#miguelmarcel

[rustbeltjessie]

13. How do you get out of a creative block?

I have lots of different tricks. They don’t always all work, but usually if I cycle through all of them I eventually land on one that works.

One of the things I often do when I’m stuck on a particular piece or project is just work on a different project. A poem is giving me a hard time? I’ll work on my novel. My novel isn’t working? Why not an essay! Or, I’ll work with a different art form entirely. I have writer’s block? I’ll make a collage. I’m having a difficult time making visual art? I’ll pick up my guitar and noodle around a bit. The point isn’t even to make anything “serious” or “good” in another art form, it’s that I’m still being creative but not actively working on the thing I’m stuck on. What tends to happen is that my brain is still working on whatever I’m stuck on in the background, but since I’m not actively working on it, it’s free to just sort of play around and often times that’s enough to jar whatever I was stuck on loose.

Other things that sometimes allow my brain to work out creative problems/blockages without my meddling are baking/cooking, making playlists, dancing, and even cleaning/reorganizing. (Honestly, thank g-d for writer’s block in that regard, because without out it my house would be even messier and dirtier than it is now.)

Getting out of my house helps a lot. Taking a long walk or a long drive, weather permitting, often helps me immensely. Sometimes it’s because something I experience on the walk or drive clicks things together in my head, other times it’s more like what I mentioned above—while I am focused on the walk or the drive, my brain is working on something in the background. It’s also good when I can get out of my house to write. In the Before Times, I wrote at cafes, diners, and bars whenever possible, but I haven’t had the chance to do that in over two years. Now, in nice weather, I’ll go to a park and write; otherwise, my mom has an art studio and when she’s not using it, I sometimes get to go there and write. If I can’t leave my house, sometimes just writing in a different room of the house than I normally do is enough of a change of scenery to get me past my writer’s block.

Reading can help. Not so much sitting down and reading through one book straight through (in fact, that can have the opposite effect), more like: reading an article here, a short story there, a poem or two there. All the different words and tones and ideas sort of vibrate against one another and sometimes spark something new or help click things together in my head regarding something I’m already working on. (For this reason, I’m usually reading three to six books at any given time and alternating between them.)

One thing I’ve started doing recently is writing about how I can’t write. If I sit down to work on a poem or other piece of writing and I’m finding it difficult to begin, either because I’m afraid I’m not good enough to write it, or because the topic is something that’s hard for me to write about, I’ll start by writing something like I can’t write this, this is too scary, this is too hard, and keep doing that until just the act of writing snaps me out of my block and I can get into writing what I actually wanted to write. And if I hit another block in the middle of writing whatever it is, I’ll go back to writing I can’t write this, rather than quitting. It makes for some disjointed first drafts, but that’s what editing’s for!

Finally, if my blockage is poetry-specific, I try writing a poem in a different form or style. For some reason, having to follow the constraints of a form can help stop me from overthinking the other aspects of a poem. And if all else fails, I compose a cento. When coming up with my own words and forming them into a poem is just not happening, I am still able to take other people’s words and collage them into a poem, and at least I’m still keeping my poetry muscles in shape, and eventually my own words will come back.