One effective way to dissolve creativity blocks for good
The blank page and you
The empty page and me, it’s such a melodrama that it even gets its own label as the empty page phobia.
The housework, the essay, the new composition, the new picture. The beginning can be quite exhausting. When we finally make up our minds and heroically defeat other distractions and competing activities, there you are. You, you blank page. Tick, tock, tick tock, time seems to stand still and slowly The pen end or other 0-calorie snacks seem quite inviting.
Time goes by, the electricity burns up, the page remains empty. The first sentence should blow her away. We know that the first paragraph and the final paragraph are particularly important. A good first motif and theme are particularly inviting in the musical composition. When drawing, we can often paint several layers on top, but a solid base also gives shape.
I recently joined the hay house writers community, a community of writers with a wide variety of backgrounds. The goal is to publish a book within a year. The supervisors Kelly Notaras and Reid Tracy both have a lot of experience with this topic and regularly provide charming and helpful methods and tasks to achieve the goal of becoming a published book author within one year or to have successfully written the book by that time.
Today, however, it shouldn’t be about the many useful tips from the writers community, which I would like to share here from time to time, but rather about Julia Cameron’s excellent book: The Artist’s way. This book was first published in the 90s and has brought millions of people back to their creative expression.
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.
How to get over the blank page
Julia Cameron describes a task for this: the Morning Pages.
The Morning Pages are three written pages that you put on paper by hand every day (no format was mentioned here, I recommend three A4 pages or four A5 pages). It is important that you make friends with the good old pen and paper.
Writing these pages is all about you and your creativity. Cameron gives clear rules here:
1. You just start writing, no matter what. The content is secondary. It’s primarily about mechanical activity and letting go, getting rid of.
2. You leave the generated text, the picture, the music just like that. We mute the inner critic and focus on lively generation.
3. No matter what mood you are in, you write every day (preferably every morning). If the pages sound like an illiterate person’s, are incoherent, and make no sense, that’s perfectly fine.
I have now carried out this technique successfully for four days and it is already showing results. For one thing, the regularity makes me do more paperwork. I unconsciously started painting and drawing a few months earlier because I just wanted to enjoy my creativity and had really nice moments. This method is more than mere actionism, because it gets the creative crowd going and small works of art are created in the course of the day or even during the three sides.
The inner critic, who is often allowed to be very loud in us, becomes very quiet here. Perfectionism, one of the skin blocks, doesn’t get a chance here. Uncensored, we simply allow everything that finds its way onto the paper through the Muse head-hand-pen unit. The way is now paved for more creative effusions that may emerge during the day.
Another advantage of this method is that motivation should not be a requirement, because it is simply about spontaneously expressing what is inside you. Regular action ultimately leads to motivation.
That’s it for today. Have fun with the exercise and see you Monday!
There are many ways to Rome, how do you overcome your blockages and make it regularly
Creative greetings
Andreas