Creative Cycle
Sun, July 19, 2009 at 5:59 PM I have been learning about my own creative cycle over the last few years. It took me quite a while to even notice that it was a cycle. I would just get into these terrible creative slumps. I would fight and fight and fight with myself to crank out work whether it was design jobs for my freelance clients or art/music for myself. I would get very depressed and feel as though I should just quit doing anything creative at all. All my work sucked. No one cared. Blah.
Shortly after hitting bottom, I would explode with creative energy. I could handle 3 freelance clients/projects at once. Every idea worked. I looked at all of my past work with pride. It was great. Three months later I was pulling my hair out again.
This pattern would continue. 3-4 months of creative high, 2-3 months of creative low.
Once I finally noticed that it actually was a pattern I could deal a little better with it. When I was down at least I knew I would be coming back up. I still fought it pretty hard at first though. I thought that if I just worked harder I could push through it. Boy was I wrong.
After about three years of cycling I started to realize the best thing to do when I was down was to change direction. Stop trying to create and instead take time to manage. Do all of those organizational things that I never had time to do when I was on the creative high. I started focusing on archiving my work, organizing my photographs & audio samples & drum loops, shameless self-promotion on Facebook/MySpace/Twitter etc., finding inspiration by reading blogs and just waiting for the cycle to pass.
Have you discovered your creative cycle? What are your strategies?
Reader Comments (1)
Great post. Very on point.
I also focus on the organization and tech prep work in the down time of my creative cycles. Sometimes I do some technical development and training to bring new chops.