The feeling that keeps you stuck
When working harder stops working
Have you had this feeling?
A deep, compelling, almost painful need to express something that feels inexpressible
An intense desire to express this concept correctly — but the search for an accurate way to express it feels cumbersome, overwhelming, and insurmountable
Caught in that place where it literally feels like if you don’t express this concept you will be in physical pain, but you still can’t see a way to get it out of you and on the page (or in a drawing, a piece of music, or another medium).
I call that feeling creative despair.
Creative despair can happen for different reasons, but many of those reasons come from:
A lack of self-trust
A lack of experience in successfully expressing yourself creatively
A sense of overwhelm spilling in from other areas of your life.
Most of us don’t experience creative despair at the beginning of our creative process – when the work is still shiny, new, and exciting. That initial high can carry us through the process quite a ways (through a month of Nanowrimo, for example).
You might even have had the experience, as I have, of a marathon, 40-hour stretch of creative activity, with barely any sleep, forgetting to eat, and crashing for days once a project is complete.
That kind of process is exhilarating, and can even be addicting, in spite of the resulting crash.
But the length and scope of a book, in particular, pushes us past the tipping point of what can be accomplished in one long stretch of creative hyperfocus. Plus most of us don’t have the luxury of dropping all of our responsibilities for days at a time. We have day jobs, children, spouses, bills, grocery shopping, dishes.
And when we can’t drop it all to finish a project in one fell swoop, when we have to set it aside to feed the children, to put gas in the car, to go to work – we feel a disconnect, disappointment, fear that we won’t be able to get back in that headspace again. We long for more time but worry that we’ll never, ever be able to find it. We begin to believe that expressing our truth is impossible. We lose faith in the project and in our ability to see it through to completion. We feel creative despair.
When we feel creative despair, it is painful—physically and emotionally. It’s also the point at which we’re most likely to give up on our creative endeavors, on ourselves, on the dreams that feed our souls. That’s heartbreaking, and also unnecessary.
The first thing you need to know if you’re feeling like this (or if you have ever felt this in the past) is that it’s NORMAL. You aren’t alone in this feeling, you aren’t weird or wrong or somehow incapable of creating. It doesn’t make you a bad writer – I’d even argue that your ability to experience this sensation is a sign of the radiant, abundant wealth of artistic expression you have to offer the world.
Feeling like this at times is inevitable, AND, you don’t have to stay in this space. There are ways to navigate creative despair.
Here are a few things you can try starting today:
Take a calculated break from your project. You may just need time for new ideas to germinate. So plan to take a break, but (and this is important) develop self-trust by making a promise to yourself about when you will resume your work. Make it a day, a week, a month, three months – but commit to trying again once you’ve rested, and keep that promise to yourself.
Talk about it with a fellow creator you trust. This could be a critique partner, a creative friend, a teacher or mentor, me, or even a therapist. But it should be someone you trust to really listen to what you are feeling, who can repeat your thoughts back to you, help you gain perspective, and maybe even come up with a plan to move forward.
Mix up your routine. Are you a morning pages person? Try after-dinner pages, midnight pages, or lunch break pages. Do you write every day? Try writing for a longer stretch, but only three times a week. Do you usually work in a specific place, like an office, a studio, or your bedroom? Make some changes in that space, or try a new space altogether.
This is NOT an exhaustive list. There are as many ways to navigate away from creative despair as there are types of creators. But, it’s a place you can start. Try something new, see what happens. Ask yourself how you feel about the result, and trust the answer you give yourself. Then go from there. There is always a new entry point to your creative process, you only have to be patient enough to find it.
