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Nine Creativity Blockers & How to Release Them

Carolyn Blount Brodersen

Being the stupid optimist I am, I actually don't believe there are uncreative people or that creativity is a character trait. After years of studying creativity, both as a research project and on my own, I've come to believe that creativity is a habit. That you can choose to take the road less traveled and that you can teach yourself to think divergently. I believe we also can pick up the habit of listening to that childlike inner whisper –– the playful, spontaneous one –– and harness our analytical editor side until we really need it.

Remember in the movie "Castaway," how Tom Hanks' character finally gets a creative idea from a winged logo? He creates a sail-wing that will eventually whisk him to freedom. The creative idea saves him. Can creativity whisk us to a new place in our writing lives, too?

Most of us would answer "yes" to that question, wistfully. We realize how important creativity is to our writing process. But how do we access our creative side consistently, and don't we sometimes thwart the creativity we otherwise could access?

Alexander Hiam, a noted and prolific business expert on creativity, has summed up nine obstacles to creativity. These obstacles are the failure to:

• ask questions
• record ideas
• revisit ideas
• express ideas
• think in new ways
• wish for more
• try being creative
• keep trying
• tolerate creative behavior

When a speaker asks if there are any questions and no one raises a hand, there is a tacit assumption that everything is okay as it is. Either the information was absorbed or it is in stasis. Questions imply that something more is needed: a movement toward or away or deeper into an idea. If you want to be more creative, you need more than stasis, you need the creative rub, the fruitfulness of tension, the mushrooms that grow from frustration.

To start being more creative, start by asking questions of yourself, of situations, of others. Questions stimulate possibilities and change, and are a precursor to brainstorming. When you can't think of what to write, ask questions about what you want and why. And ask why of why. Speak aloud and stew over those questions. Challenge assumptions; status quo doesn't lead to creativity.

2. Failure to record ideas

What do you do with all those questions and the answers you come up with? Write them down, if you value your creativity. Recording your ideas may be the single most important creativity "unblocker" you can enact. Don't assume you will remember, don't expect entire songs or stories to appear full-blown in your head. Honor the bits, the molecules of ideas. If you capture those bits, they can have affinities for other bits and can organically form into larger entities, making idea cells, tissues, and organs. Writing your thoughts down solidifies them and stirs up new life, like seeds that can sprout without your awareness.

When ideas come to you, don't fumble with a computer (unless one is handy), just scribble it down. Don't think about form or appearance. Keep your idea writing loose and airy. Train yourself to listen, for listening is power. Everything that encourages you to express is good. Scribble on paper so you can express yourself graphically, dynamically. Draw circles, arrows, make faces, something.

To make it ridiculously easy to record your bits and ideas, place notepads and pens at strategic locations in your car's glove compartment, on the nightstand, at your desk, in your purse or briefcase, always out and available. A Scottish physicist said the greatest discoveries have come about in the three Bs: the bed, the bus, and the bath. More than a few of my ideas for poems came to me while I was driving or riding. Just as quickly, those ideas would have dissipated if I had not recorded them. Charles Darwin said he had to write a contradictory thought down within 30 minutes or his brain would seek to refute it. Do you scare off your unusual and seemingly contradictory thoughts (and dreams)? Don't give that creative idea a chance to flutter away; write it down or draw it immediately.

Then, what do you do with those recorded ideas? Express them (#4) and revisit them (#3). Surround yourself with idea-catchers. When my husband was blocked while writing his master's thesis, I persuaded him to get a tiny tape recorder and speak into it. He had plenty of ideas he could glibly express out loud, but found himself unable to write them. All he had to do was spend a few sessions with the tape recorder, then write out the ideas he recorded, before the torrent of ideas that became his thesis fell into place. The tape recorder was just a crutch. Whatever tool it takes to catch those ideas, use it with gusto.

Plus, if you record your ideas, it can be a mind-dump, allowing you to let it go. Once your idea is recorded, it's easier to relinquish it. Out of your head but not forgotten, just transferred and available for reuse. This transferal of chewed bits leaves more space in your mental fridge for fresh finds.

Noted creativity guru Julia Cameron recommends morning pages: three handwritten pages of your thoughts first thing each morning, every morning. Henriette Anne Klauser recommends rapid writing, writing for ten minutes each day, come what may. If you are having a difficult time writing, write about that; just WRITE for ten minutes, turning off the inner critic. You'd be surprised how true creativity can emerge from that "effluvia" writing. The important thing is for it to be "okay" to write anything and to exercise the writing of that anything.

Writing a little is often like opening a channel, releasing the flow. With the possibility of being heard, the silent partner/right brain/intuitive side of you is cajoled into coming out. Ever listen to a shy child? Your attention and responsiveness open the child up. Your encouragement brings out more conversation. So open it up and get it down, without concern for how it comes out or what it is. As comedian Mike Myers says, it's better to write something crappy than to not write at all. Something crappy can be fixed later.

3. Failure to revisit ideas

Once you've capture your ideas, what's next? Revisiting is crucial. Ideas are like friends. If you don't visit and revisit them, you drift apart. Develop a relationship that nurtures your idea-friends. Enjoy them. Spend time with them, Invite them in. Be pals. Go for walks. Make them live and grow.

When you are writing, you are essentially trying on ideas. An easy first step I use when I need to write but am having a hard time doing it, is to simply collect the recorded ideas. Gather those snips and jots and bits on pieces of paper and e-mail and journal entries and sticky notes. Start typing those ideas up and collecting them. You can reassure your blocking agent, "oh, I'm not really writing, I am just gathering." A measure of respect is needed, though. Your ideas aren't junky ideas, they are future friend-ideas. So regard them as buddies and be happy to see them again. Typing them up and gathering doesn't take much creative energy. When you are tired and not feeling juicy, organize your ideas. Just by surrounding yourself with them, you will feel juicier.

Don't be afraid of random slips of paper. If those slips are tossed into a box and you are revisiting your box o' ideas, you can get random juxtapositions that may spark new ideas. We know how William Burroughs and the Beatnik writers chopped up pages of their writing and recomposed them in new ways. This discovery-by-doing method of writing lets ideas speak for themselves. If I took it for granted that I would have a limitless supply of readily available ideas, then I wouldn't need to record them. Make a conscious decision to honor and value your ideas, and to record and revisit them consistently.

4. Failure to express ideas

Expressing can be drawing, shaping, scribbling, dancing, humming, practicing. Practice the habit of expressing. Your expression doesn't have to be planned or staged in any way. One of the beauties of writing for me is that I can take my time sorting and shaping and expressing my thoughts before they are ready for presentation. I am one of those people who can never come up with a snappy retort on the spot, but in my own time, one usually comes. Writing gives us freedom in the time dimension and includes incubation –– the negative space of writing –– the looking-out-the-window part of the writing process. But for the time dimension to work to our benefit, we must express the culmination of the incubation and lay that egg. Sounds unremarkable, but if you practice expressing, the expression channel stays open better.

5. Failure to think in new ways

Here's a hard one: How do we think in new ways? Start by deliberately avoiding the rut, if you know you are in one. Then reward yourself for thinking in new ways. (This is easier-said-than-done advice, for sure.) Lastly, and here's the fun part, spend time filling up the creative battery with new input. Julia Cameron recommends Artist Dates: time you spend alone simply doing something different and pleasurable. Utne Reader recommends hosting a Bad Art Party, where you get together with friends and create silly stuff without judgment.

Doing things you are not good at is another way to stretch your thinking. Learn a few sentences in Japanese. Participate in a fashion show. Use your non-dominant hand. Drive a different way home. Hang out with kids without telling them what to do. Thinking in new ways stretches and flexes our creativity muscles.

6. Failure to wish for more

Wishing for more fits in with asking questions (#1) and requires imagining more. Imagine other colors, other characters, other realities. Imagine the final product. Imagine your writing success. Be okay with frustration along the way, too, because it fuels invention (through wishing for more).

7. Failure to try being creative

A lot of us admire creative acts or creative people but don't think of ourselves as creative. Well, before you became a writer you had to imagine yourself writing and being a writer. And it worked, you imagined yourself into and created a new future. Sure, not all writing is creative, but all writing is create-ive, requiring the creation of something that did not previously exist. You have been creative, therefore you can DO creativity. And you can do it again.

What trying to be creative breaks down to is two parts: one part is coming up with the fresh and fertile new ideas, and the other part is editing and judging them. But even if we can allow ourselves the freedom and joy of questioning, expressing, practicing, recording, and all the other parts of outside-the-box creativity, we still might block ourselves by letting the inner critic in too soon. That critical voice is crucial to the process, given the right timing. Think of it this way: creativity is not complete unless those wild and uninhibited ideas are corralled and tidied. First, you toss ideas out higgledy-piggledy and then you decide which ones stay and which go. Generate and then separate, sow and then sort, play and then edit, brainstorm and then judge. If we can separate those two roles, then each one stands to let the other one live.

With only the brainstorming side, we'd be like children saying any old thing and thinking it marvelous. With only the judging side, we'd never get through to juicy thinking because we'd block it with so many shoulds and oughtas before the creative stuff could come out. Ideally, creativity is a dance of the two: "Your turn to lead," "Okay, now it's my turn," or even, "Let's sashay that way together."

8. Failure to keep trying

Somewhere in our culture is this grand myth that if you have done something once and failed, it can't happen. My neighbor said (almost proudly) that she got two fingers caught in a favorite ring and had such a hard time getting them out she could no longer bear to wear that ring again. I thought, if you can learn something, then you can unlearn it. What a waste not to bother to keep trying, especially for something as rewarding as creativity. Your first try at writing something may have your inner critic howling with scorn. But so what? It's just an inner critic. You can still be playful and try it again.

9. Failure to tolerate creative behavior

One of the things I had to do to write this article was to ignore the sound of your criticisms in my head: the "Well, that's a nice piece of fluff," or the "How can I get anything out of a simple article that could actually help me?" comments. I am pretending I can't hear a thing. For now, I am chunking it out and serving it up. Later, I'll look at it with critical eyes, toss the debris, and compose the final seasonings with your tastes in mind. But first, I have to let myself go through all the goofy bad writing and scribbles and pitfalls and junk and many, many revisions on the way to the final product.

Part of the creative process is releasing your fears: the fear of looking stupid, fear of failure, fear of standing out too much, fear of success. Knowing this can help us feel more tolerant of creativity in others and more supportive of it in ourselves. We are all afraid and yet we get a lot of creative work done anyway. Maybe the act of creating makes us feel so responsive and playful and alive that it's worth it.

Don't let this list of creativity blockers end here. Let this be a participatory article. How do you thwart your creativity? Knowing how you do it is the first step in "unblocking." Calling it out is the key to releasing yourself of the blocker's thrall.