Overwhelm, for me, often stems from having an abundance of ideas but lacking the time or energy to act on them. The longer I linger in the liminal space between idea and action the more frustrated I become. However, I believe we’re meant to feel that way, since we’re hardwired to move away from pain and towards pleasure, so the discomfort from inaction motivates us to make progress to alleviate the pain.
I try to see this creative discontent as useful, albeit uncomfortable, but staying there too long is depleting. Having to hold onto unexpressed ideas forces us to juggle them, along with new ideas, and every other responsibility we have.
A couple months ago during a stretch where I felt particularly stuck, I told
that I hadn’t completed anything in weeks. The supportive friend she is, she’d noticed a pattern that only a close friend could:“You know when you copy text?”
I nodded.
“Well you can’t copy anything else until you paste what you have,” she said.
She equated this sensation of cut-but-unpasted text to my overwhelmed feeling.
“All these drafts are just floating and you need to paste them,” she said. “The stress comes from having to hold onto them all without losing them.”
She’s right: I sit on drafts for months, overthink, redo them, until the edits I’m making only make them worse. The farther away I get from the original spark, the more it loses its luster.
Unlike me, Maddie’s quick to take an idea and share it. For instance, last week, she shot a video in several locations, edited it, and posted it in the same day. Observing her contrasting “pace of pasting” unlocked my desire to attempt to move in her direction of being quicker to release an idea (paste what’s cut).
But could I? Perhaps this was innate to her… and people like me who tend to have more drafts than published work are doomed to create at this glacial pace?
I hoped not because this slowness often leads to creative constipation—an unpleasant sensation that I wrote about here. Being creatively backed up occasionally is natural—it happens due to time restrictions caused by our relationships, careers, environments, and our mental and physical health. But when these backups become chronic, like they have for me, that’s when it’s useful to seek a solution.
I’m not alone in this creative condition: I’ve observed several similar cases in the clinic, and it’s one of my favorite issues to help people navigate in their process. Each situation is different with a unique solution, but universally making cuts and setting deadlines usually help.
This sounds easier than it is; people who tend to be “draft people” like me aren’t going to magically become “quicker creators” like Maddie overnight or maybe ever…
I believe that we can create at a quicker pace if we want to because there have been periods where I’ve “pasted quickly.” It’s been a while but not long enough to forget how good it felt, so I tried to reverse engineer how that happened. Of course there are several variables at play, including mental and physical health and interpersonal issues, but beyond those, my output has been quicker as a result of being forced to hurry up—by external deadline.
There’s never going to be enough time but there’s also often too much time. There comes a point in some projects where there’s not a clear end so instead it’s just choosing to stop— which is usually when another project is knocking.
So in an effort to not keep ideas waiting at our creative doors… the list that follows contains advice I give myself when I’m buried alive under a drafts mountain.
I hope they are helpful to you too but, as always, take what you like and leave the rest. And feel free to comment what helps you with this issue. Or if you don’t have this issue and you relate more to Maddie, great—what’s your secret?
And if you relate to me, as someone who typically takes longer between cutting and pasting, does this tendency make you feel a frustration best articulated by Julie Delpy in Before Sunset?
With the anxiety that feels like homework hanging over my head at all times, I’m distracted constantly. And without the dopamine hit that comes from handing something in, completion, publishing, and feedback—it’s difficult to gain enough momentum to see things through.
With unexpressed ideas (drafts) and tasks needling at us as they get moved from to-do list to to-do list, we clutch onto them. But would it be a relief if we lost them?
Which brings me to #1 on the list….
11 WAYS OUT OF CREATIVE CONSTIPATION :
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