How to stay in love with your creative practice

Whether you paint, write, design, sew or code, it can be tricky to maintain motivation, no matter how much you adore it. While there are a million and one blogs, books and podcasts about finding fresh ideas, what creatives speak about less is falling out of love with their practice altogether.

Beyond the usual writer’s block or just plain despondency, sometimes we lose more than our energy and enthusiasm. A few days off turns into weeks, months or even years. Inspiration doesn’t just run dry — it disappears altogether. Leaving us feeling bereft, cast adrift and unsure of whether the magic will ever come back again.

And with every day that passes, we pile more and more guilt on top of our inactivity. Our shame gets so stifling that even just stepping back up to our canvas or screen can feel impossible. Creating becomes an activity we avoid and push to our brain’s edges, only to have it remerge when the lights go out and we’re left alone with all the things we still haven’t done.

The trouble with applying pressure and being steadfast with our creative process is that in the effort to Just Get The Thing Done, we forget why we love it so much in the first place. This is a tragedy for any creator, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll have wrapped so much of your identity up in your output that it’s hard to know who you are without it.

And this is especially troublesome when your passion is also your livelihood and you don’t have the luxury of just leaving that project to gather dust in the corner of your studio. But there is a way home. The pendulum always swings back, and with a little love and intention and patience, you’ll find it again.

So, to illuminate the way or at least leave a little helpful writing on the wall for the next one along, I wanted to share a few of my tried and tested ways of getting that spark back. Maybe it helps, maybe it won’t. But hopefully something gets knocked loose in the reading. Here are five tips for falling back in love — and staying in love — with your creative practice.

Get back to the basics

We’ll start with the simplest one. Try to return to the roots of why you loved your craft in the first place. What is it about it that makes you so excited? What gets your mind racing and fingers itching to get making? What sets a fire in your belly, or better still — whose work makes you feel envious or inspired?

Admittedly, over the last year or so, I’d lost a little bit of my love for writing. Working as a writer for my day job is a blessing, but it did leave me feeling like I’d used all my words up by the time I got home. I stopped reading, and even gave up writing the silly little poems I never really showed anyone anyway.

I dedicated almost all my free time to art and while I don’t regret that (not even slightly), I did use it as an excuse. Life is always a balancing act, but I realised that it wasn’t so much a lack of time but a surplus of fear — fear I’d lost my knack for it, misplaced my ability to string words together into a sentence in a way that made me feel proud, capable and talented. In short, I got stage fright.

That changed when I started reading again. Reading made me realise how much I missed and admired it. How deeply I loved writing and crafting words that rang true, words that felt good to put down on paper. Words that weren’t written for a client or end user or even anyone in particular, really. Just me alone at my desk writing whatever strange thing happened to appear in my brain.

So, go pull your favourite books off your bookcase and reread those long-beloved passages and underlined phrases. Return to your favourite gallery. Spend time wandering aimlessly around a bookstore. Start writing those embarrassing little poems and keep them for just yourself. Play around. Maybe even just push some paint around the canvas to remind yourself of how the movement feels in your fingers. How freeing it is to watch the colours change and warp and become something new.

Go in with no expectations and an open heart. This isn’t for public viewing, hell, it doesn’t even need to be seen by your partner or your friends. Not everything needs to be polished. Just try and have fun with it again. It’s like a muscle or good relationship or faithful houseplant — your creative practice needs to be cultivated and cared for. It needs time and space and plenty of light so it can grow. Don’t leave it in the dark.

Lean on (and learn from) each other

But we don’t need to go so far for inspiration. Sure, taking a trip to see your favourite painting or sculpture can be reviving, but we don’t always need to consult the Greats to get back on track. Sometimes we just need to take a look over our pal’s shoulder to see what they’re up to.

Creating is largely a solitary activity, but creatives rarely have no creative friends. Reach out to your community. Start debating the intricacies of your craft with someone who really knows what they’re doing. Get up close to their canvases to work out how they did it by unwinding the brush strokes.

One of the things I love about working in an agency is the multitude of ideas, the sheer range and scale and variety of expertise and brains on offer. Each practitioner is toiling away in their own profession, stumbling into terra incognita and returning with lessons and keepsakes from their travels. It’s our job to listen well and long, and then squirrel away any insight we find to use in our own work.

There’s also something to say about simply just having a conversation. Beyond the cathartic value of talking it through, fresh minds bring fresh perspectives, and with them previously unexplored angles and opportunities. It’s so easy to get lost down in the weeds that just taking a step back can help us see things differently.

It’s in communication that we really begin to see ideation in action — where a conversation sparks a new idea, or some inconsequential phrase sets the cogs moving in your brain. A connection reveals a new connection. A joke becomes something more. Don’t be afraid to steal inspiration from wherever you find it, just make sure you always give credit.

Come up for air

When I was struggling in a tough project a few years back, my dad texted me some advice: “Remember when you are in a challenging place or situation to step back and take your blinkers off. It is human nature to be drawn in and to become stressed and focused on just what is directly in front of you. Work is transitory and there are countless opportunities for you. You will always be you.”

Unsurprisingly, I printed it out and stuck it to my monitor and even now, all this time later, I still reread it whenever I start to feel overwhelmed. Because he’s right — so what if this time you messed up a little? Who cares if things didn’t quite go to plan? There is so much ahead of you. And if you learned something, you didn’t lose anyway.

“There are countless opportunities for you.” Remember that. Take solace in it and breathe in a big gulp of air. What’s urgent probably isn’t that urgent anyway, so loosen up. Take a walk. Get outside. Go for a coffee with a friend and talk and talk until things feel like they’ve cleared, or at the very least momentarily settled.

My (messy) current desk set up 

Other times, what you really need is to focus on something else altogether. It sounds counterintuitive, but it can help to take off the pressure. For me, something I like to do is free writing. On days when it’s hard to start, I sit down at my desk and just start writing. It doesn’t matter what about or whether it makes much sense, what’s important is you start pulling sentences together. It’s always quite surprising how suddenly it clears.

I find this most when journaling — I always start by thinking “well I don’t know what I want to write about” and then before long I’m three pages deep. Once we’ve got our minds and muscles moving, it’s easier to work on the more important things. It’s not that Mark Twain was wrong when he said you should eat your frogs first, more that sometimes it helps to work your way around a problem before you dive in.

Don’t take it so personally

This one’s the biggie. It’s simple to say but harder to do, because it’s natural to feel protective of what we create. After all, haven’t we poured all our hearts and souls into it? Isn’t our work the product of a lifetime’s experience and experimentation? Didn’t we try, really, really hard?

The role of the artist is to create and bring something new into the world. Whatever that world then thinks of our creations is really none of our business. We’re not writing or painting for everyone. Around here, we don’t make motel art that’s so stripped back and sanitised that it’s palatable to everyone. What we want, what truly matters, is making something that connects with just one person. Something that feels authentic and real and resonates with their experience.

There’s a poem I read and loved probably ten years ago that really shaped the way I think about art. It’s called Information by Daniel Donahoo (you can listen to it here). In it, he writes: “My life’s work, she says, is the impact that this has. This is not about what I produce. It is all about what others receive.” And what they receive we have no control over — so stop stressing about it so much.

I’m not saying we should never listen to criticism or take on feedback, but more that when we tighten up around our practice because someone said something less than pleasant about what we’ve produced, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves. So, make whatever weird thing it is you want and try not to pay attention to what people say about it, if they say anything at all.

We’re all just slightly wonky children in an adult’s body anyway, so have fun with your work. Aim to be passionate, not precious. It’s not that you don’t take your practice seriously, it’s just that you won’t take it personally when things don’t quite go to plan.

No one is gonna die, anyway

Sure, sometimes the stakes are *just that high*. But generally, if a deliverable arrives at 9am tomorrow instead of 5pm tonight, nothing terrible is going to happen. The world will keep spinning, babies will be born and the sun will still rise. You don’t need to get it all done right now or three hours ago. It’ll happen when it’s meant to, so relax.

By not getting caught up in the urgency and letting panic calcify our brains and fingers, we create better work. Gavin Strange said it best when he said: “Don’t make it perfect, make it now.” And he also said that when it starts to feel heavy to remember that one of these days or millenniums the sun is going to explode and swallow up the earth anyway, so who cares if the painting we did isn’t our best yet.

We’re here briefly and barely — so why not make the best of it by filling up our days with slightly substandard paintings and poems. You’re here for the love of making, for the sheer joy of having an idea and following it all the way through. What happens next doesn’t really matter. Pulling something out of the dark recesses of your mind and into the world — that’s enough. That’s all it was ever really about.