How To End Your Creative Drought

When is the last time you felt you were able to create consistently for a period of a few weeks or months? When did you last feel that you could call yourself an active artist, and not say "I'm an ex-creative" or "I used to be a writer"?

We all experience times of creative drought where it feels not only that our creativity is going through a lean patch, but that it's dried up for good.

So what can you do if you find yourself in this position of desperately wondering if you'll ever be creative again?

Here are 5 tips to help you end your creative drought:

1. Believe you can be creative again. You were creative before and you can be again, but sometimes it's hard to see that. If you were a professional athlete then yes there is a limited timespan to you performing at your physical peak, and your 20s and 30s will be your best years. But as an artist you're barely getting warmed up at this age. Your creativity becomes richer with experience, both of creating, and of life itself.

   Think back to a time when you were last very creative and look closely at the elements in place that allowed you to be like that. You can recreate them now and in the future, as you watch your creativity not only return, but flourish more than ever before.

2. Switch on your senses. All of our experience of the world around us comes through our senses, so if these are dulled or disengaged, we experience life far less fully and vibrantly. This means less stimulation, fewer ideas, and less creativity. Start switching on your senses again and you'll realise that you're almost constantly surrounded by creative inspiration.

   To get kick started, go somewhere stimulating and focus on each of your senses in turn for a period of 4 or 5 minutes. You'll likely be shocked at just how much is going on around you that can be a rich source of creative ideas, that previously you've let just drift by and barely noticed.

3. Create in small chunks. A classic way to sabotage your creativity is to completely overwhelm yourself with expectation and the amount you expect to create in one sitting. If for example you say "I'm going to record an album this weekend" when you haven't actually got any new ideas or haven't played an instrument in months, it's going to be a challenge to say the least.

   Be kind to yourself and your creativity. Instead say something like: "I'm going to set aside half an hour tomorrow to pick up my guitar again and just enjoy playing some of the old songs I like, get myself familiar and warmed up again". With this attitude of creating to enjoy, and in small chunks of time, the pressure's off and your creativity will return with a melody here and a few lyrics there, before you even realise.
4. Set aside time each day. If you don't create for days or weeks on end then expect to just turn your creativity on one day and it come gushing, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Consistent creativity comes through nurturing an underlying base level of creativity. The only way to do this is to create a little each day.

   It doesn't mean you have to spend hours a day producing wonderful art. It simply means setting specific time aside to encourage your creativity in some way, whether it's writing a few sentences, sketching a flower in your garden, or playing a couple of songs on the piano. Build this daily habit and it'll be the core of consistent creativity that will last a lifetime.

5. Go with the natural flow. Often when we say we can't be creative, what we're actually saying is we can't be creative in exactly the perfect and idealistic way we expect to. "I'm SO uncreative, all I ask is to be able to write 5000 words each day" or "My ideas NEVER evolve into exactly what I expect them to, so my creativity must be dead!"

   Once you accept that your creative flow has a natural path of evolution - and that the more you give ourselves over to that, the more creative you become - you can create like never before. Practice this by taking a new idea and simple experimenting freely with no expectation of the outcome. Focus simply on the act of creating, not the end product.

Follow these 5 tips and you'll never live in fear of your creativity drying up again.