Creativity isn’t Inspiration. It’s habit.

You always hear it; I can’t do my <artistic project> because I’m uninspired! Then the person proceeds to give reasons why they aren’t inspired.

Its an excuse.

I’m guilty of this myself, so I know.

I’ve complained about how bland my art studio is; have it done anything about it? Nope.

I’ve complained about how noisy my location is, so I cannot write; did I move somewhere else? No.

Its all excuses to not work on your project.

So why do we make these excuses? Many, many reasons.

The main culprit is passion.

When we lose passion for a project, we lose motivation to continue working on it. But we as a culture have driven into each other that giving up, is bad. But when you don’t work on this project, what else are you doing? Likely procrastinating on ‘anything’ creative, right? I’m sorry but, procrastination is like giving up, because you’re not doing the thing you wanted to do.

Guess what? You’re allowed to move onto something that you’ve got a passion for. You can totally leave that project for when the passion comes back or scrap it.

A canvas is easily painted over.

A novel or digital work can be deleted.

Sculptures can be reworked to fit a new purpose.

What’s the other reason people make up excuses not to be creative? Habit.

That’s right, habit along with motivation are the two big contributors of a project being finished or left to collect dust.

Think about it. What are you doing if you’re not working on that project? Anything and everything else.

Say you’ve got a corporate job (I don’t mean some ECO sort of job, just anything that’s not self-employment) and you know on certain days you can work on your creative project. You come home, make food… then what do you do? If you’ve been procrastinating on your project you’re going to just chill until bed. The reason for that, is that’s the habit you’ve set, and as a human, we gravitate towards whatever is easiest. Sitting and chilling until bed, is a lot easier than spending what little time you’ve got on that project.

I’m saying all this, because I’ve been there, I am there. My last vocal article was almost a year ago! Yes, I was between semesters in school, but I’ve been done school as of January of this year, so what the heck have I been doing for 5 months? Frankly, focusing on the wrong aspects of starting a business, but I also haven’t been creative. It’s been over a year, proper, that I’ve written anything. Yes, I’ve edited a few more chapters of my novel, but editing is different in my mind.

I got Gib-Smacked the other day, and it lit a flame under my ass. Its not a fire just yet, but it restarted my motivation, and I became inspired to do a lot of writing as of late; but I haven’t put a single word to page. And it boils down to being out of habit.

Now, how best to getting back into a habit? A lot of artists that seem to have fallen out of habit, rely on this concept of Time Chunking… Fa-Chunking… Chunking… We all have our own little word for it, but the concept is still the same. (I like Fa-Chunking personally)

What you do, is simply spend fifteen minutes on your project, then leave it for ten minutes and come back to it for another fifteen minutes and just repeat that. Of course, you can reduce that leave time to five minutes if you’re short on time.

Here’s something to look out for though, if after those ten minutes you don’t want to come back and work on that project, while completely okay, you also might examine why. Because if the passion isn’t there, move onto something else. It is why you’re in that position to start with.

Honestly this works with everything, from sending emails to doing laundry and other chores.

One last thing about inspiration versus habit. While not everyone is the same, I’ve found the more I’m in the groove of working on my writing, or doing art of some kind, the more inspired I become. You surround your space in finished pieces of art that clearly inspired you to do them, so why can’t they continue to inspire you to do more art?

So, get into the habit, Fa-chunk that art project, whether its canvas art, writing, or something digital, until its finished, or you realise that your passion for it has waned and start something new that you’re equally passionate about.

Myself, I’m going to be writing more and posting it on here.

I’ve got 3 shorter fiction pieces that I’ve been inspired to write, and I’d love to share that with you. While I’m not writing I’m going to be working on art pieces. I’ve got two canvas pieces that need finishing and a lot of much smaller items that shouldn’t take me very long to finish, I just need to sit down and do them.

Go out there my friends, get inspired but most importantly get into the habit.