Friday, February 05, 2016

Time to drop this brain into gear...

Creativity is a funny thing. Sometimes it fires on all cylinders, and the ideas seem to tumble all by themselves out of my brain and through my fingers. When the creativity gods are smiling on me, ideas seem to coalesce out of nothing, while the words that bring them to life virtually tie themselves together with barely any effort.

Other times, the spigot seems to go dry, with blinking cursors on paper-white displays replacing the easy flow that once was. On days like this, I can stare at the relentlessly alternating vertical line of pixels and rake my mind for inspiration, yet all that emerges is a whole lot of silence.

I'm not entirely sure how any of this works, and fortunately the quiet times are few and far between. Yet this week, that's where I find myself. I'm not any more or less busy than I usually am - which means I'm typically flat out from before dawn to ridiculously late - but instead of carving out precious moments to create in those in-between slices of the clock (read early morning, late at night or while I'm waiting to pick up a smaller version of me after school) I'm allowing my usual channels - social media, blog, whatever - to lie silent.

Living on the wrong side of the creativity curve, however temporary it may be, bugs me. I know the mind eventually finds its own gear and returns to form, but I'm not willing to wait for that to happen on its own. Time to kickstart my muse.

Your turn: How do you break the creativity logjam?

1 comment:

Pat Tillett said...

To be honest, I've yet to discover my muse. If I'm in the mood, I have no problem writing. The problem is that I have no idea exactly what that mood is...