Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

– Scott Adams

Whether you’re a novelist, musician, software developer, painter, poet, designer, or any other kind of creative, you probably know what it feels like to have “that time of the month”. You cramp up and buckle down for the storm that lies ahead. Your mood shifts and you get more and more frustrated. You feel cranky and critical. You pass the time by taking out your frustration on others. You wonder if you’re ever going to “get any” again. Good ideas, that is.

I’m talking, of course, about creative blocks.

What Causes Creative Blocks?

Without understanding the cause of creative blocks, you might just see creativity as a quality you either have or don’t have. You might think there’s an idea faucet somewhere in your mind that turns itself off and on at its own leisure. But creativity is not a limited natural resource. By learning what causes creative blocks, you can gain access to an infinite well of imagination and ideas.

The primary cholesterol clogging your creative arteries is fear. Fear of imperfection, fear of failure, fear of the pain involved in making progress, and so on. J. K. Rowling, who many would consider one of the greatest storytellers of our time, said that she experienced her worst case of writer’s block when writing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Why? As she said in an interview with Scholastic.com, “I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralysed me. I was scared the second book wouldn’t measure up, but I got through it!” (emphasis mine)

To loosen your creative muscles become an imperfectionist. Allow yourself to barf out ideas onto the page, the canvas, the text editor, or whatever medium you use to bring your ideas to life. Bad output beats no output, and you’ll often find that once you have something to look at and criticize, it becomes much easier to shape it into something you’ll be proud of.

For example, when I wrote the article on online dating, I knew this wasn’t a cutting edge newsworthy piece that was going to hit the front page of Digg and reddit. I could have just kept chasing my tail and told myself that I must have something better to write about. But it was what I had in me at that moment, so I recorded and delivered, and I was ultimately happy with the result. It helped keep my creative juices flowing and I said what I wanted to say on that subject.

While fear is probably the single biggest impediment to unleashing your inner Picasso, there’s no discounting the creative value of knowledge, experience, and a practiced ability to see relationships between seemingly unrelated things.

Knowledge and Experience

An insatiable appetite for knowledge and new ideas is the foundation of a healthy creative process. The vehicle of your self-expression–be it words, music, paint, source code, or whatever–will likely influence your info-cultural consumption. To expand your creative capacity in a given field, become deeply researched in that field. The more knowledge you have, the more reference points you have, and the more dots you have to connect and draw new insights.

As a writer on topics of personal growth, my intellectual eating habits are biased towards books, film, music, and other cultural artifacts. For example, a lot of the writing I do on dating and relationships is inspired by all manner of material that I’ve read specifically on those subjects, but also by great works of fiction like Atlas Shrugged or Gone with the Wind.

My article on Authenticity and Subordination came from a quote I read in, oddly enough, O Magazine (yes, Oprah’s magazine :). A more recent article, Interest vs. Commitment, came from a single sentence I read in a book the other day, that talked about how people will often get interested in something, but never really commit to it. That immediately lit my creative spark on “partial commitments”–something I’ve had experience with and learned to control–and out popped a new article.

Another useful technique to expand your creative frontiers is to consciously push yourself outside of your intellectual comfort zone. One of my favourite ways to mix things up is to visit my local magazine store about once a month and semi-randomly select a few magazines off the shelf that I wouldn’t normally read. I like doing this because, with a relatively small time and money investment, I can explore new disciplines and broaden my horizons.

Of course, you don’t have to do this with magazines, nor necessarily on a monthly schedule. If you’re a programming language designer, you could make it a point to learn a new programming language every few months. As a musician, you might try tasting a new music genre and/or group every week. There is no right or wrong way to explore; it’s all about listening to the voices that inspire you and improve your results.

Ask the Right Questions

Sometimes resolving a creative block involves just asking the right questions. Things like:

• What do you spend a lot of time thinking about?
• What kinds of things do you talk about with your friends?
• What annoys you about the world?
• What do you and your spouse argue about?
• What’s your favourite book/movie/song and why?
• What’s the craziest experience you’ve had recently?

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea. I’d encourage you to think up your own questions that help stoke your imagination. Whether you’re stuck for a business idea, trying to write a song, or looking for an idea for your motion graphics assignment at school, all of the above questions could help you uncover ideas and get your groove back.

My ideas for blog articles are almost always extracted from things that have happened to me recently, issues I’ve struggled with and worked through successfully, or things I talk about with my friends, who are a mixture of computer geeks, Poker players, graphic designers, serial entrepreneurs, and other Nonaverage Joes.

Write Your Ideas Down

Another way to avoid creative anorexia is to keep your ideas ahead of your output. When you get a whiff of something good, follow the scent. My own experience of creativity is that it doesn’t happen on a schedule. Sometimes the ideas just start flowing, so I write them down. If the feeling is intense enough, sometimes I’m compelled to stop what I’m doing and write the article on the spot. I’ll be reading a book and come across a passage that gives me an idea for an article, and suddenly I’ll lose my ability to concentrate on the book anymore until I’ve written the article!

Experiencing a creative block can be difficult. It slows down your progress and makes you doubt your abilities. Sometimes it even prevents you from getting started. By understanding what causes creative blocks you can learn to have better control over your brain’s idea faucet. The best approach to overcome creative blocks is to avoid them to begin with, and that means flooding your brain with new knowledge, ideas, and experiences on a regular basis. It also means asking the right questions, and appreciating the value in recording your thoughts as they come off the wire. Learning to stimulate your artistic circuitry doesn’t happen overnight, but with enough practice, you’ll start to feel like you’re walking around with a light bulb over your head. :)