Hello lovely people! I hope you have all been doing well. This month I wanted to bring the attention to a topic that has been a struggle for most of us (definitely me included!): creativity. At first I thought that having a lot more spare time would be the perfect situation for me to focus on my creative projects… and at first it was, but then slowly became quite uninspired and… dull. And this is something that a lot of you have also been experiencing and telling me about, therefore I wanted to share a few words on how I overcame that vicious cycle and how to think about your creativity in general.
I like to think that every human-being on this planet is creative to a certain degree and for a certain ‘thing’. Why/how is that possible? Because creativity is also triggered by common problem-solving situations on a daily basis (ever seen those TikTok videos of people coming up with ‘hacks’?). As people dealing with music however, our creative work is very much focused on our area of expertise and prominent interest of course, which tends to build up pressure to produce and a sense of guilt when things do not happen how/when we envisioned in our heads. This is a very common struggle that has been accentuated for a lot of us by this global pandemic this year; but feelings of guilt and pressure are auto-generated meaning that we are creating them within ourselves therefore internal (unless you have specific deadlines or external factors that might enforce this on you).
So this is a real problem… but it is also the beginning of your solution. In order to defy this cycle of guilt, anxiety, procrastination, laziness, and self-doubt, we need to re-assess our values and principles. Here’s a simple list of steps I would like you to consider going through and see if you can rationally make sense of it.
1. Why am I feeling uninspired?
2. Why am I scared of failure?
3. Where is this pressure coming from?
4. Why is this not feeling fun anymore?
I am pretty sure we can all find somewhat reasonable answers to these questions, and they will be your starting point. Be honest with yourself though! Once you get out of that cycle, then we can move forward to actually feeling positive and fresh again. So here’s where the creative process is actually back in motion and will start working again. Let’s have a look at the following steps:
Make yourself a schedule dedicating specific time for your brain to be only focused on your creative processes. If you do happen to have random ideas throughout the day, grab pen/paper/phone/laptop whatever and write/record them so you don’t forget. Go ahead and expand/revisit them when your ‘creative time’ starts.
1. Start from simple concepts; what do you want to create? why? what is the core message/meaning/idea?
2. How does it look in your head? can you visualise it? can you hear it?
3. Write down keywords – they’re super helpful to keep you on topic and feed more inspiration to your projects.
4. DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING. EVER. Save everything, every project, idea, voice note, everything. Even if you think it’s pure trash, I promise you it will either fall into place later on (day, months, years), or it will inspire you to create something else.
Once you have done these couple steps, you should already have a solid idea of what your project will be like. This however doesn’t mean that it’s all set in stone, but at least it’s a starting point. As we all know, creative thinking doesn’t always follow a straight line; it can get messy, scattered, and discombobulated. Do not fear that. It’s just like a jigsaw; keep all the pieces around you because at some point you will be able to see that, somehow, they all fit even if cannot see the full picture just yet.
I would love to end this post with some helpful links as usual. I hope you all fond this helpful and reassuring perhaps. If you want to know more and are interested in more resources, here are a couple of links to some really interesting stuff!
CLICK HERE TO WATCH JULIE BURSTEIN TED TALK (inspiring creativity)
CLICK HERE TO WATCH DAVID KELLEY TED TALK (creative confidence)
CLICK HERE TO ACCESS NICOLE BIANCHI BLOG (more tips & tricks, guides on writing specifically)