So, you're creatively blocked.

You’ve taken up a new creative pursuit, and it was fun at first. Maybe it was photography and you got a few good frames, frames you liked, in the first couple of weeks with your new camera. Then, inevitably, the fun dries up. Maybe you have some misapplied idea of ‘good’ photography, but making pictures just isn’t the same anymore. The spark has gone, and your camera sits on shelf in an out of the way room, forlorn, as you tell yourself you’re saving it for days when you can finally take good pictures.

Of course, that day doesn’t come. And you feel bad. Bad about the camera, bad about the pictures your not taking, and bad that you miss whatever inner impulse led you to buy the camera in the first place.

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Or maybe you’re an old hand at your craft. You’ve been around the block a few times, you know all the words to all the songs, but they’ve lost their meaning. You find that you’re just singing the tune, mouthing the words, but what they mean, what they mean to you now, just totally eludes you.

Congratulations, you’re creatively blocked. Join the club.

It happens to everyone, eventually. Their perfect run of good days comes to an end, and they find themselves unable to create any more. What was once a flood that overwhelmed has now run dry, and you find yourself staggering through a desert of your own heart begging for water. The good news is that is doesn’t last. And, conditional on you being healthy there’s a lot that you can do. The bad news is that you’ve got to do it.

Here are a few things that have helped me in the past.

Have you tried not being perfect?

It’s tempting to think that to create the work we want to create we need to be radically different from who we currently are. Perfect in fact. The imagined work is so colossally beautiful that someone so limited and flawed and actually quite terrible could not have produced it.

So instead we wait until we’re perfect.

Naturally, we’ll be waiting a long time. Not even Jesus was perfect, and he’s the son of God. And whilst we’re waiting, our art goes unmade. In the meantime, we’re not doing nothing. We’re making good progress on our issues! Soon, we will be the sort of person who can create the luminous and shimmering art, transcendental and beautiful, that exists in our minds. We’ve bee on a lot of courses and workshops with the express intention of becoming perfect so that we can, finally, do justice to whatever captured our imagination. We want the blessings of our muse to be worth it. Furthermore! Our heroes are perfect. Otherwise they wouldn’t have done such amazing things.

Unfortunately all this doing means that we never get on with actually doing the work. Our songs are unsung and our poems unwritten. The cure is pretty simple: we need to accept, like it’s written on our bones, that we aren’t perfect, and to get on with it anyway.

This feels terrible, so we resist it. When we do get some work done, instead of the beautiful child we birthed a monster knitted together from all the unclean parts of ourselves. We tell ourselves that we can’t do it, we were never made for art. We imagine that if only we were better people, what we create would be more luminous.

Are you trying not to bully yourself?

All artists, no matter which type, are beholden to their process. It’s a mysterious set of rituals, behaviours, and attitudes which, week on week, year on year, eventually produces work. It’s kind of mysterious, but also the sort of thing that artists love to talk about over drinks. Just like sex, everyone’s doing it differently, and everyone’s worried that they’re doing it wrong.

One thing that’s common is the insistence that you can’t game your process. You just have to be patient. There’s no bullying yourself into producing more, or better, work. Even trying to compromise the integrity of your means, in service of producing ends, ends up compromising the ends you set out to achieve. In this way you treat your work as unimportant, except in the sense that it’s necessary. In the end you have to throw a lot of stuff away, and it’s no more efficient than just being patient.

The rub is this: people who say this sort of thing constantly forget that being bored, and feeling a little unpleasant, is all part of the process as well. It’s tempting to think of art as some other category of being, that is light and playful and fun, and not work at all. This isn’t true. Writing needs to be drafted, plays rehearsed, music practised. It’s these mundane sort of activities that are the granite firmament of your process, and there’s no getting around that.

You have to cultivate a capacity to gently sit in a chair and do nothing, or write.

Have you tried doing the work, and it’s all the work?

One way that we flee from the work we’re here to do, is by insisting that some things are outside the process. These things need to be resolved before we even start the work. And so, they cannot be resolved by the sort of methods that other, more mundane, problems can be solved.

It’s true: project management mostly sucks, and that’s because the world, and our imaginations in it, are too incomprehensible. How are we supposed to plan? Any kind of productivity hack just isn’t even on the same level as we’re trying to solve.

I have to disagree.

The very first thing David Allen Green gets his clients to do is write everything they’ve got to do down on a single sheet of paper. Yep, anything on their minds, from the business strategy to emptying that one cupboard full of crap they’ve got hidden in their homes. This seems like it’s twee, or it’s overkill, but I think it’s incredibly powerful.

How many projects weigh you down? At any moment you could be working on any of a hundred things, but you have to say no to most of them. If you don’t manage this combinatorial possibility your soul gets worn down by all the things you could be doing. The key word here is manage. There’s no getting around it, you have to find some way of bringing the emotional side of work within some system, even if it’s imperfect.

Have you tried writing down what you need to do, all of it, and just seeing if anything is still salient? If you do, then go and do that.

As ever, Ursula le Guin said it better than I ever could:

“I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.”

Have you accepted the place you create from?

Because we love play, and the freedom and joy creative play brings, we think that we ought to be creating from a place of play. Freedom and joy seems like the natural emotional place for our best work to emerge from, except for the fact that you might not actually be able to work from that place.

Whenever I try to lighten up I find that my work loses its electricity, I just can’t get it out. That’s because I tend to write from anger, irritation, and my darkness, because that’s what energises me. ‘Someone is wrong on the internet, and I must correct them!’ isn’t a good place to begin a piece. It suggests that I am one of the armchair disgruntled, who stand on the sidelines of life whilst others play, and that I seek to broadcast my superiority over everyone else.

Yes, that would be a bad place to create from.

So it’s good that I’ve reframed this impulse. Instead of anger, see it as passion. What moves me, be it anger, or worry, or joy, or wonder, suggests what I’m passionate about. And with that, I can step into my power. Now that’s a place to write from.

Have you accepted the circumstances and moods you create under, and instead of throwing that power away, drawn it in to yourself? If not, maybe that’s what you need to do.

Have you accepted your creations are all the same?

Heidegger, a German philosopher in the C20th, said all philosophers have one major thought, and the rest is commentary. He was no exception, and over the course of 70 years and who-knows-how-many books he just repeated his observation that philosophy simply had reduced Being to presence. Over and over and over again, in increasingly more obscure ways.

David Mamet, the American Playwright, has written plays about men talking about sex (Sexual Perversity in Chicago), men scheming in junk shops (American Bufallo), men scheming in real estate shops (Glengarry Glen Ross), men scheming in…well you get the picture. He has similar characters, and similar situations, and writes the same thing over and over again.

Bach reused the same themes in his music. What started off as a fugue, became a choral, and then a violin concerto.

There’s no shame in writing the same thing over and over again. As ever, what you need is to accept the deeper grooves life has left in you and then get to work. Anything else is just a way not to accept ourselves.