We were sitting down to dinner, when a friend’s girlfriend asked me what I did for a living. When she found out I was a writer, she asked me if I ever experience writer’s block.
I do, but I’ve discovered really only when I’m either bored with or don’t know the subject matter very well.
So how do you keep your creativity going?
Get bored, I said, the words slipping out of my mouth before I even thought it through. Then, because the reply sounded intriguing, I decided to let my mouth do the thinking on this one.
I think you have to get bored of your own work, I rattled on, as her face turned into the look of someone who just got hit by a truckload of paragraphs when she only wanted a sentence.
You have to, otherwise you settle, you get comfortable and that’s dangerous. But you have to get uncomfortable, get bored of what you’ve done before, and that will push you over the edge to look for new ways to do old things.
Mainly to keep yourself interested really, so you can keep on working. But I’ve found that most of the time when I do work I’m interested in, it’s work that other people become interested in too.
And that’s one key to my creativity. Not the key certainly. But one key, and it works for me.
