scarcity mentality which teaches us to be adversarial to the magic.
She explains that there’s a certain kind of thinking that says creativity is something to be achieved, wrangled, controlled, and possessed. But this in fact stifles creativity, it suffocates it, it turns it from something that could be warm, loving, and magical, into something to be restrained, regulated, and measured.
“Such thinking assumes that the mysteries of inspiration operate on the same scale that we do — on a limited human scale of success and failure, of winning and losing, of comparison and competition, of commerce and reputation, of units sold and influence wielded. Such thinking assumes that you must be constantly victorious — not only against your peers, but also against an earlier version of your own poor self. Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play.”
Ideas come to you in the shower or while you’re brushing your teeth because you’ve stopped forcing them. You’ve stopped trying to pry the door. What door? The door that you’re convinced is bolted shut, keeping you from reuniting with all your brilliant ideas. You say to yourself, “I gotta find a way to open this door!,” and proceed to do everything in your power to open it by force. You try kicking it down, cause you saw that in a movie once. Battering ram, yep. You even tried being super sneaky with it, wedging that credit card between the lock. But really? It doesn’t have to be that hard. You’re just freaking it out. Put the credit card down, nice and slow.
Say yes.
Instead of doing violence to yourself, your psyche, and to the magical mystery of creative endeavors, go draw something, make something out of pottery, pick up an instrument. Allow yourself to explore something new and different! Say yes to whatever comes in that flow. I assure you it will be something good and generative.
When we use our body and mind for something other than trying to pry the door open, creativity then has the space to move, to breathe, and to grow beyond the walls that have confined it. Ideas will come out of that room when they feel safe, I promise.
Our world is topsy-turvy at the moment and that’s taken its toll on many people’s creative flow. It’s hard to feel inspired, motivated, energized when everything seems to be blowing up, burning down. For some, the luxury of doing something different, new, or exciting right now just doesn’t exist. Everyone’s social location and context matters when it comes to creative pursuits. The reality is that for some, their social, political, economic, and varying other intersecting identities might make it so that they can’t break free of an external pressure to produce.
But for those of us who have a little wiggle room, I say take it. Wiggle! Get out of that vortex of forced creativity. Choose to collaborate. Promote flow and ease in your creative life. I promise the door will open.
