Unconventional ways to restore creativity

when everything is dull and lifeless

Awoken by a familiar dread, the flat kind, I throw my legs up against the wall, toes pointing right to left to right. I’m doing everything dutifully, it seems, playing by the laws of magic: wearing my best matching underwear, knocking on the bedside table three times, seeking angel numbers on the microwave, calling my mom to hear her voice, putting cashmere on for good luck and festivities. Nothing helps to claw out of the cave where creative gods choose to abandon me.

Whether to punish me, thrill me, or make me sweat for it and prove I really want it, everything stretches and wraps itself around my 14” screen so I can’t stay focused. But I’ve learned how to get out of this thankless state – for the most part, anyway. Over the years, there’s been certain things uniquely helpful in restoring my creative strides when my brain feels like it’s being farmed for content and juiced for a cleanse. Follow instructions below.

1. Put on your most faded denim and lipgloss. Touch soft fabrics. In that order. Think about a time you wish you had been easier on yourself and harsher on the world. Imprint your frustrations on unlined paper. Be sullen. Use a red pen – this step is important. In red ink, even the most ghastly thought imaginable turns into a silk-and-lace intimate love letter, a confession stamped with a sultry, thawing kiss. Be very specific.

2. Kiss your partner. It tastes like cherries, grapes, fireworks, the memory of a funny stomach tickle when you’re on the biggest swing at the park and yet to scrape your knees. But not just that, it’s not just the pleasure. I find there to be unmistakable, charged, surreal energy, all earthy and ready for me. It brings you back to the ground and pries you open. This is good. If no partner, kiss whoever’s fit enough for the role. If no one’s fit enough for the role, imagine them, then go back to point one and write a love letter to them, wearing your faded denim.

3. Now ask the partner to go away. Just for a little. Alone time is crucial – creation is a force to be summoned, a symposium arranged in complete solitary stillness. It’s not forged through optimization, and often, to our disappointment, not revived through company.

4. Read fiction. Read it slowly, read it greedily, read it again. Put that self-help down. We learn ourselves through stories about people we’ve never met – people that are mirrors to the highest and lowest frequencies of our hearts. Fiction is the oldest form of knowledge, holding the most wisdom in its hands. You stop thinking about your own dreary problems and inhabit someone else’s entirely, and something loosens. Pick up Anaïs Nin, Duras, Henry Miller, and tell me you come away from that unchanged. Whoever said “nobody reads anymore” hasn’t read good fiction in a while; Book of the Month’s campaign Nobody Reads Anymore proves just that. Loving this antithesis to the exaggerated doom narrative, and I love marketing that feels stylish and makes me feel like not all hope is lost in the branding world even more.

5. Acknowledge your terminal averageness by blending in with your surroundings. Lay down on the wooden floor. Hear it creak. Bask in your mediocrity. Nothing groundbreaking is about to happen. Everything you want to create has always been created before, and better, more eloquently, easier, sharper. Breathe out. You’re not late to bringing value if no one’s been waiting for you to do it. Sometimes, I tell myself, “You can’t have writer’s block. You’re not a writer.” Harsh? Maybe, to some. To me, it’s liberating. My engine starts back up within twenty minutes after a good reality check. Where nothing matters, everything flows.

6. Chase an idealized outcome – of a landscape, a future penthouse, a thing you’re not sure why you’ve been told to desire, and the work in progress. You’re a prophet in the body of a tired person, it’s alright. We fall into these success traps because we need the warmth of acceptance. We want to hear our voices ricochet through the crowd every time we speak, and what’s not human about that? But there’s only so many stairs to climb, and everything you do is just a way of getting you closer to the 9 PM, silk dress, chasing dusk while walking twenty to thirty blocks feeling, and this life is restless but entirely yours. You don’t have to wait. You can do it all now.

7. If the above hasn’t helped, find an hour when the house is quieter, grab a journal, and use these exercises on Uncertainty from a writing workshop I hosted last year:

The prompts for Exercise I:

8. Call your grandmother or your most critical friend that doesn’t let anything slide – somebody you wouldn’t go to when you’ve done bad and need reassurance or an elixir of pity unless the possibility of scorn excites you. Tears will surface, probably. Egos will be torn down, likely. This is all good – in this one particular instance, at least. People that give us tough love have a certain function, perfectly fit for the occasion. You don’t need to be softened right now. No one brings you back to life like your inner critic externalized.

9. Remember what it’s like to exist in friction. Assume that friction will never leave. A life with its limits and edges, how tiring. A relic that rolls over into every new chapter. Sit with the weight of that. It’s not hard until it’s easy, it’s always hard because you love it enough to watch it come alive. Paint your nails as you envision a world in which money and opportunities and ideas are boundless. Money will be unlimited, always – it’s just something that grows on trees. I’m saying this as a working class girl. Opportunities wash up on the shore, some precious seashells, others just debris and marine litter. Ideas are rare, and most of them suck. A good one is worth millions. And you’ve had it before – you caught it. That’s not nothing, so go feel rich and powerful. Then go to bed.

This post was very kindly brought to you by Book of the Month.