Struggling to find your creative mojo? You and me, both. There’s something about a daily diet of infection rates and global death tolls (not to mention the kids being home and constantly hungry) that makes it hard to sit down and make up problems for your characters.
So what do you do?
Here’s three things I’m trying right now to reboot my creativity and get back on track.
Try something new
Or, go back to a hobby you’ve let go. I know, I know, you’ve got to get the words on the page, fight the blinking cursor and push through to get the story on the page. Why? Are you working to a deadline? Do you have an agent or publisher demanding to see the finished product? If you do then good on you, but if you don’t then taking some time to do something creative just for the pleasure of it may help you relax, destress and get back in touch with your creative self. So go knit that scarf, decorate that cake or paint that picture. If you need some inspiration Bluprint is offering free lessons until the 9th of April.
Start a new writing project, try a different genre, or form
Do you always write in prose? Try verse. Give in to your angst or your appreciation of the natural world or today’s current events and immortalise it in poetry. Or put your novel on the back burner and give short fiction a try (I’m always open to receiving two-sentence stories to publish here for Two Sentence Tuesday). Or step away from romance for a while and give sci-fi or contemporary or some other genre a try. Rhiza Edge – the young adult imprint of Wombat Books – have just opened their short story competition. Trying something new might land you in an anthology!
Let it go
Do an Elsa and let it go. Not forever. Not even for the next six months. But we are living through an unsettling period of time, so let yourself breathe and let yourself adjust. When things settle down again and the world returns to normal, and sooner or later (probably later, to be fair) it will, your writing will still be there.
How are you keeping your creative juices flowing at the moment? What strategies could we use?
