Creativity Tip 25: Three Habits to Cure Writer's Block...for Life

Do you ever sit in front of a blank page and want to write but the words won't come? Or do you ever stand in front of a white canvas with paint dripping from your brush but the ideas won't flow? Or you try to sing a new melody but the notes are stuck in your throat? What a strange feeling that is.

To want to create, but the engine doesn't start.

As far as you can tell, you did your part.

You set the time aside, you got in the car, you turned the key, but it sputtered.

What gives? Are the muses on holiday? And can you buy them a drink? Sometimes inspiration courses through you like a force of nature and you marvel at it as it happens.

and other times you sit bemused by your own incapacity, like someone clipped your wings while you were sleeping.

This is the life of the artist.

You are a purveyor of unseen forces, influences which, for normal people, are too fleeting and too fickle to waste their time on.

But for you, dear artist, these unseen forces are vitality itself.

because when the engine is humming and you're in the middle of a flow state, it doesn't get much better than that.

This feeling of inspiration is so magical and even otherworldly that people of ancient cultures attributed it to spirits and divine beings like the nine muses of ancient Greece.

It was such a widely accepted notion that musicians and philosophers would invoke the Muses before playing a concert or delivering an inspired lecture.

In the Odyssey, Homer begins, Unquote.

This is one aspect about the spirit of ancient cultures which I find so appealing.

The reverence paid to creativity and that it becomes like a gateway to the divine.

But sometimes that gateway is shut and it is not so easily opened.

We even see the muses mentioned in Plato's celebrated dialogues.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates mentions four kinds of divine madness—the prophetic, the initiatory, the poetic, and the erotic— each resulting from possession or influence by a different divine being.

The prophetic belongs to Apollo, the initiatory to Dionysus, the poetic to the Muses, and the erotic to Aphrodite or Eros.

Now, why does Socrates use the term divine madness in this context? Why madness? This is an acknowledgement of the rarity of the state of consciousness occupied by the individual.

Socrates states that this type of madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.

Unquote.

Meaning that in that flow state, we are not adhering to the rigorous constraints of culture anymore, but are loosened in a world of ever-expanding possibilities, where the norms and expectations of our society and medium play a much lesser role.

And I think this is true.

When you are in the zone, in a flow state, when you are moving from a point of inspiration, you feel the difference and you are creating meaningful work.

But what happens when it doesn't work? What do you do when the muses are on holiday? That's what this Creativity Tip episode is all about.

The three habits to cure writer's block for life.

Let's get into it.