Photo by Gianandrea Villa on Unsplash
How often has this happened to you? You’re on a creative roll, making your art (whatever your art is), and then all of a sudden the well just dries up. There’s nothing left.
Sometimes you think about creating and it feels like the tools required — a pencil, a paint brush, your guitar, whatever — weight a million pounds. It’s too much effort. You just can’t.
Or maybe you don’t even realize that you’ve dropped this thread of your life. You look up one day and realize that you haven’t done a single creative thing in months. How did that happen?
Try this the next time you feel like you’ve run out of creative juice.
Seek out something beautiful that you already know you love. A passage from a favorite book. A piece of art. A still picture from a favorite movie. The cover to a favorite album.
Tape it somewhere you can see it from your work space.
Then let yourself fall down a rabbit hole.
Google the artist — whatever kind of artist it is. Read the Wikipedia page. Follow the links. Find the art that inspired that art. Let yourself be filled up with the kind of inspiration that must have gone into creating that thing.
Then go ahead and steal from that artist. Create in their image. Think about it like the breeze that fans the fire.
Try hand writing a few paragraphs of a favorite book, just to remember how it feels to put words together. Or paint an homage to your favorite artist. Play some of your favorite musician’s songs.
Do that until you find yourself creating on your own again.
Sometimes being blocked just means you need to open the window. Creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.