Oh, that blank page!

Or maybe it's a blank canvas, or maybe it's a blank sketchbook. Or maybe you're just sitting there staring at your piano keyboard.

Welcome to Creativity!

Creativity is the wonderful thing, but with very few exceptions it does not tend to show up on command. For the vast majority of us it ebbs and flows much like the tide.

Whereas I am an aspiring blogger, I am also a sporadic one. After all, I have a life! That is to say, I have a life that revolves around things much different from being creative, and most of those things have schedules and deadlines and such things.

By extension, that also means that my opportunities to sit down and create something are contingent on my grabbing half an hour here or an hour there and then it becomes very much an "on demand" situation. Alas, many of those on demand periods actually end up turning into nothing at all.

The thing is, most of us are not good at just saying "I need to write a blog post real quick" and then creative perfection flows from our fingertips.

Time has taught me that, as a part-time creative, I am served far better by simply grabbing inspiration when and where it comes to me and working with it then and there, even if it's inconvenient, relative to the other things I'm doing.

I realize this may not be very feasible if you're in the middle of doing something at your place of work, or while you're in the middle of working out, but keep in mind that "grabbing inspiration" doesn't mean you have to produce the finished product on the spot!

All you need to do is capture the rudimentary idea of the insight you just had, or the other inspiration you found. Then you can come back later and polish it up at a time where you actually do have a little free time because the polishing and finishing part of the creative process doesn't require the "Creative Muse" to be quite as present.

As a blogger, I have found that the "voice to text" feature on my phone is a super useful tool. I can simply open up a new email, dictate to myself for a minute or two without making corrections, and then send the email to myself for later processing.

Managing the Uneven Creativity Stream

As an example, I am currently on day three of a 30 day blogging challenge I set for myself.

The entire idea is tremendously daunting and overwhelming, and it represents probably my most significant attempt at creative output in a very long time, if not ever. One of the things I am incorporating into this challenge is the fact that I may have multiple ideas on one day, and no ideas for many other days and so I need to capture all the ideas I get, but spread out the output over the entire 30 day period.

An important aspect of functional creativity is that is that it actually doesn't work best to "make it pretty" while we are in a creative space.

To be perfectly honest, I find I am far more effective at the process of formatting, and adding illustrations and coming up with appropriate tags a while after I write something. So called "finishing work" is actually best done when our work has had a while to "marinate" and we can reflect on what we were really trying to convey.

Waiting that little bit of extra time serves the additional purpose of not ending up in the situation where we look at a piece of writing and think "I wish I hadn't published that!"

Our creativity is a splendid and wonderful thing... so we must learn to make the most of it!

=^..^=

*** Curator Cat, January 23rd, 2024***

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