One of my very favourite bloggers, the lovely Bee over at VIVATRAMP, did a post quite some time ago about getting rid of creative anxiety, and it's helped me to this day. If you have any sort of creative endeavour at all: writing, painting, blogging... making tiny models of politicians out of plasticine and making them have debates, you'll know that sometimes our creative process becomes stifled with doubts, and our ability to do and make the things we love grinds to a halt. Having dealt with this plenty over the years I thought I'd spread the love as a fellow creative person and share my own tips for tackling fears and worries relating to creativity.
BE BAD ON PURPOSE
This is something that took me a long time to accept as part of my creative process, but it has honestly worked wonders. I'm not saying deliberately go out of your way to produce something you hate, I'm saying that sometimes it can be incredibly liberating to remove 'good' from the list of things you want a creative project to achieve. Aim for 'finished' and 'alright' and 'something I enjoyed doing'. Nothing holds us back more than perfectionism, and I struggled with this for a long time. If you can allow yourself to just make stuff, whether it's good or not, you open the floodgates and it's easier to discover where the potential is, and what you want to work on, and that way, you can make magic.
HAVE A LAUGH
We have this incredibly strange idea that art should be a very somber and humourless process, but the greatest things I've ever made were often when I was just having fun. Laughter and joy are the bedrock of the creative process, not anguish and pain. You can use anguish and pain, but it won't sustain you after that burst of feeling has died down. Breaking through a creative block with humour and silliness is a much easier and more effective way to get yourself going again. Here are a few examples:
. Novel ground to a halt? Give yourself half an hour to write a trashy fanfic where two of your characters who hate each other get stuck in a lift together. Don't finish in time? Who cares, keep going.
. Painting just not taking shape the way you want it? Go outside and collect rocks and paint ugly little faces on them in acrylic. Give them names. Put on plays with them. Whatever floats your boat.
. Poetry flatlining? Grab sticky notes and write the dirtiest limericks you can possibly come up with. Then scrunch them up in the recycling so nobody knows what a pervert you are. Or keep them in your scrapbook if you like living on the edge.
LOOK AFTER YOURSELF
Pro tip: There is absolutely no bonus prize for suffering for your art. Getting the food and rest you need, taking any medication you have and looking after your body, these things take priority over anything creative you want to do. Sometimes those of us who live with things like anxiety and depression can use art as a self-soothing tool. But when we stay up all night painting when we know we have to be up early the next day, or get so lost in the world we're creating that we forget to go food shopping, we're not creating, we're avoiding. This is something I've faced many times in my life, but I'm at the stage now where I can recognise this compulsion to work on something for what it is and say to myself "I can paint/write/make in a few hours, because I'll be better at it once I've showered and gone outside."
CONSUME NEW CREATIVITY
We all know that consuming our favourite art helps us make good art, but I want to make the case for searching out completely new media, the further outside your comfort zone the better. When we limit our creative intake, we end up with a restricted view of what creativity should look like. To give you a personal example, I haven't written creative prose for some time, even though I have so many ideas in notebooks and half-finished drafts on my laptop. I keep feeling just a bit inadequate, and like my ideas aren't literary enough, or too immature. Then I read The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. I never read YA but I wanted something to chill out with, and wasn't especially fussed if it was 'good' or not, and I loved it! But more than that, I felt inspired by it. I realised that maybe I didn't want to write the next man booker prize winner. Maybe I just want to write something fun that I love, and that people will really enjoy. Similarly, some of my favourite sources of artistic inspiration are modern-day witches that I follow on Instagram and YouTube, who do incredibly creative beautiful work to celebrate their beliefs and spirituality. Molly Roberts is an endless source of inspiration to me.
DO IT ANYWAY
Ultimately the biggest cure for creative anxiety is to just get started. Blank pages and canvases can be intimidating but I usually find that as soon as pen or paint get on there, the project is suddenly much more doable than it was before. If a scene isn't working, write it anyway, and come back and edit it later. If a drawing isn't coming together, finish it and if you don't like it, you still practiced your skills and can always redo it. I think in a society where we share everything we do, a lot of creative fear comes from seeing everybody's finished work and feeling that we don't measure up to that yet, but we never see the messy scrapbooks and the scrunched up first-go's. Nobody makes amazing stuff all the time, and often when someone does churn out amazing things over and over again its because they've had years of practice, and they know how to ride out creative anxiety. I find that actually seeing the process of other people making creating things can be incredibly motivating, especially if I'm drawing or writing along with them, so I'll end here by sharing a few videos of some amazing creative people doing their thing for you to enjoy.
FurryLittlePeach . Frannerd . Kelly-Ann Maddox . Molly Roberts . Kristina Horner
Thank you for reading!
Excellent advicee <3
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