Getting back into the creative flow

About a year ago I had the first in a series of great ideas.

I’d always enjoyed writing, but it felt like the well had run dry. I would counter this, I thought, with my first ever New Year’s resolution: I would start a blog, where I’d put up things I’d written. It didn’t really matter what - short stories, essays or weird narratives or whatever, it wasn’t important. I’d get praised by people I admired on Twitter. People would post links to the blog, saying things like “important, powerful work from Tobias Brockie”.

Then came another great idea. Nobody ever actually follows through on New Year’s resolutions, do they? I’ve seen friends with grand plans like “do a marathon” or something, they’ve always just wound up in the same old rhythms of their everyday lives.

Resolutions are stupid. They are acts of hubris. No, I’d best delay the launch of the blog. Best gather my thoughts first so I can come out with some real crackers for the first few entries. The best course of action.

And 2013 obliviously rolled on. I got busy at work. I was planning a trip overseas. I went overseas. I did a lot of things, but I didn’t start blogging. I had notebooks full of ideas and thoughts, and a post-it note stuck to my computer at work that said, inscrutably, “Hotel Misgivings”.  

But sitting down and writing was something else entirely. It went beyond procrastination: writing out my ideas became like clutching uselessly at plumes of smoke. No longer was I inspired and motivated by reading other people’s good writing – instead it terrified and intimidated me.

It wasn’t just writing I’ve found difficult. Since I was a teenager I’ve intermittently written and recorded music. I dislike and am terrified of playing music live, so it was really just a bedroom vanity project, but I found writing songs the easiest thing the world. Not anymore. Sitting down with a guitar, my fingers would return to familiar positions on the fretboard, and I’d find myself absently strumming calypso versions of old songs I’d written.

I’d settled into an uncomfortable creative inertia. It was grim. But I wasn’t alone in this.

My friend Jonathan Phillips had hit a similar lull in his output.  For years he’d been knocking out several albums a year, playing both solo and in bands, under the name Mount Pleasant. He’d also been a prolific blogger. We were in the same circles in Christchurch and in Wellington, and we’d often collaborate.

“It just seems so self-indulgent to play music and want my friends to listen to it, when it is just my friends who do listen.”

He now lives in Nelson with his fiancée, where he teaches at a local intermediate school, and all is silent in Mount Pleasant. Phillips’ blog has been updated once in the past year, with a poem that reads like a dismissal, while his only music release in that period has been a hastily completed Christmas single.

For Phillips, recording “outsider jams” just doesn’t have the same allure it once did.

“I feel a much greater pressure now than I ever had before, where I don’t want to put out any old shit. It’s a lot more difficult.”

He attributes his prodigious former output to a “wilful ignorance” of his own “lack of ability” to play live.

“But I mean, even at our peak, we were only playing to like 50 people. It still felt like a step up, because we’d come from [former Christchurch bar] Antonio playing to 10.

“It just seems so self-indulgent to play music and want my friends to listen to it, when it is just my friends who do listen.”

He says his work as a teacher also gets in the way of his old projects, with that dark figure of professionalism to consider when he puts his work on the internet.

“On my first day as a teacher they pulled up a big photo of the cover of [my album] the Aztecs, and were like, ‘Jonathan, please explain’.”

“In my writing I’m influenced by my exact personal experiences of the world. It’s just harder because I have students coming up to me, being all ‘I’ve Googled you’.”

But while Phillips does profess to hold a “sad longing” for those good old days, he resolutely does not want to become “one of those guys wistfully reminiscing about the halcyon days of a scene”.

“My priorities are different now. I can still be creative in other ways. Just doing it all for those little guys.”

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Wellington illustrator Phoebe Morris is no stranger to creative block. For her final year project as part of her Bachelor of Arts in design, she created the part drawn, part written Page Perils, which she describes as a “how-to” guide for people struggling with creative inertia.

A major fear for her was beginning a project, and the infinite possibilities of putting pen to a blank piece of paper.

“When you’re going into a creative endeavour you don’t know what the outcome is and it could crash and burn, and as a creative so much of what your ego’s tied into what you do.”

Morris has avoided her own creative droughts by pushing through, never stopping working, a response she admits isn’t always the best course of action.

“My way of dealing with block was to work myself to pieces. I got carpal tunnel in my second year of uni, so learning to detach was a big part of the process.

“I guess some people have the opposite – they do nothing.”

While there’s no hard and fast rule to beating creative block, Morris says. it’s important to identify the specific fears standing between creators and getting to work. Part of Page Perils involves the identification of specific fears - of starting a project, of judgment, of the unknown - so they can then be overcome.

She says her work has already helped her a lot, and she will be putting the lessons of Page Perils to work in 2014 as she strikes out in to the professional world.

I’m scared that my writing will be terrible, and that the people I respect on Twitter will ignore me completely, or worse, weakly praise my work out of courtesy.

“I guess by trying to nut it out and section it into those fears is just a way of making people realise why they want to do what they’re doing. It’s helped me a lot because I have a lot of projects I want to do next year, and when I think about not doing them I know exactly why I don’t want to do them.”

OK. So. It’s pretty easy to work out what’s holding me back.

I’m scared that my writing will be terrible, and that the people I respect on Twitter will ignore me completely, or worse, weakly praise my work out of courtesy. I’m terrified my ideas are no good, and that there’s no use in even beginning. And I’m also pretty certain that I was never any good at writing, and people who have always urged me to continue were blissfully misguided.

Really, I’m overthinking things.

And the solution is obvious: the way out is to just sit down and write. Start small and accept it won’t all be good. So, I’ve started again, and am facing down the empty document. Like a heaving machine, I have started putting one word after another again. And it’s good.

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