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The air in Lambertville, NJ is different during the holiday season. It’s more than just the snow flurries that dance around in the chilly gusts. There’s a palpable sense of energy, joy, and creativity that fills the December air.
Yes, creativity. Whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, recently you might have found yourself decorating your Christmas tree with colorful ornaments, searching for the perfect gift for that special someone, or cooking up your favorite holiday treat. All festive and creative endeavors.
However, at other times of the year, it might seem as though you only get fleeting glimpses of your inner creative.
Between travel, deadlines, and client calls, there are P&L statements to analyze, KPIs to measure, and scalability and sustainability to worry about. There’s plenty that keeps you busy, and creativity gets pushed to the side.
Then, when you need inspiration to strike and creative ideas to start flowing, crickets start chirping. Your creative well is running on empty.
The idea of “filling the well” comes from Julia Cameron’s bestselling book, The Artist’s Way. Her work describes how to keep your inspiration flowing and growing so that fresh ideas come to you when you need them most.
But before we get into how to replenish creative energy, fill the well, and achieve peak creativity, it’s essential to know what causes our wells to run dry.
Why Creative Wells Go Dry
If you’ve ever struggled to come up with ideas or brainstorm new content for your next book, speech, podcast, or article, you’re not alone. And it’s not because your initial ideas aren’t worth pursuing or because you lack research or resources. It could just be because your creative well is dry.
At times, your creative well—your artistic energy reservoir—is full, flowing with bright new ideas and living water. You can easily remember stories, experiences, and images and shape them into content for your speech or book.
At other times, your well is almost empty (or dry as a bone). There are three common reasons why your creative well might run dry.
#1 Overuse
Even the most creative people can suddenly find their well empty and in urgent need of attention. This is because as we create and progress towards our artistic goals—writing the keynote, drafting the book, and rehearsing our speech—our creative batteries can start to deplete.
In her book, Cameron says, “Any extended period or piece of work draws heavily on our artistic well. Overtapping the well, like overfishing the pond, leaves us with diminished resources. We fish in vain for the images we require. Our work dries up and we wonder why, ‘just when it was going so well.’ The truth is that work can dry up because it is going so well.”
Making time to fill the well when you feel uninspired is just as important as nurturing your creativity when you do feel inspired. To keep the downpour of ideas coming, you have to continue to feed your creativity.
#2 Neglect
I’m sure you didn’t intentionally set out to abandon all creative endeavors (but if you did, there’s a solution for that too).
We all get caught up in the roller coaster of life. There are seasons when things are more calm and there’s time and energy for more creative endeavors. And then there are seasons when you don’t even have time to stop and think (let alone spend a few minutes doodling).
But just like overuse can drain our creative batteries, the opposite is also true. Long periods of creative inactivity can also cause your artistic energy reserve to weaken. A writer who goes weeks or months without writing can become stagnant, consequentially finding it extremely difficult to pick up a pen and get any ideas down on paper.
#3 Barriers
Our own beliefs about creativity, what parents, teachers, and figures of authority have told us about our art in the past, the need for approval, perfectionism: these barriers can destroy the spark of motivation that leads to creative pursuits.
Perhaps you’ve experienced it before: suddenly, your mind lights up with an idea for a new project. It’s a little different, more daring than your current projects, but it excites you. Immediately the creativity gremlins chime in: “just imagine what so-and-so would think”; “no one would want to read / see / hear that”; or even just a simple, “no, you can’t do that.”
One of the greatest barriers to creativity is the sinister idea: “I’m just not creative.”
We’ve all had this thought come to mind at one time or another as we work to achieve our diverse goals. Negative thought patterns like this one are like hammers that smash the creative juices out of our souls.
But the truth is, inner critics and barriers like these will always be part of the creative process (as much as we wish we could throw them off a cliff and never hear from them again).
The speakers who write the keynote, the authors who finish the book, and the artists who present their glowing final product aren’t without their inner demons. They face them too, but they’ve learned how to silence them and continue creating.
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