Creative work is scary.
Terrifying, even. We are making stuff up, pulling new music, stories, designs, objects, jokes, ideas out of our minds and into reality. Where others can judge and criticise them, love or loathe them. Or completely ignore them.
Sometimes there’s only a narrow gap between making interesting and innovative work, bravely exploring new territory – and overstepping into Crazytown, where you suddenly discover that you’ve just been elected mayor.
It’s so much easier to stay safe. To never finish our work – or perhaps even start it. Then it can stay pristine and perfect in our minds, an unrealised idea that no one can fault. Although they can’t enjoy it, either.
Creative blocks help us avoid all the striving and grafting, the messy first drafts and the pits of despair, the disappointment and the endless days when it feels like we’re going backwards, not forwards.
So we conjure demons, to help us to stay safe, stay small, stay invisible. These creatures live in our heads for so long, we forget they’re thoughts at all. We start to mistake them for objective fact.
We become adept at excuses, distractions, busywork. We become thinkers, planners. Instead of doers, makers. Eventually, we realise we’ve become blocked.
How does that feel?
Lousy, usually. There is little more toxic than a dream deferred.
My mind thinks up endless tricks to stop me writing. Yet when I’m not writing regularly, I feel grey, fuzzy, unfocussed, wrong. Everything else feels harder.
So we have two choices.
1: Give up
This is always an option, and sometimes it’s the right one. Maybe this is the wrong project, idea or direction, and you need to start fresh.
And if you’re beating yourself up and living a half-life of procrastination and recrimination for years on end, please know that there are plenty of ways to have a fulfilling life without writing a novel/becoming an artist/doing whatever creative work you dream of doing.
Life is short. Choose happiness.
2: Get on and do it
Creative work is hard. Of course it is. But we can do hard things. We can feel the fear, the frustration, the struggle. And choose to do it anyway.
Every time we do it, the terrain gets more familiar, with all its obstacles and difficulties. And when we succeed – even if that just means getting a project over the line, rather than winning an award for it, or global acclaim – there’s no feeling like it.
There is no cure for these ills.
We all create our own gremlins, our own ways of avoiding the difficult work. These are not demons you can vanquish, once and for all. But they are energies you can learn to harness, to control.
You can become familiar with their tricks, their wiles, their deceptions. You can learn to recognise old fears and anxieties returning in new disguises. You can learn to live with them, to ignore them, to use them as motivation. And to calm them, when they get in your way.
They’re daily battles for all of us, from absolute beginners to the most confident, competent creatives at the top of their fields. We all have doubts, demons, gremlins, blocks.
It’s the nature of the job. We’re creating new things from our messy, imperfect minds and so we perhaps also tune into these thoughts more acutely than people. But we can choose whether to believe them, and allow them to affect our actions.
Here are some of the common ones. Recognise any?
Procrastination
Common symptoms
You don’t do what is important to you. But nor do you really rest or play. You get tangled up in busywork, you get distracted by new and shiny objects/ideas, you do mind-numbing activities such as scrolling, staring at screens, playing pointless puzzles and games.
Underneath, there’s often a well of dark self-loathing that grows the longer you put off doing the things you really want to do.
Side-effects
You might find you’re very well-informed on news headlines and skilled at certain computer games. You probably know exactly what everyone is up to on social media and/or have very clean kitchen cupboards.
Sadly, none of these things were on your priority list. (If they were, you’d have found some other busywork instead.)
Resources:
- Why do we procrastinate? Know it, so you can beat it
- The six triggers of procrastination, and how to reverse them. Or: How I learned to stop procrastinating and (almost) love doing my tax returns
- Stop Procrastinating! 17 strategies to get you back into action
- Still Procrastinating? Some questions to help
- How to Make Time for Your Personal Projects
Books I’ve found helpful:
Solving The Procrastination Puzzle by Tim Pychyl and Procrastination by his academic colleague Fuchsia Sirois are based on solid scientific research and both full of actionable advice. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is less advice, more a rousing call to arms. He asks us to battle against the force of Resistance that all creatives have to face down daily.
Paralysis
Common symptoms
You feel blocked in the most literal sense. You set to work, and nothing comes. Musicians call this losing their chops. Wordsmiths talk about writer’s block. Artists might say their muse has left them. Others use terms like burnout, corpsing, or just feeling totally stuck.
It helps to introduce more rest and play, and to be gentle in your creative work. Give yourself permission to suck. To produce awful, sloppy, silly work. Or early drafts that are just really, really bad.
Resources
- Why You Need a Shitty First Draft
- Feeling stuck? Uninspired? How to get your creativity flowing again
- Adults Needs Play too. Especially creatives.
- 100 Ideas For Play Dates
Austin Kleon’s books Steal Like An Artist and Keep Going are about getting started, and about sustaining a creative practice. They’re both tiny books packed with wisdom, humour and compassion for creatives.
Perfectionism
Common symptoms:
You’re caught up in the planning and preparation phase but never seem to move on to the actual making. You just need to read a few more books, research a little more, finish this extra course, upgrade your skills, colour-code your filing system and save up for an extra bit of kit before you begin.
You may be waiting for some magical time and space to open up when you’ve finally cleared the decks, emptied your in-box, got all those niggling jobs done, raised your kids, cleaned the house. Then you’ll start the work you really want to do.
Or perhaps you’ve done the work. But now you’re trapped in the polishing/refining phase, unable to let go and put it out there. You just need to add one more song or artwork, another draft, a final edit/mix and you’ll be ready. Well, just after you’ve tweaked this final bit. And that one. Oh, and this section could do with some work, too..
Resources
- Confessions of A Recovering Perfectionist
- Say Goodbye To Perfectionism, and Unleash Your Creative Genius
- Make More, Care Less
- Me talking about what my perfectionism has cost me on the podcast My Worst Investment Ever (30 minutes long)
Inner critic/Imposter Syndrome
Common symptoms
You’re not good enough. You’re making a fool of yourself. You’re wasting your time. You have nothing new to say. And you’re saying it badly. Other people do it better. In fact, you always mess it up. Everyone is laughing at you.
We all have these voices, chattering away inside. Even the high flyers, the achievers with all the fame, money, recognition anyone could want. (They just have a loud voice telling them they’re a fraud, that they’ll soon ruin everything, that they don’t deserve their success.)
The great imposter is a close partner of your inner critic. It’s all about not being good enough. We somehow get convinced that everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing. But we don’t. And soon, we will be found out.
Success rarely helps here. I’ve coached world-famous creatives who still have it, every time they start new work, or go out to promote it.
How to recognise your chorus of critics
- They are abrasive, rude, harsh. You would never talk to anyone else this way.
- They talk in absolutes: you always mess up; you never know what you’re doing; everyone will laugh at you.
- Listen carefully, and you might even recognise the voice: a family member, maybe. A teacher. Or someone who criticised your work, early on.
Resources
- Take control of your Inner Critic
- Working With Your Inner Critic
- You’re Awesome. So Collect Evidence to Prove It
Tara Mohr’s book Playing Big is written for women stepping into leadership roles. But it has an excellent chapter on recognising your inner critic, and finding and trusting your inner mentor that is helpful to everyone
Compare and despair
Common symptoms
From the very fist whittlings, carvings, cave paintings; from the first times humans started beating out a rhythm and moving their bodies or gathering together to hear and tell stories, I can promise you that someone was looking at what the others were doing and finding themselves lacking.
What has changed, of course, is how many others we can now compare our output to everyone, everywhere, all at once. Thousands of years ago, we only knew the people in our tribe. Even in Renaissance times, creatives could compare themselves to other composers, writers, artists, scientists – but only a few thousand of them, and only at the speed of a letter.
Now, we can see what almost anyone in the world is doing, making, creating instantly, with a click of a mouse or a flick of the thumb. We have an overwhelming amount of culture to compare ourselves to, and inevitably we’ll find ourselves lacking. Especially when we’re comparing our first efforts, or early drafts on a project, to someone else’s very best work, work that has been honed and polished often through hundreds of iterations.
Resources
Overwhelm
Common symptoms
You’re trying to do too much, all the time. Then you beat yourself up for not being good enough/smart enough/organised enough to do the impossible.
Or you’re jumping into a big project without any kind of preparation or plan, but once the initial excitement fades, you can’t see what to next and suddenly it all seems so huge it’s terrifying. Either way, you end up frozen or messing about with busywork that doesn’t really move you forward.
Resources
From me:
- Feel overwhelmed? Here’s how to deal with it
- Let Go of FOMO, and Learn to Say No
- Overwhelm, open loops – and how a coach can help
- Your Second Brain: the answer to information overload
Gary Keller’s book The ONE Thing will help you decide what to focus on. Charlie Gilkey’s Start Finishing helps you break projects down into smaller chunks and schedule them – and unlike many productivity books, it also understands creative process.
If you’re overwhelmed with information, Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain helped me enormously.
Out of ideas
Common symptoms
The well is dry. You just feel uninspired, nothing sparks.
Resources
- What to do when the ideas run out
- Want more brilliant ideas? Here’s how to get them.
- Adults still need to play. Especially creatives.
- 100 ideas for play dates
If you’ve been out of ideas for some time, Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way offers the best programme I know for creative recovery. If it feels like more of a bump in the road than a big, high wall, Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist is a great source of inspiration and encouragement.
Any others?
What is your block? How do you get in your own way?
Let me know if I haven’t covered your particular demon. It will help me create more resources to help.
What do you think?