Why most of the stuff we learn about creativity is not helping us
So much advice about creativity gives us surface-level sound bites about the creative process, like “just sit down and do it.” Listicles and well-meaning teachers tell us that this is the only rule, and that this is the difficult part, without much guidance. But this advice totally neglects the inner life of creativity: the conditions that make creative acts possible and what actually happens in the mind of a creative before, after, and during a creative act. After studying creative writing, improv comedy, and experience design—and navigating my own creative blocks and challenges—I’ve realized that we can’t really talk meaningfully about creativity without first talking about imagination, spontaneity, and our inner landscape of thoughts and emotions.
Many people are unaware how afraid they are of their imaginations, and how they scare creativity away by their constant policing of themselves. Capitalist productivity spreads into every area of life, including our education and upbringing. We are taught to expect good results from our efforts immediately, to be “normal,” to have realistic or reasonable expectations, to not stick out too much but also be exceptional. Our understanding of how the creative process works gets tangled with our unacknowledged internalization of big systems that govern our lives: capitalism, patriarchy, Western hegemony, the effects of colonialism and white supremacy, etc…all of these may sometimes trick us into believing we’re not capable of this work. That we don’t have what we need to do it. For instance, women in particular are constantly told to not be “too much” or that they’re “not enough.” On social media, it’s amplified: we look to and evaluate others in relation to ourselves constantly. We only see the shiniest of results. We’re anxious and exhausted. We can barely make time to give ourselves what we really need: rest and down time and a break from the grind.
In this kind of hostile, constricted environment, how could a wild imagination survive and thrive? And yet everyone seems to know intuitively that the most creative and “successful” people dream big and do the seemingly impossible (or at least unimaginable), the things you hadn’t allowed yourself to think you could do because of a failure to imagine in a big, messy, and unfiltered way—and then commit to what the imagination shows you.
The imagination demands our attention
Writers often give strange and elusive answers about where they get their ideas. Anne Lamott says the metaphor of “listening to your broccoli” describes the process of ideation. Jennifer Crusie says she gets her ideas from “the girls in the attic” who deliver the ideas to her conscious mind. Toni Morrison wrote in the foreword of Song of Solomon that in writing this book, she became a believer in muses,“‘voices’ that speak to them and enable a vision, the source of which [she] could not otherwise name”. Basically they’re all saying that at a certain point, ideas just come seemingly from nowhere, from this mysterious imaginative part of them or of the greater consciousness, whatever you want to call it.
To me, the imagination is the deep, unconscious part of us that just produces thoughts, ideas, images all the time, whether good or bad, sense or nonsense, in the background of our conscious mind. It synthesizes and processes all the stuff we experience in daily life, and some writers collect this stuff in their minds like “compost heaps” as Neil Gaiman calls it. The imagination gives us dreams and “shower thoughts” or intuitions at random moments of the day when we’re feeling relaxed and quiet with ourselves.
To imagine is to call forth this random stuff our mind spontaneously generates. It’s both to form a mental image and/or to suppose or assume something to be true that may not be. To create something from nothing. To entertain the possibility that something might be true, however outlandish, and to take it all the way to its wild conclusion. To conjure in the mind, to see what hasn’t been seen before. To hazard a guess or a try. To make it up as you go along.
The imagination shows up in ways you don’t even typically notice in your daily life: like the time you misheard or misinterpreted something someone said and later found out you came up with something totally different; like the time you told a story about something someone you don’t really know did and why they did it; or like the time you did something you were told you couldn’t possibly do! It breaks up the routine, points to new directions, opens up a new perspective. Without it, avenues feel closed off, and life can feel limited. A failure to imagine or play can lead to a sense of despair.
The imagination is not like empathy—it reaches beyond what it knows. It surprises you into new actions, new thoughts and feelings. It’s expansive and welcomes all.
It requires a soft focus. Like mindfulness, it’s about paying attention and tuning in. You don’t have to work really, really hard every day to get the gold nuggets from it. Nor do you have to sit around doing nothing, passively expecting ideas to come to you someday. But you do have to relax and return your attention to the same questions or preoccupations again and again, if you want to be in collaboration with that part of yourself to generate the work that matters most to you.
We fill up our free time with “have tos” and “shoulds”, with passive, escapist distractions or endless scrolling. Or we’ve learned not to believe things that are serious can also be enjoyable. Generating creative work doesn’t have to be poisoned by our capitalist notions of work. It can be about enjoyment and pleasure and catharsis too. Engaging the imagination is both an act of self care and a way of connecting to our sense of possibility that our worlds—inner and outer—could be otherwise.
In all the advice we get about creative practice, one thing is clear: an artist or writer needs more time observing, daydreaming, processing, practicing, and resting than the time it takes to actually produce their best work. Think about that. How much time do you give yourself to really be present in your life? Or do you pressure yourself to just “sit down and do it,” and then get frustrated with the “it” turns out to be so large and unwieldy a task?
I don’t know about you, but I wasted a lot of time banging my head against the wall and trying to just use self discipline to sit down and show up again and again, even though I was completely depleted. I had great systems in place—tried using timers and project management programs, cleared out space and time to write, read all the advice I could get my hands out, talked to other writers about their process, went to therapy and saw coaches—and I was completely spinning my wheels the entire time. I just didn’t have any “juice”.
Or maybe you’re overwhelmed by the scale of your project and the height of your expectations and the glamour of your dream—so you don’t even start. That makes perfect sense. I hadn’t practiced starting enough or solving creative problems as they came up, so I didn’t develop those muscles yet. I didn’t realize yet that it was up to me to plant seeds in my imagination and then water them and tend to the soil (or whatever else you need to do to make this garden metaphor work).
Our capitalist productivity mindset and our teachers in formal education spaces might say that creative work is hard work and loads of practice is required. That’s all true, but all that daydreaming, paying attention, imagining other worlds, and enthusiasm for the process as a whole—that stuff is way more important. It just doesn’t sound as good. It sounds self-indulgent or “woo-woo” or childlike. But the imagination doesn’t respond well to meltdowns or threats, and calling ourselves names, getting mad at ourselves that we’re not doing enough, worrying all the time, or being completely exhausted will do nothing to coax it to play. And isn’t imagination or playful experimentation what fuels any creative act?
In this series on the imagination, I’ll be sharing some concepts and writing that I find incredibly powerful, because they reveal paths into the creative process that are just way more fun, intuitive, and energy-restoring. There are lots of books on craft and criticism, but I think these days we need to really allow ourselves to imagine, to create a creative headspace, and to find more ease. Imagination exercises, visualizations, and writing/art-making prompts all might help us engage with that part of our brains again.
Writing/thinking prompt: what is your imagination like?
I invite you to get to know it and write about your own imagination as wildly and freely as possible. Picture it. What if your imagination was a cave or underground lair? Or is it more like Hermione’s bottomless bag? What if it were a wolf or a lion or a sea creature in the depths? What’s it been up to? Where does it go when you’re not paying attention to it? What feeds it, and what annoys it? When and where does it show up?
It doesn’t have to make sense. The point is to just let yourself go and not worry about what comes out. It might be easier to do this right after waking up, when your mind is in that state between dreams and reality.