Outside the Creative Process

January 26, 2010 | Published by Kjell-Roger |

The focus of being a creative artist is mainly the creative process and it’s goal; the finished product. There are however alot of factors outside the creative process that affect you. It can be small things like never being satisfied with the thing you create or everyone’s worst nightmare – a full on creative block. As a creative artist you will know; the battle are often fought outside the actual creating. In this post, or rant rather, I will comment and share my thoughts about some of these.

Self-confidence or rather the lack there of. This is a tough one and the one I find hardest to write about, but I’ll try my best. Sometimes you have a great idea, but when you do get creative it doesn’t always turn out the way you wanted it. And this can happen because of lot of things. Maybe there’s a skillset you don’t have but need, maybe others don’t seem to fond of the idea, maybe you actually made it but it doesn’t make people respond the way you’d wanted. We could keep going, couldn’t we?

I have been in the situation more than once. The one where I felt like giving up, started questioning myself if what I was doing was right for me and the one where I simply thought I wasn’t good enough. These are thoughts I know others than me have had. But here’s the kicker; There’s no skillset you can’t learn, there’s no idea that everybody will love, there is no ideas that makes people respond or feel exactly the same, taste differs to much. If this is what you really wanna do, there’s no such thing as not good enough. There’s only time. Get dedicated, learn the things you need to learn. Your idea may not be right for this particular project/client, but it might fit another one. Brace yourself, not every work and idea will amaze and get people to feel the same way you do, it’s just not the way people work. It may take a long time to get where you want, but you just gotta keep trying. A wise man once said: Nothing is worse than regretting the things you didn’t do

I might sound like a dreamer, in many cases I am and I’ll allways be, but my point is; everyone earns, everyone grows and the only thing that can stop you in that is yourself. I can’t promise that everyone will make it to the exact spot they want to be, but you have to try because in my experience; all the hard work usually pays off for something. So my best tip is this: Just believe in yourself. Give it another try. Never give up!

Creative block is probably the most common “nightmare” for us. You’re working with a project and usually you have somewhat of an idea thought up in your mind. This thing is gonna be totally awesome. But then it happens; the idea is gone, you can’t come up with anything good. You doodle around on your sketchpad or whatever and nothing is good, you get bummed out and angry with yourself. - ARGH, ain’t I suppose to be a creative artist??. We’ve all been there.

My best tip is; Stop what you are doing. Just trying and trying equals failing when you are in that spot, at least in my experience. Go do something completely different. Go take a walk, make yourself a cup of tea and read a magazine or something completely else. I usually get away from my sketchboard and computer. If I stay in front of the computer I just randomly surf alot of stupid websites and spend my time really doing nothing. And that doesn’t fire up your creativity at all. People probably have different things they do in this certain situations, but I think doing something rather different, but somewhat productive, fires up your brainjuice much faster than keeping on or doing some mindless activity when you’re in such a situation.

Distractions are also a common creativity-stopper. And there are alot of them. The TV is on and suddenly there’s a movie that seems great; – Hey I oughta watch that! I’m not saying that you shouldn’t watch movies or take breaks from working, just keep in mind at which point you do it. If you’ve been working for several hours straight, fine, take a break. You really should. But if you just started up and actually are in a pretty good “zone” that distraction, if you let it distract you, will most likely kill your “zone”. And from that distraction there might be others and then you keep postponing. I speak from experience, because I used to be quite easy to distract and by the time I got back I often had to start from scratch because the creative flow was gone and filled up with other things.

The best thing to do is usually just turn off or remove everything that can distract you, put on some good music that keeps you in the zone and carry on. I know it’s hard with the easy access to everything these days. You have the internet and then a friend suddenly tells you about this reeeeaaaally funny video on youtube that you just MUST see right now and your on your way. But if you really set your mind to it, these things are fairly easy. Keep focus, it’s your mind that get’s distracted, but you just gotta not let it.

So I hope you found this somewhat usueful. It’s more a rant on personal thoughts than anything, but I think that, along with a thousand other factors, these are some points that alot of creative artists struggle with so I felt like writing up my thoughts about the subjects. Now go be creative will ya?