13 Ways to Stay Creative: Easy Solutions for When You are Stuck

Let’s face it: it is tough being creative. It is tough coming up with new ideas while juggling other responsibilities you have in life. Especially if your work (like being a writer) requires you to be creative all the time.

Creativity, I have found, is often connected to inspiration. You often create more when you’re inspired. In the list below — of ways to stay creative and keep your creativity flowing — you will therefore also find ways to gain inspiration.

 

13 Ways to Keep Your Creativity Flowing

1 — Listen to music that inspires you. I find music from movies very inspiring. There are genres in movies just as there are in literature, so search around on YouTube for something that correlate to the genre you’re writing.

2 — Create a board on Pinterest, find pictures that inspire you, and then pin them to your board. Then, when you need inspiration to stay creative again, you can look at the pictures on that board. A quick note: you can keep your boards private if you don’t want others to see what you’re inspired by or what kind of goals you have with your creativity.

3 — Take a long walk. I find that one of the best ways to come up with new ideas or reload my energy in order to create words is to take a walk and get some fresh air. Fresh air also helps to cleanse my head.

4 — If you’re out and about, keep your eyes open. There is probably something around you that will inspire you. Just keep your eyes and mind open. Are there any interesting people around you that you can use as inspiration for characters, a cute dog you might add to your story, a shop that inspires a great setting, perhaps a sound of birds singing, etc. The options are endless if you just remember to keep you eyes and mind open.

5 — Find inspiration from the writers that are what you want to one day become. Read their blogs or listen to their podcasts. When I need a surge of inspiration and a desire to be creative, I usually take a moment to look through Joanna Penn’s blog The Creative Penn or listen to an episode of her podcast.

6 — Talk to other writers. The internet makes it easy to talk to someone wherever they might be in the world.

7 — Ask for advice from writers you admire.

8 — One simple way that I use to find inspiration is by reading my thesaurus. I just open the book at a random page and read.

9 — Clean up and organize your desk. Just don’t empty it. Remember what Albert Einstein said: ”If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” A bit more organized wouldn’t hurt, though.

10 — Persevere. Keep writing. Just dump some words in a word document. Create a separate word document if you don’t want to dump just anything in your manuscript. Quitting shouldn’t be an option.

11 — Write something else for a while. Perhaps something in your journal, or a poem, or a list of your current goals, or a list of things you want to do (or places you want to travel to) in your life, etc.

12 — Work hard, but also remember to eat well, sleep well, and activate your body! Being frustrated, miserable, and tired all the time won’t help you achieve your goals or dreams.

13 — Make some coffee! This usually always works for me when I’m feeling mentally tired. A couple of sips of coffee and then I’m off writing.

 

How do you stay creative?

 

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