We all want it, of course: that sense of being guided in our work by a golden thread of inspiration. It’s one of the most purely exhilarating experiences on the human experiential spectrum. You feel like what you’re writing (drawing, composing, conceiving, constructing, cultivating) is emerging effortlessly, perfectly, and you’re just the conduit. The right words and turns of phrase spring spontaneously from your fingers. Your powers and energies seem mysteriously and exquisitely aligned to bring forth exactly what you mean, and even — holy of holies, the mother lode of creative gifts — to release things you didn’t consciously know you wanted to say, but that greet you with a staggering sense of rightness when they land there on the page.
“Everybody enjoys it now and then,” says Lawrence Block in his oh-so-wonderful Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers, “when the words flow effortlessly and you feel plugged into the universal mind and the stuff on the page is worlds better than what you had in mind when you sat down. This doesn’t happen very often, but I’ll tell you it’s a kick when it does.”
Yes, it’s a kick when it happens — but it’s a sharper one when it doesn’t, and especially when you’re not just lacking that flow but are positively possessed by its opposite state. Many times in my moments of creative block, I have thought of Block’s words — and have hated them. I have thought of Kierkegaard’s description of an authorial state in which his ideas seemed to emerge fully formed, with exquisite perfection — and I have cringed. What sounds inspiring when you’re in a positive state sounds revolting and crushing when you’re in a negative one, and I have known all too well those extended states when the opposite energy from Kierkegaard’s comes over me, and everything I write emerges deformed, stillborn, or both. Maybe you’ve known this state, too.
So the question, naturally, is how to experience the divine flow state and not its opposite, how to generate or receive it, if indeed it’s a state that is accessible to effort instead of a purely supernatural-seeming endowment that categorically eludes our attempts at controlling it.
Here are several suggestions, ranging from the practical to the theoretical, that stem from my own experience and that of several other writers and artists. As you’ll see, some of these suggestions are distinctly more mundane and concrete than the psychologically and philosophically oriented advice I’ve previously offered at this blog. Remember, we’re examining creativity as a relationship between you and an independent, or independent-feeling, force or presence in your psyche. That means we’re looking at creative work as growing out of a relationship between you and the whatever-it-is in your soulspace: your muse, daimon, genius. Sometimes, as in our relationships with other people, we have to work on ourselves; sometimes, in the most humble of ways.
1) Experiment with diet
You can’t get much more mundane than food. It’s our connection to the physical biosphere. It’s also loaded with symbolic meanings and resonances, as any sociologist or anthropologist can tell you.
And I’m here to tell you that what you eat can hugely affect your experience of creative flow. Not to put too fine of a point on it: Try eating less. Even consider fasting, even if it’s just skipping an occasional lunch. Reams of evidence show that a restricted caloric intake contributes to overall health, and I’m here to testify that it can also contribute to enhanced creativity. To put it in highly non-medical terms — which are of course the terms I know best, since I’m not a doctor — the more you eat, the less energetic you feel. The more you eat, the greater the portion of your overall physical and mental energy that has to be devoted to processing this intake. Conversely, the less you eat — without tipping into an ill-health situation, mind you — the more light and vivified you feel.
If you find that you’re possessed of an unusual energy throughout much of the day, and hit with an unusual number of spontaneously occurring ideas, as if your unconscious mind is operating closer than usual to the zone of your conscious awareness, then you’re probably experiencing some of the benefits I’m describing.
Now, I suffer from reactive hypoglycemia, so I’m constantly having to snack throughout the day. I’d be the last person to recommend setting out on a foolhardy course of hardcore fasting. And I’m the first to admit how energizing it can feel to eat something when you’re experiencing a blood sugar crash. So yes, of course, factor all of those things into this perhaps odd-sounding advice to court creative flow by cutting out food. But also, please, consider experimenting to find if you, like me, and like a lot of other people, experience a surge of energy when you deliberately work some food restrictions into your routine. I’ve found this energy can easily be channeled into an experience of heightened creativity. In a way, it’s like deliberately inducing a less frantic-feeling version of the emotional high on the manic end of the bipolar affective cycle. And I assume we’re all familiar at this point with the established fact, as attested most famously and powerfully by Kay Redfield Jameson in Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, that a huge number of history’s greatest artists and creators have done their best work in such a state.
In April 2009, Men’s Journal published a long story about actor Matthew McConaughey. It recounted writer Neal Pollack’s experience of following McConaughey as he pursued one of his favorite pastimes: journeying cross-country in a pickup, pulling an air-conditioned travel trailer, stopping off at any points of interest. As recounted by Pollack, McConaughey was in his eighth day of a 10-day fast when they met up in California’s Joshua Tree National Park. Pollack questioned the actor about this practice, and received an answer that’s good enough for me (although I myself have no plans to engage in a 10-day fast): “Only water, tea, and broth have gone into his system since he started. Ten days is not a big deal. The human body has enough energy to last 40, he says. ‘I’m high and clean and tight, man,’ he says. ‘It’s good to feel hungry. If you keep filling up your tank when it’s three-quarters empty, you’re gonna run on old fuel. So you gotta drive it down to empty and let it work.’”
2) Experiment with sleep habits
Again, this advice involves experimenting with restriction. Perhaps the salubrious effect of restricted sleep upon creativity is related to the same energy cycle described above. Or perhaps not. Whatever the case, I find that I sometimes have the most wonderful experiences of creative flow on days when I’m a little bit sleep-deprived. I first found this out by accident and then later learned to play around with it on purpose. I usually need at least seven hours of sleep to feel fully rested. So what happens if I intentionally only get six or five, or less? If done judiciously and occasionally, what happens is that this sleep restriction results in a palpably enhanced flow of ideas from my unconscious mind throughout the day.
Note that there’s a point of diminishing returns in this practice, after which I’m just crushingly weary and foggy, which of course defeats the whole purpose. I’ve had to do some testing and trying to get it right. But I have found that if I’ve been getting my regular and necessary night’s sleep for a few days, I can go a night or two with significantly less, and find that on the following days I experience a flow of ideas and a sense of energy that’s way beyond the norm.
Importantly, if you want to try this out yourself, you’ll probably find that your best advice is to get up at your normal time in the morning. A regular time to rise seems to be key to all sorts of sleep-related goodness in terms of overall health and alertness. Stay up later than usual, then get up at your regular time. If it ruins your day, maybe it’s not for you. But if instead you find that it seems you’re A) possessed of an unusual and almost giddy energy throughout much of the day, and B) hit with an unusual number of spontaneously occurring ideas, as if your unconscious mind is operating closer to the zone of your conscious awareness than usual, then you’re probably experiencing some of the benefits I’m describing.
3) Learn to practice active imagination
Active imagination is a technique for accessing inner guidance and exploring your psyche through imagery. It was developed by Carl Jung in the early part of the 20th century. There’s no space in this blog post to explore it in detail, but here’s the gist: You sit or lie down. You relax. You let yourself enter a light alpha state (sleepy but still awake). The mental centers that work during the night when you dream get activated. And then you find that you’re following the actions of your imagination — a familiar experience to everybody who thinks or daydreams — but that they have, amazingly, become spontaneous. So basically, active imagination is a way to induce a mild state of lucid dreaming. The applications to creative work and the establishment of creative flow are, I assume, glaringly obvious.
The long-running online magazine The Morning News recently ran an interview with artist Julie Heffernan that explicitly hits in the territory of active imagination without mentioning the actual term. Instead, Heffernan refers to the experience as “image streaming.” The way she describes it is most instructive:
Interviewer: I read somewhere that you get ideas and inspiration through a process called “image streaming.” How does that work?
Julie Heffernan: It works differently as I develop, but when it started I had been through graduate school and this very intense Fulbright year in Berlin, really painting for 16 or 18 hours a day. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hours, and I think I was hitting my 10,000 hours or something. I started to notice that as I would relax and go into a fade-away state before sleep, I would be dreaming these images from nowhere that wouldn’t relate to anything I had seen in the day or was painting at the time; they would come to me like a movie. Francis Bacon talks about it, a lot of people do. I would just kind of watch this movie and think, ‘Oh my goodness this is so much more interesting than what I’ve been painting.”
Over the next few years, I changed everything I was doing stylistically so that I could see these images more clearly. That’s why I went toward what some people call the old master image, but what I think of as “Light and Shadow.” Over time the image streaming has given way to an inner sort of mind voice where I don’t necessarily see a particular independent image so clearly as I am being told by the inner voice what to do in the painting.
“Boy, O Boy,” The Morning News, May 24, 2010
4) Learn to practice mindfulness or other meditation techniques
Mindfulness refers to being aware of our surroundings or, in the particular case of what we’re talking about here, of our inner states. The explosion of “alternative” spirituality in the West — alternative to the formerly all-dominating Western Judeo-Christian tradition, that is — has made the Eastern version of mindfulness meditation available to absolutely everybody in America etc. now. Books on meditation are as easy to get as a trip down to your local bookstore or a finger-click journey to Amazon. Then there are all of those wonderful websites about it, too. And of course we’ve also seen a bunch of material published that reminds us of the mindfulness practices that existed all along in the West in the Jewish and Christian monastic traditions. The idea that most of us commonly walk around in a foggy dream state, locked inside our little conditioned ego selves, outside of which (and deeply inside of which) reality is inconceivably more rich and varied, has gone from being a trade secret of spiritual gurus and masters to being a matter of open knowledge. For a pleasant way to start learning how to see past this delusion by practicing mindfulness, go and read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now or A New Earth. Or read some books by Ken Wilber. Read Alan Watts, Charlotte Joko Beck, John Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Jiddu Krishnamurti, or any of the others whose books are everywhere.
Why? What’s the benefit to creativity and the establishment of creative flow? I’ll be lazy and let marketing consultant and author Jonathan Fields answer that for now, especially since he points out that you can get the same effect from other activities:
Being driven by the process of creation is by definition pushing into the realm of the unknown in a quest to give life to something that didn’t exist before. You never know if it will work or not until you do it. You can try to plan, to protect, to take steps to minimize uncertainty, but you never completely eliminate it. Living with that is just one of the costs of creating.
Which leaves the question, “how to you dance with uncertainty? How do you get comfortable with it?” My biggest breakthroughs, best lines, greatest imagery have come when I’ve struggled with a challenge, worked really hard, then stepped away and gave my subconscious mind the space to “let the answer come.”
So I’ll go workout, walk or ride in the woods, play my guitar or switch to another activity that allows me to leave the task completely behind. The more I let go, the faster the answers come.
A lot of creatives would be exceptionally well served by developing some kind of stilling practice, be it mindfulness, meditation, solo walks in the woods. Over time, these practices help us breathe through the anxiety of creation more easily.
– Jonathan Fields, interviewed by Steven Pressfield at Writing Wednesdays, May 12, 2010
Also remember what Natalie Goldberg’s Zen teacher once told her, as famously recounted in her classic Writing Down the Bone: Freeing the Writer Within: You don’t necessarily need a formal meditation practice of the sit-and-close-your-eyes sort. Her roshi urged her to recognize that her very act of writing could accomplish the same thing.
5) Be working
Julie Heffernan mentioned Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of “10,000 hours” above. That refers to the idea contained in Gladwell’s 2008 super-bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success that to achieve real success at anything, you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice. For evidence, Gladwell refers to the experiences of everyone from sports starts to musicians to business entrepreneurs (see “Practice makes perfect: Why 10,000 hours to be a success at anything, according to a to a top academic,” Mail Online, October 19, 2008).
Remember what I wrote in “Learn the Art of Active Waiting” about the necessity of working hard to hone your craft, and of looking at this as a means of waiting on your muse, since you’re working to forge yourself into a vessel or conduit that can successfully bring forth the inspiration that comes from your higher partner? The 10,000-hour rule plays right into this.
Picasso probably said it the most succinctly: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDIT:
“Genesis” – Used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney
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