Creativity

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.