Creativity Lost… and Found!

For var­i­ous rea­sons (health, chron­ic pain, an aging pet, vol­un­teer com­mit­ments, and the Pacif­ic North­west weath­er), I’ve spent the win­ter pret­ty much chained to my desk. When­ev­er I had a spare moment I tried to force myself to sit down and write—right now! As you can prob­a­bly guess, I was supreme­ly unpro­duc­tive. And frustrated.
You know how if you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’ll keep get­ting what you’ve been get­ting? Well, today I decid­ed to try some­thing dif­fer­ent. I shrunk my man­u­script (with the gap­ing hole in the mid­dle) and my research notes so that they’d fit on one page each, I grabbed a pen­cil, and I went for a walk.
Wouldn’t you know it, my cre­ativ­i­ty was hid­ing in the woods! I found her right about here:

Once I found her, the man­u­script prac­ti­cal­ly wrote itself. And I got to walk (hooray, exer­cise!) in the sunshine.
We even stopped to make a few new friends on the way home…
Piglets
Piglets!

Sheep closeup
A sheep, one day before shearing.

Goats
Goats!

6 thoughts on “Creativity Lost… and Found!”

  1. I know what you mean, Lau­rie! Some­times we need a change of scenery or rou­tine to break through the block. I’ve learned that when I try too hard to write, I can hard­ly write any­thing. I like the idea of tak­ing my papers for a walk. I may have to try that sometime!

    Reply
    • Well, this man­u­script is a pic­ture book, so that makes it eas­i­er to take with me. I’m not sure it would work for a nov­el, but I think it would if you were to focus on a sin­gle scene or chap­ter at a time. I read it through before I went, then walked and read some more, then put it away for awhile and just thought about the prob­lem. Voila! I sud­den­ly had a mid­dle where before I had a gap­ing hole. I’m sure I looked like an idiot stop­ping in the mid­dle of nowhere to scrib­ble furi­ous­ly in my lit­tle note­book, but it would­n’t be the first time I’ve looked like an idiot. 😉

      Reply

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