How to: jumpstart stalled creativity (Part One)

Sometimes, you just get stuck.  It happens to all of us.  For days or weeks or months, you're driving along happily in your creative project.  And then one morning, the battery's dead.  There's no juice, no spark, no energy to move the project along.

Our goal as creators, of course, is to keep things moving right along.  We recharge the batteries and get our projects back on the road.  Here are the first five of ten tips to help you do that.  (Five more coming later this week!  Stay tuned!)  

1.  Let yourself stink.

There's nothing like the pressure to create perfect (or even really good) art to bind up your creative juices right up.  When you get stuck, back away from "serious" and give yourself permission to create something really awful.  Really.  Be silly.  Wreck something.  Play.

2.  Play inside a thesaurus.

Treat yourself to an actual hard copy of the actual Roget's Thesaurus.  Thumb through the pages.  Savor the words.  Get lost in all the ways one can express "azure."  Get caught up in the language of numbers, time, emotion, geography.  String a few random words together and feel your heart sing.

3.  Grab your camera.

Your digital.  Your iphone.  Your full-on fancy-pants photographer kind.  The point is to take pictures.  Do it with abandon.  See something, and photograph it.  See something else, and photograph it, too.  Free up your eye to see and snap images and movement.  Quickly.  With a sense of abandon.  There are no sorts of results required.

4.  Go outside.

Take a hike anywhere -- in your neighborhood, on a mountain, in a city center.  Clear your head of its worrisome cobwebs by breathing in and out as you're exercising in the fresh air.  Look at the architecture or the trees.  Listen to what people . . . or the wind  . . . are saying.

5.  Write them down.

Make a habit of having a way to record your creative ideas the minute they pop into your head.  And DO record them the minute they pop into your head.  They LOVE it when you do that!  When they see you taking them seriously, they will come back and visit you again and again. And they'll tell their friends to come visit you, too.

Check back in later this week to get five more tips.  And post a comment below to let us know what methods you use to jumpstart your stalled creativity . . . . we'd love to hear!!!