The Unorthodox Way to Recover Your Creativity after a Long Week

I was on a record-setting pace of productive creativity and certain I’d set a personal best for a single week of getting stuff done. It all came crashing to a halt.

There are all kinds of reasons for that to happen. When being creative is something that happens from 5-9, the odds of you feeling energetic are not good.

Heck, I sometimes don’t have the energy for my 9-5, but I have a regular carrot and stick thing going on with my paycheck and worry that I might be fired.

When you’re working on something in your 5-9 that’s super fun, it’s not that hard to keep making progress.

A week ago, I started a short humor piece that needed cartoon figures to make the jokes work. I grabbed my iPad and used a tool called Paper to draw them. It was a blast.

It’s real easy to play around and make figures with Paper, and you have lots of choices for how to color the drawings. It was fun, so I spent a lot of time getting started.

Similarly, there are parts of creative writing that are like that, such as the beginnings of new novels or screenplays when this new idea seizes your brain and all you do is write stuff down. A few years ago, my novel HIVE started that way, and I was 20,000 words in before I even noticed.

Then you have to take a breath and figure out how the next 40,000 words are going to be arranged so that it all makes sense, and pays off in a great story.

With my drawings for the short humor, I had to refine them, clean them up, discard the duds and come up with new ones. Then I stumbled into a bug in the program and lost my work and had to redo four of the drawings from scratch.

After that, I also had to make them suitable for publication, which meant cropping and resizing, which meant going from the one tool on the iPad to another tool, which meant getting the drawing onto my laptop.

I’ve played around with drawing for a few years now, but I’ve never dared consider submitting anything. It was all just fun and games.

A lot of people stumble when the fun of discovery gives way to the drudgery of polishing and publication.

What made things worse, last week, was that I had a doctor appointment on Friday and decided to swing by a book store on the way home. It’s a local, independent place and the owners and employees are all voracious readers. I chatted about books for half an hour and bought a new book. It was fun.

Later in the afternoon, I attended an art exhibit reception for my friend. He does amazing paintings and murals, and it was fun to be around art and people who appreciate art.

That pretty much killed Friday.

On Saturday, I visited family. Sunday I recovered.

This is a lot of first world belly-aching, I know, but here’s the kicker: my recovery Sunday was doing the drudgery of my little drawings. I took the inspiration I enjoyed on Friday and Saturday and used it to propel me to do the hard work on Sunday.

I’ve been at this for decades so, despite low energy and distractions, I know how to get stuff done. Mind you, had this been football season, most of my Sunday would have been spent watching games.

It’s easy to start stuff but difficult to finish. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start a bunch of stuff. You have to keep trying things until you find something you love so much that you want to finish it. For some people, that’s how they approach marriage.

When I did the drudgery of taking my fun beginnings with drawings and turning them into something I can use to submit to an online magazine, I felt satisfied with the work.

Once I hit the submit button, it’ll be out of my hands. But I know what I did and I know it brought me joy.