The Semi-Ultimate Guide to Maintaining a Consistent Creative Practice

Here’s everything I’ve learned (so far!) about how to keep on track with creative work.

Why is this guide only semi-ultimate? Because there’s no such thing as an ultimate guide. That’s just a gimmicky click-bait word. But here I’m going to tell you everything I know about how to avoid the creative blocks and burnout that keep us from developing and maintaining a consistent creative practice.

The key to this is to never force creativity. But how do you know when you’re encountering normal resistance, and when it’s forcing it? Why is forcing it so bad? And what do you do when you encounter that feeling of having to force it? I’m going to answer all these questions for you right here.

Why is forcing it bad?

Most advice on how to be creatively productive involves marshaling self-discipline. For example, writers are told they need to get their butt in a chair every day. If you have excellent self-discipline and are happy with your creative process and output, great! No need to read further. But if you struggle with issues like consistency and inspiration, or if your creative process feels onerous and stressful, those could be signs you are in a “forcing it” mode when it comes to creativity. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you lack creativity. It just means you need to tweak your approach to it.

The problem with forcing creativity is that it works against creativity’s natural flow. All human beings are deeply creative. It’s an actual brain function. We use creative cognition on a daily basis, mostly unconsciously. It just happens naturally: it’s easy and it also feels good, because there’s an evolutionary advantage to creativity. Our struggles with creativity emerge when we try to intentionally channel it for a creative task. This is where we mess up. We go about it all wrong.

Creative cognition happens mostly in the subconscious, which means it can’t easily be directed. You just kind of have to let it do its thing. Creativity likes to explore, go in “wrong” directions, meander, take long roadside breaks to stare at a bug doing nothing, forget what it was doing, and then start all over again. It is not a model of efficiency and productivity, to put it mildly. Ever try to force a two-year-old or a cat to obey your will? Yeah.

For those of us who live in a culture with a preference for rational cognition (most of us do), creativity is very uncomfortable. We do not like to give our subconscious minds free range, and we definitely do not like letting things develop naturally. We want goals, action plans, and results. So we seek to control our creative process. We may see some initial success with this, leading us to believe we’ve mastered creativity. But what we’ve really done is block off part of our access to it, like plaque clogs an artery. So we have to work harder for it. We have to start forcing creativity through an ever-narrowing channel.

Eventually we are forcing it all the time. And it doesn’t feel good, it’s onerous and stressful, and our creative work feels like it sucks. We get blocked, burn out, doubt our own brilliance, suffer from existential despair, the works. It’s not a good place to be (trust me, I know).

But creativity doesn’t always feel easy, you’re saying. In fact, it’s often a struggle. And if I just sit around waiting for inspiration, or if I only do my creative work when it feels all flowy and joyful, I’d never get any work done at all! I have to exercise some self-discipline. I hear you. And you’re not wrong.

What’s the difference between working through resistance and forcing things?

We need to be realistic about creativity. Sometimes you get into that flow state where it feels easy and joyful, but most of the time there’s at least a little resistance involved. This is because we live our regular lives within the rational realm. It’s hard to let go of the control we’re always having to exert to survive in the regular world. Plus, we’re trained to be suspicious of our subconscious, creative minds. And most of all, we expect creativity to be hard, especially if that has always been our experience of it. Creativity is a soft force, a reflector of how we approach it. If we approach it with distrust and the expectation that it will give us trouble, that’s what we’ll find.

So what does normal resistance feel like, and how much effort should you be putting into working through it? The first thing to know is that at some point resistance turns into forcing it, so you do need to pay attention to how it’s developing. The best way to identify resistance is through a comparison with forcing it, because resistance is a range, whereas forcing it is a specific and identifiable feeling.

This is what forcing it feels like: dread. It’s that feeling you get when you really don’t want to do something. Adults are practiced at forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to do. We have to, to survive. You may really not want to go to work in the morning, but you do it. You force it. When you feel that about creativity, it’s a red flag, because this is what leads to blocks and eventually burnout. The second important thing to know about forcing it is that if you push through it, your creative work doesn’t give you a good feeling. The only good feeling you have about it is that you got it done. That’s not enough to sustain you in the long term, and it’s a sign you’re not tapping into your full creative potential. 

Here's what resistance feels like: anxiety and doubt. Maybe it’s minor, maybe major, but once you work through it and sit down to do your creative work, you get a rewarding feeling. It feels good to actually do the work, not just get it done. This is a sign that you’ve accessed creative flow, and that’s the feeling you need if you want your creative practice to be sustainable and if you want to do your best work.

The question is, when do you need to start worrying about resistance tipping over into forcing it?

This is how I deal with growing resistance and how I avoid forcing it.

This is the part where you’ll have to work out your own specific methodology because it requires paying attention to and understanding your own feelings and capacities. I’m going to tell you how I do things, and hopefully that will help you figure things out for you.

Mild resistance comes and goes, and isn’t necessarily cumulative. I may feel some resistance one day because I’m particularly tired, then none the next day. Usually mild resistance is associated with everyday stressors not explicitly related to creativity. Mild resistance comes in the form of thoughts like: I feel too tired today, or I’m distracted by [stressor] and can’t concentrate. I notice this type of resistance, but easily work through it by making myself sit down and do my work, and that’s that. Look at it as the equivalent of making yourself go out and take a walk as part of a regular exercise plan. Some days you may not be feeling it, but you know it’ll make you feel good, so it’s fairly easy to get yourself out the door.

Moderate resistance is where I really start to pay attention. This is resistance that is associated with the creative process itself. It comes in the form of thoughts like: This creative project isn’t going well, or I’m not getting as much work done as I’d like, or My work lately isn’t good. This type of resistance is harder to work through, and probably causes you to procrastinate. Some procrastination can actually benefit creativity, because it gives creative ideas time to percolate. But you may find yourself putting off doing your work because you are experiencing stress when you sit down to do it, and having more and more trouble getting over that procrastination hump.

This has a cumulative effect, because procrastinating puts more pressure on your process. You start feeling like you need to exert your willpower and harness your creativity – you read about the problems with that above. So pay attention when you start experiencing this type of resistance. I find that too much of it leads me to that place of dread, the forcing it stage, so it’s my preference to deal with things at the moderate resistance stage before I get to the point of not only feeling like my work sucks, but that I suck, too (this is the burnout stage).

The only way to deal with this is to take a break and let go. This requires practice. We are trained to double down and try harder when things aren’t working the way we’d like. We inevitably gravitate toward control, no matter how good at creativity we get, and we need a way to get ourselves back into that place of flow. I find the best method is to intentionally do the very things that cause us to exert control over our process in the first place, the things we fear so much that we are willing to scuttle our creative process to avoid them: being lazy and wasting time. You can read more about my intentional practice of wasting time here if you are interested in learning about this technique.

One final technique I use when I start to feel moderate resistance that has risen to the level of negatively impacting my creative inspiration is the creative pivot. This is when you find something that is inspiring you, no matter what it is, and adapt it to your task. You can read about an example from my own experience with that here.

By paying attention to your feelings of resistance, being careful not to ever force yourself, and using techniques like intentionally wasting time and the creative pivot, you’ll find it easier to maintain a consistent creative practice over time. No methodology is infallible, of course, and sometimes we need to take more extended breaks. But if you develop an understanding of your own creative process, these breaks need be simply that, some enjoyable time off, and not the result of creative blocks or burnout.

Need more guidance? I offer a number of creativity coaching plans at different price points. Check out my coaching page for more info.