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How to climb out of a Creative Rut

Posted 10 Jul 2009 - 9 Gratefully received comments

Ever sat down to work, faced with a blank screen, holding a brand new project then find yourself staring into space all day without a single idea popping into your head?
Anyone with a creative job always works under the pressure of generating ideas. This is particularly awkward when a tight deadline is approaching and you’ve got nothing.

I can’t imagine I’m alone on this one. It’s common to hear of authors getting “writers block,” but a lot of designers seem to deny the fact that they have trouble with inspiration. A lot of designers I know try to tell me they are staggeringly prolific and that they never struggle when responding to a brief.
Obviously telling a client that you struggled for inspiration while working for them is a silly move, but it is important to admit a lack of inspiration to yourself. If you don’t there is a risk that you will toil for very little reward, and the quality of your work can suffer. Not only that but you can find yourself getting frustrated and making the situation worse.

I’ve never had a problem admitting that I have days, sometimes weeks, where the ideas just don’t surface.
I have a few approaches to staving off the effects of a dry spell. Some methods are preventative and others I use to battle those inspiration-less periods while I’m stuck in the middle of them.

The first step is acceptance. If your job is to be creative, then dry spells are inevitable. You are human after all, not an ideas machine. Once you accept that this will happen to you intermittently you can prepare for it.

So what can you do to try and prevent a creative rut?

Try not to live to a routine.
Once you get stuck into a routine it gets harder and harder to break the longer you keep to it. This can be a good thing in many jobs but I don’t think it is for creatives. By living to a routine you narrow your experiences, actions and thoughts to those included in your daily grind. After a while things become stale and it’s very easy to run out of ideas because there is nothing new in your day that might spark that great idea.

Let randomness into your life.
There is great power and endless scope for ideas generation in randomness. Some of the best ideas come from completely unexpected inspiration. Try to open yourself up to the unexpected. I’ll try to cite a few examples:

Vary your travel routes.
You may be going to the same workplace everyday, but why make the same trip everyday? Who knows what you’ll see by taking an earlier bus, or taking the scenic route instead of the quickest?

Start saying yes.
If you are invited somewhere, go. Even if it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t usually consider. By widening your own experiences you have more depth to plumb for ideas in the future.

Be spontaneous.
This is a little difficult, because you can’t get up in the morning and decide to be spontaneous. It’s more of a mind set. Spontaneity goes hand in hand with saying yes; it’s just a way of broadening your horizons.

Crave variety.
You can do the smallest of things to help open you up to new things. Why not swap your ipod with a friend and hit the shuffle button. You may not like a lot of the music, but the chances of hearing something new are pretty high.
When shopping for books let someone else choose for you. It’s a risky approach but you tend to make decisions based on what you already like and are comfortable with. You may end up reading a lot of dross, but it’ll be worth it when an odd little book you’d have never picked up puts your brain into gear.

Sure you can try these things straight away; maybe something obscure will get those brain cells jumping. Maybe it won’t?

Inspiration is a very odd feeling. Most of my good ideas come to me all at once, fully formed, like a lightening strike. It’s exhilarating but you never know where it comes from or how you got lucky enough to be struck. You can choose to be very relaxed about it and wait for these flashes, or you can improve your odds and work for them in an attempt to encourage their appearance more consistently.
I’ve always decided to work for my ideas, even when they flow freely. When they begin to dry up it’s time to dig in and do a bit more. After all, ideas are my business, it’s what I sell, so without them I can’t turn a profit.

What if you are stuck at the moment?

My first measure is to walk away for a bit. There is no point staring blankly at a screen or piece of paper hoping for that bolt out of the blue. Sometimes it does happen that way, but the odds are stacked against you. Be pro-active.

Change your surroundings for a little while. It could be as simple as going to get coffee, maybe you’ll overhear a conversation at the next table that will kick-start your project. Take a short walk, go to the cinema, do the housework. Basically distract yourself from the task at hand, you’ll still be thinking about it subconsciously but you won’t be stressing about it.

Dive in and do loads of research. This is something that should be done anyway, however if you have done a load of research and are still clueless, carry on! If you dig deep enough there will be something that you latch onto that will drive a new idea on.
Part of research is finding inspirational parallels to what you are trying to achieve. Visit museums and galleries. Find work on the web that you want to aspire to, or even out-do.

There is only one other way I’ve ever dealt with a lack of inspiration: I’ve put my head down and worked, churning out pages and pages of crap until I stumble, almost by accident across a good idea.
Sometimes you have to steel yourself, dig through that 10 feet of sh*t before finding the smallest sliver of gold.

These approaches have been very helpful to me in the past, and I find new ways to stimulate my thinking all of the time. If you try to employ any of these suggestions, please let me know how you get on. I’d also love to hear how you deal with your own inspiration-less days.

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