Creativity is a much-studied activity that no one truly understands. And some of what we don’t understand about it includes

• how it occurs
• what triggers it
• how we can control it.

So in this post I’m intending to write entirely about my own experiences doing—and not doing—creative work.

Creativity Is a Flow

One of the first things I noticed about my own creativity is that it just flows out of me. I can have a creative thought in the shower, at dinner, walking along, chatting with friends, reading a book, watching TV or a film, listening to music, or even falling asleep.

I’m not really able to turn it off. I have given birth to creative thoughts in the strangest places, at the least appropriate times, and in the most difficult circumstances. Over the years, I learned to write down a lot of this stuff, because when the creative fever passes, I often can’t recall what I was thinking while I was in its throes.

I Can’t Force Creativity

Although creative ideas flow out of me with astounding regularity, the flow is not under my conscious control.

As I said, I’m not able to turn off my creativity, and—symmetrically enough—I’m not really able to turn on my creativity either. Although I haven’t ever tried this experiment, I’m willing to bet I can’t meet the challenge of coming up with a certain number of creative thoughts in a certain period of time.

Sure, on demand I can come up with quite a few random thoughts, and you might even be generous enough to call them “creative.” But I wouldn’t honor them with such a highfalutin rubric. Most of them will probably be silly, stupid, childish, crazy, or some combination of all four.

For me, trying to fill a quota will generally not produce creative thoughts that (as they should, in my view):

• meet a need
• point toward a purpose
• exhibit relevant meaning
• feel satisfying
• spark a lot of enthusiasm in others.

I Can Make Creativity Happen

Nevertheless, I have found ways to set the table for creativity, so I can sit down and wait to see if any ideas show up to feast.

These ways include:

• setting forth a clear purpose for the creative ideas I’m anticipating, which could be anything from “selling breakfast cereal” to “explaining the motivation of a character,” and beyond
• sitting quietly without distractions and waiting for inspiration to hit
• avoiding other activities, such as sharpening pencils or straightening my desk (If I’m there to write, I’m there to write—and do nothing else.)
• piggybacking or building on any creative ideas that do show up, as a method of generating more ideas (Maybe the character needs money. [Yeah, that’s a good idea!] Maybe she needs it to pay for her mother’s life-saving surgery. [Yeah, that’s another good one!] Maybe she needs to borrow it from her boss. [Yeah, that could happen!] You get the idea.)
• avoiding any judgment of my creative ideas (That process comes later. For now, during the idea-generation process [part of which I described in the previous bullet], there’s no room for negativity, objections, rejections, or rebuffs of any kind.)

I understand that I am very lucky to have some kind of a creativity muscle in me that has performed so well so far. I recognize that many people feel they don’t have one. I hope they are wrong. In fact, I am pretty sure they are wrong.

In my view and experience, most people of average or better intelligence can tap into a wellspring of creativity if only they have the courage to try and the techniques to support their creative efforts.

I Can Exhaust My Creativity

If you will join me in considering creativity to be much like athleticism, as in the metaphor of my having a creative muscle, you will readily see that every creative effort I make is going to require a commensurate effort at recuperation. I breathe in, I breathe out. I exert, I rest. I strain my brain, and then I make an attempt to soothe my brain.

What’s more, as with athletes, the quality of my performance as a creative person has exhibited good seasons and bad seasons, good days and bad days, even good times of day and bad times of day. There are periods when the ideas come thick and fast, then other periods when I have nothing creative to contribute. Of course, there are many periods that fall in between these extremes.

Just like an artesian well that brings fresh water from hidden sources, my flow of creativity seems to exhibit its own pace. I have never tried to plug it up, but I imagine if I did the urge to be creative would build up pressure until it would overflow.

I have occasionally tried to drain my creativity too much, and I have then found myself in a period where my creativity ran dry. Fortunately, this has lasted only for a relatively short period of time. But I have known people who have come to the end of their creativity.

It seems sensible that the creative juices can thin out and even dry up as the creative person ages—not always, of course, but often enough to warrant notice. In the same way that athletes lose a step in the latter part of their careers, creative professionals may similarly find themselves coming up with fewer or weaker ideas. I honestly don’t know if this is happening to me. So far, I don’t perceive any such changes. But if and when it begins to happen, I’m hoping I’ll accept the changes with grace.

You Can Find and Nurture Patterns of Creativity

All of these attributes of the creative flow lead to an inescapable reality: creativity exhibits patterns. I have mine. I would expect that you have yours.

If you can chart and understand these patterns, you have a fighting chance to nurture them. This will allow you to increase both the total amount of creativity you generate over your lifetime as well as your ability to direct your creativity when and where needed in hopes of accomplishing specific tasks and meeting specific goals.

I’m not telling you what your patterns of creativity might be. I’m merely encouraging you to expect that your creativity muscle is probably subject to one or more patterns, with highs and lows, strengths and weaknesses, good and bad periods, and the like. Look for them, and make use of them so you can more fully benefit from the creative flow that emanates from somewhere inside you.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.

I’ve been writing professionally for more years than I usually care to remember, and I am still struggling to fully accept some basic truths that other professionals have been freely sharing every one of those years: There is no shortcut and no easy way forward.

Naturally lazy, and given to an “organized” frame of mind, I have been searching long and hard for a way to write great material in half the time using half the effort—without success. And I still have not given up!

In some ways, I’m like the kid looking relentlessly through the pile of horseshit because I just know it: in there somewhere must be a pony.

But I’m adult enough to realize at some level that my search for a shortcut and an easy way to write great material—totally driven by my intrinsic nature rather than by any rational probability of success—is pointless.

That’s right: In my mind, I understand I’m almost certainly not going to find what I want. So I offer you the same advice I have been getting—and hoping but failing to disprove—for many years. There is no shortcut, and there is no easy way forward.

What this reality boils down to for professional writers is that you must nail your butt to the chair and work. You must log the long hours. You must push through the tedium and the pain and the temptations of other things you could do instead. You must write long. You must write hard. You must write steadily.

Once you are willing to concede that writing professionally is not a walk in the park, you can begin to do the hard work that’s necessary to succeed at writing. As a bonus, you may also begin to see the value of other truths about the plight of the professional writer.

For example, you and your writing are separate. Writing a bad poem or a crappy song or a stupid story or a worthless novel does not make you a bad, or crappy, or stupid, or worthless person. You’re still a wonderful human being, and you must begin to recognize that a far more accurate description of what has happened is this: you have merely made one or more mistakes in your work. You can fix them, or you can leave them as milestones in your wake. Either way, you can and should keep working.

Here’s another important truth about writing professionally: that inner voice calling you bad, or crappy, or stupid, or worthless is just a voice in your head. Sure, it’s a strident, tenacious, negative voice. But it has no more direct connection to “The Truth” than you do, or than those other voices in your head.

Maybe that negative voice got planted during a misfortunate moment in your childhood. Or maybe it took root during a series of mistakes or misadventures you experienced over a period of time. Or maybe somebody intentionally inserted that negative voice into your head for some nefarious reason of their own.

It almost doesn’t matter.

Just don’t pay it any mind, or at least no more than the absolute minimum you can muster.

You might be able to get rid of that negative voice if you come in and lay on a couch five days a week and pour out your heart and soul to some therapist. But there’s probably no way you’ll ever entirely eradicate it.

So it’s more practical just to turn down the volume and credibility on that voice as best you can and get on with your writing.

A deeply spiritual teacher used to talk to me about how he had done so much hard work over such a long period of time to get rid of his ego and be one with the universe, and how whenever he began to suspect he was making some important progress on that journey, his ego would tap him on the shoulder and say “Great job!”

That’s the eternal struggle. That and the search for a short, easy pathway to your best writing.

You will never “win” either struggle.

Which leaves you with the only fruitful course of action if you want to be a professional: don’t get involved in the struggle. Just write. And then write some more. And then keep writing.

Eventually, you will strike your own form of gold. And that, I can assure you, will be its own reward.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.