What I do to not lose my creative spark

The origin of creativity is in the mind, what you can imagine, you can bring to life. You can’t create something you’ve never imagined or envisioned (unless by accident), so this goes to show you that a lot of the creative process takes place in our mind and what else is in the mind? Memories.

We often underestimate the importance of memories, experience and logic when it comes to our creativity, but they all play a very important role altogether. I think you reach a creative block when you’ve exhausted all of these resources, when you’ve covered all the lessons your experience has taught you through the years, when the memories have all been employed in some form and when your logic constantly takes you down the same paths. Of course there might be other factors too, here I’ll just talk about the ones you can influence.

In order to regain your creative spark you can do two things, make new memories or change your way of thinking.

Changing your way of thinking

Everything you’ve done so far, creativity wise, has been done following a specific pattern, a specific way of thinking and reasoning. Reaching a road block where you lose your creative spark is because you feel the redundance in your logic, you feel like everything you are doing looks the same or comes out identical. One way of overcoming this then is to change your way of thinking and to operate under totally different rules, for example an artist who feels he is making the same song over and over again might simply just change his recording studio and be exposed to different people who think differently. This alone will set him up to a new path, just changing your environment or the people you work with is enough to rekindle your creative spark.

You could also try to do things in a different manner, instead of relying on the same rules and logic you’ve always relied on, you could give a challenge to yourself and impose different constraints which will force you to be creative in order to find a way out.

Make new memories

Our creativity stems from the memories we have, we eventually shape these or get inspired by them in order to produce our creative output. Another way of regaining our creativity is by simply making new memories which would give us a different perspective about the work we do already. Being locked in an echo chamber where we ingest and produce the same things constantly can not help us remain creative. Creativity is not a fixed algorithm, by design it means reinventing and changing, I don’t think you can call yourself creative if you keep doing the same things in the same way.

Making new memories helps us gain new experiences which eventually translates in our work and way of doing things. Being exposed to different creative forms equally does the same.

Beware of burnout

No matter what you do, even if its the most fun for you ever, if you keep doing the same thing over and over again you’ll eventually burnout. Creatives often don’t think about burnout because they are in a constant cycle of reinventing themselves and trying out new things, that’s why they are under the impression that they are not doing the same thing, but this is not the case. The fact that you have to come up with new ideas is already somewhat of a routine that you can eventually grow weary of.

You didn’t necessarily run out of ideas, you are simply going through a burn out phase where your body finds it harder to come up with new ideas because it has been doing it for so long.

Conclusion

Trying different things or ways is in my opinion the best way out, depending of whether you are overloaded or underloaded with content your creativity can be rekindle by taking a step back and using a different inspiration. The world is full of so many experiences and ways of making memories, even just a walk down the road could be full of inspiration.

Thanks for reading ☺️