Replenishing the Creativity Well
Unless you’re very lucky, creativity isn’t a consistent thing. Some days, we’re full of ideas. Other days, we’re much more lacking. We can have months at a time where the ideas seem to flow and it’s all we can do to keep up with their overabundance. But other times, we seem to fall into a rut with no ideas at all. Those times can be hard, especially if like me you use your creativity as an outlet for other things—an escape, a chance for catharsis, a way to unwind at the end of a busy week. When creativity disappears, we can sometimes try to force it, but this, in my experience, can often make matters worse. Creativity doesn’t tend to do well under pressure. If there is nothing there, then there’s nothing there. I tend to think of creativity as being like the water in a well. Every time we sit down to write, we dip into that well, and slowly, during periods of productivity, the water level goes down until there is simply nothing left. We lower our buckets but all that comes up is a sludgy mess.
This scenario will happen for most of us many times during our writing lives. Sometimes, the drought is more of a hosepipe ban than anything that should cause us particular concern. But other times, it’s a full-on apocalyptic event. The patient among us can ride it out. The fourth or fifth time it happens, we can draw on the experience of previous droughts. But there are also plenty of strategies we can employ to conjure up creativity from elsewhere – and that’s what I’m exploring in this month’s craft article.
I often remind myself that the majority of writing as a creative pursuit doesn’t actually involve writing. Thinking, people-watching, smelling the buttery smell of baking as we walk past the bakery, listening to the rain, listening to the radio, learning about the lesser-spotted woodpecker, talking to a friend about the golden ratio—these are all things that contribute to our writing whether we think they do or not.
Read
Hopefully, the logic of reading to inspire your writing is reasonably clear. Read with the aim of finding something you love and use that as a springboard to help you conjure up some ideas of your own. Read with wanderlust. Read with envy. Short pieces can be particularly good for this, since you can read dozens of pieces in a short space of time, and if you’re looking for the best of the best, you might find it useful to download the “amalgamated best-of lists for flash fiction” from my website which I’ve recently updated to include the lists for 2024.
If you’re more of a novelist by nature, one technique I often use is to open up a novel (preferably one you’ve never read), and read the first couple of paragraphs on page 203. For example:
“A man was killed here an hour ago, he thinks, a man like me, who’d worn this uniform, who probably had the same breakfast of salty porridge in his belly as they put the rope around his neck.” (The Fortune Men | Nadifa Mohamed)
What is the context to whatever you find on that page? Who is the character? How have they found themselves in this situation? What will happen to them after this? Hopefully, there might be something in your chosen extract which feeds your creativity, but again this is something which isn’t particularly onerous, so you can jump from book to book until you find that spark of inspiration.
Or how about reading something even more disorientating? Read something in a language you don’t speak (like these stories from SmokeLong en Español) and imagine what the story might be about. Pick out words that look similar to English words and start to join the dots between them. Allow your mind to wander. Allow a story to come slowly into the light.
Daydream
I mentioned above that creativity often doesn’t do well under pressure. Fear, exhaustion, anger, stress, depression—the more negative our emotional landscape, the less water we will tend to find in our creative wells. This is unsurprising. At times of strain, our brains are more concerned with the art of survival than they are with the less-essential-to-continued-existence function of writing stories. So, if we want to regain our creativity, then it’s generally going to be helpful to find a way to push those negative emotions as far away as possible. We want to reach a mental space where we can fall into a daydream. As writers, we have the perfect excuse for this. We can sit there on a warm summer’s day and let our minds meander into something random; and we can claim that this is a profitable, or even an essential, use of our time. Go for a walk, listen to music, visit a virtual museum, flick through an anthology of artwork—any activity that pairs together relaxation and sensory stimulation will generally be good for refilling our creative wells.
Experience something new
Another thing that I often find to be a good spark for inspiration is learning about something new or learning a new skill. Coming back to my “creativity well” analogy for a second, we can wait for the rain to refill that well, or we can do something active to find the water from elsewhere. For example, learning about new things (watching TV documentaries, reading non-fiction books, taking a short course in Roman history, playing Trivial Pursuit) can open up a hidden aquifer of ideas. Learning new skills (taking a pottery class, watching a YouTube video on calligraphy, teaching yourself how to juggle) might equally open up those hidden water courses; new experiences too. Anything we learn as writers broadens our horizons and gives us new ways of thinking about the world. It also gives us new language, new possibilities for imagery and access to new tones of voice.
Re-experience something old
Perhaps we turn in the other direction. Rather than looking to experience something new, we look to re-experience something from our pasts. Memory can be a powerful trigger. Most of us have lived through quite a bit by this point. We have a lot of experiences in our pasts that are rich with creative possibility. Write about a memory. Take one of your memories and push it into fiction by imagining what would have happened if you’d made a different decision to what you did. Find inspiration in photo albums. Flick through old photos until you find something interesting. Another way of connecting with the past is to imagine the life of a childhood friend you haven’t seen in years. If you’re adept at social media, you might be able to find a few traces of them online. How does this interact with what you remember of the person when they were a kid? What sort of person do you imagine they might be now? What sort of life do you think they might be living?
If you want to immerse yourself even further in the past, why not revert to a more childish state of mind? Do something inherently childish like playing pooh sticks, climbing a tree (I take no responsibility for any tree-climbing incidents caused by this post!!!!), or building something with Lego. When we’re children, we seem to be in possession of an endless supply of creativity, so does allowing ourselves to revert to this earlier state give us access to the deeper creativity well we might have had in the past?
Write different
The more adept we become at writing, the more pressure we can often feel to maintain the standard of our pieces. We start to doubt ourselves at every turn and our creativity is used up much quicker as a result. In this scenario, my suggestion is to try something different. If you’ve mastered the art of literary flash fiction, try writing limericks. If you’re adept at humour, give lyricism a try. Step outside the genre you usually write in and remove that pressure from your shoulders. Simply allow yourself to have fun in experimentation and failure. Or if you want to stay more firmly in your comfort zone, maybe change the way you go about your writing. Write a story by hand rather than writing on the computer. Write on a bench in the park rather than writing back at home. Write at a different time of day. Write by speaking out loud and recording it into your phone. Write a story by starting at the end and working backwards. Or how about bringing someone else into the equation? How might writing a story in collaboration with someone else help refill your creativity well?
Be patient
Hopefully, there are a few ideas there. But ultimately, it might still come back to the need for patience. As I said at the start, creativity isn’t something that can generally be forced. And sometimes, no matter what we try, we have to wait for our creativity wells to refill themselves of their own accords. If this is where you’re at right now, I know how frustrating those periods can be. But know that with time, your creativity will return. Know that your brain is probably doing amazing things to store up nuggets of wisdom and inspiration to be used when your creativity well is full of water once more.
Taking things further
For whatever reason, I am not a person who does well with prompts, but I know they are often helpful for other writers. That’s why I’ve created a prompt generator for my website. If you’re in a bit of a creativity drought, why not give it a whirl?
Another way into renewing your creativity is through taking a writing course. All of my “Write Beyond the Lightbulb” courses focus on words and technique rather than on crafting perfect stories, and participants have often told me that the courses have provided them with an unexpected route back towards their art after a period of creativity drought.
If you’d like to write with me, I’m running all four of my courses later in the year. First up in August, there’s “Colourful Characters”. Then I have “Go With The Flow” in September, “Glorious Words” in October, and “Lyrical Writing” in November.
Recent interview
I’m delighted to be judging the next round of the prestigious Bath Flash Fiction Award and it was lovely to be interviewed by Jude Higgins about what I think makes a prize-winning flash, and also to answer a few questions about my new (eek!) novel.
Interview with Jude Higgins (Bath Flash Fiction Award)
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