Conquering Creative Blocks - 5 Strategies to Get You Back in the Zone

We’ve all been there, it’s late at night, you’re in your studio space ready to capture all of your brilliant ideas but you can’t seem to put anything on the blank page or canvas in front of you. Artists block is something that happens to even the most experienced professionals. Whether you’re an artist, writer, musician or dancer, overcoming a creative block can feel like climbing Mount Everest.

Fortunately, there are science backed methods you can use to overcome the creative hurdles in your life. I’ve done the research for you so you don’t have to search yourself! Here are five suggestions for overcoming creative blocks in your life.

1 - SET A ROUTINE

A study done by Elsevier investigated three groups of nine blocked writers and found that those who were habitually writing showed the highest level of creativity. The study also showed that working within a routine not only increased their overall productivity, but it also directly increased their ability to generate new, creative ideas. Conversely, the writers who waited for inspiration and/or abstained from writing entirely while they were blocked saw little to no improvement in their struggle to create new work.

Many successful artists and creative professionals have spoken about the importance of creating a schedule and a routine for your creative work, I have also touched on this idea in previous articles and that is because the importance of setting a routine for yourself is of the utmost importance. Once you commit a specified block of time to your creative work, the best way to start is simply that --- start! Give yourself permission to create bad work and make your goal to simply get something down onto the paper or canvas. There is plenty of time to revise and edit your work later but not having anything to branch off of will inevitably cause you to remain blocked. Creating preliminary ideas leads to better ideas later on!

2 - STEP AWAY FROM YOUR WORK

This may seem counterintuitive but taking a break from your creative work can do wonders. If you find yourself contemplating the same task for hours upon hours, stepping away for a period of time may do you some good. Remember, it’s all about balance!

Psychologist Graham Wallas outlined his insightful theory of the four stages of creativity which include: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination and Verification. According to Wallas’ theory, during the preparation stage, you collect all of the intellectual resources you will need to construct your new ideas. Then, comes the immensely important period of unconscious processing known as incubation, where no direct effort is exerted upon the problem at hand and your brain is left to marinade in the new ideas and information you have absorbed during the previous stage.

Following incubation comes my personal favourite stage, illumination aka the ah-ha moment or the flash of genius. This is where the spark of insight that the conscious self can’t will, and the subconscious self can only welcome once all elements gathered during the previous stages have clicked together. Last but certainly not least, comes the verification stage. Unlike the second and third stages, verification and preparation work together in deliberate effort to test the validity of the idea and reduce it to an exact form and bring your ideas into physical reality.

It’s important to note that no single stage of the creative process exists on it’s own, each stage is equally important and codependent. I like to think of creativity as a complex quantum machine with numerous moving parts that cannot be forced by conscious will. The next time you find yourself ruminating on a task, take a break and let the incubation stage do it’s thing.

3 - SEEK INSPIRATION

A recent neuroscientific study investigated the relationship between creativity and inspiration. The paper states that inspiration is not the source of creative ideas. Instead, inspiration is a motivational response to creative ideas. When we’re inspired, creative work is effortless, engaging and fun. It’s only during times where inspiration is lacking, that creative work becomes tedious and deflating.

The best way to combat a lack of motivation is simply to take forced action as previously outlined above. However, it is also a good idea to have a pool of inspiration to draw motivation from if you regularly struggle staying motivated in your daily life. Identify what and where you draw your inspiration from, maybe it’s a book, music from your favourite recording artist or simply scrolling through your favourite artist’s portfolio; regularly engage with whatever or whoever it is that inspires you and use it as fuel for your engine.

4 - CHANGE THINGS UP

If you return to the same workspace day in and day out creating the same projects, you may find yourself bored and seeking new ideas. An interesting article by the Guardian highlights the importance of travel and how a change in the environment actually benefits the brain’s ability to process new information by creating new neural pathways that allow for more creative thinking.

Not everyone is in a position to travel and considering the current state of the world amidst the pandemic, travelling isn’t wise or possible presently. Instead, change your working environment, rearrange and organize your desk or studio, try working in a new environment altogether or start working in a medium you have never worked in before. If you find your routine is no longer serving you, switch it up a bit. After all, variety is the spice of life.

5 - KEEP A SKETCHBOOK

In her book, The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft and Creativity, Louise DeSalvo talks about how author Joan Didion used a notebook to record descriptions of people she had observed, facts she’d learned, random observations and even recipes. Didion used her notebook to remember moments that would later seek to inspire her in her work.

Keeping a sketch or notebook is a powerful practice because they are so useful. Sketchbooks give people insight to you as an artist, they are great conversation starters and galleries love to see them. Buyers love to see the process and meaning of the piece of artwork they are buying and allows them to form a deeper connection with your work. Sketchbooks also help to prove artwork as your own should you ever find yourself in a situation where someone has plagiarized your work.

Use your sketchbook to save interesting thoughts, ideas, quotations and observations. Write or sketch things down that you’ve read, films or images you’ve seen along with anything else that you find interesting. The power behind keeping a sketchbook is that by doing so, you’ll create a catalog of inspiration - hundreds of pages of ideas and information you can dip into when you’re blocked and in need of inspirational motivation. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest make it very easy to keep a digital sketchbook and gather reference materials.

Struggling through a creative block is never fun but it’s something that every creative person experiences from time to time. The next time you find yourself in a slump, try one or all of the methods on this list to get your creative juices flowing again.

What are some of your go-to methods for overcoming creative blocks? Comment down below and let us know!