Feeling Creatively Stuck? Try Following the Routines of Other Types of Artists

Before the sun rose, while her children slept, Toni Morrison hauled herself from her bed to her desk and began to write. Stephen King wrote at a child’s tiny desk in a trailer. In the basement of Powell Library, Ray Bradbury fed coins into a pay to play typewriter to write Fahrenheit 451. These routines have been used by many writers to set their own routines. I, too, have been that writer. When I’m in the throes of a book length work, I will give myself a stern talk each morning at 5 AM when my alarm goes off:

Article continues after advertisement

“Toni Morrison didn’t become great because she slept in. Stephen King would never have written Salem’s Lot if he didn’t get out of bed. R.L Stine hasn’t been publishing for DECADES because he likes the warmth under the covers. Octavia Butler…” And on and on, listing authors who I admire until I drag myself up so I can write for a few hours.

It’s not just writers whose methods I emulate. In fact, I find the routines of other kinds of artists, at times, more fruitful. At the very least, they feel less like I’m badgering myself and more like I’m giving myself the freedom to create and experiment.

I’ve spent a day as Mozart, walking through the woods while contemplating my work and the world. I’ve hacked up my stories to see what stranger creations they’d become if I just reordered things—a bit like David Bowie. Exploring these new methods of creation have helped me keep the creative fire inside dancing. And on the days when my brain is clogged and run down, they have helped me find my way back to my stories.

An artist that has an impact on many for the way that he created and approached his craft is Prince. Prince was … well, Prince was everything. He was a song writer behind both his own and others’ hits (Nothing Compares 2 U, Purple Rain, Manic Monday just to name a very small few). On top of that, he was a mind-bending guitarist, drummer, and keyboardist. Among songwriters, he’s known for being more than just a hit maker or a musical genius but a powerhouse.

According to Prince’s longtime engineer Susan Rogers, Prince would spend long hours (18+) in the studio. He wanted to walk in with a song in his head and leave with a finished recording. Prince had the hard-earned skill of knowing how to play multiple instruments, so he was able to move between singing to playing and then composing. Though he often worked in a structured way, laying down specific instrument tracks in one go before moving on to the next instrument.

It’s believed that Prince wrote a song a day. To meet this output, he wasn’t a perfectionist but a creator. He knew and trusted his methods and knowledge of music. A part of his genius was allowing himself the space to play and experiment. To jam. His talent and skill would take care of the rest.

As writers, we can translate his method by thinking of our time not in word count goals or chapter counts. Each aspect of our stories creates a whole and the only way to get to that whole finished story is by constructing the individual elements that make it up. Next time you sit down to write, target the specific element of the story you are working on. Is it introducing a new character, setting the right atmosphere in a scene, or something else? Then layer in what you need element by element—not focusing on perfection, but completion.

Exploring these new methods of creation have helped me keep the creative fire inside dancing. And on the days when my brain is clogged and run down, they have helped me find my way back to my stories.

Prince’s approach of completing a piece in one work session may feel overwhelming to some and that’s okay! You don’t have to do what he did. You can explore the world of design and building to find a way into your story and craft.

Are you an architect or a gardener? If you’ve never heard this divide it’s like plotter or pantser. Chef or cook. Architects, when it comes to writing, are those who sketch out plans and build their stories before they begin writing. Gardeners, on the other hand, work by intuition. They don’t sketch so much as plant and see what grows from their writing. The architect Zaha Hadid and the gardener Gertude Jekyll aren’t your typical architects or gardeners because they pulled from other disciplines. Primarily, painting. That ability to allow other disciplines to influence their work is what set them apart and what they each can teach us still today.

Hadid was an Iranian painter and architect from Baghdad whose buildings can best be described as still motion pieces of art. She was known for being an abstract builder who believed buildings could look just like the landscapes they impacted. To create her structures, Hadid surveyed the land, working to get to know the landscape of her subject intimately through analyze and mapping out the future project and its materials. After this analyze and pre-building, Hadid begin her memorable, stunning sketches. Despite the data and analyze, Hadid’s sketches were abstract and thought in terms of how nature (the wind, the sand, the wing of a bird) bent around space and how buildings could do the same.

Hadid’s process and way of looking at the world challenged what we knew of how materials could work together. Hadid’s work challenges us as writers to think about what we can do with story and narrative. What if our settings were only voices? Our plots run away characters shapeshifting on the page? What creative doorways to our works does that type of thinking open to us?

While Hadid worked in a way that melded the structures of nature with artificial materials, Gerturde Jekyll created her landscape designs by thinking in colors and the changing of the seasons. Jekyll was interested in the play of light and color in her garden designs. This developed from her early life as a painter. She used her skill of composition to see gardens as more than landscapes but living art, which at the time was groundbreaking. She authored the book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden that teaches gardeners how to design their beds and the landscape using wonderful arrays of colors and borders, leading to landscapes that change as you move through them.

Before she was a gardener, Jekyll was a painter and traveled with artists learning and studying her craft. Her work as a painter involved performing the artist’s version of copywork and painting Joseph Mallord William Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ again and again, learning its breathy use of colors and movement. This understanding of color and how it works together allowed Jekyll to see how plants can do the same to create a portrait out of the landscape.

As writers, we can learn from Jekyll the power of elements working in harmony together by studying those before us. Copywork is a long-held writing practice used by many authors to gain a closer study at how great works are assembled word by word. An exercise to try: pick a piece of writing that is doing what you want to do in your own work, what you believe you could never achieve or do and write it out—either long hand or on a keyboard. Study each line. Question how it leads to the next. How do the paragraphs flow from one to the next. The emotions it evokes. Then translate what you’ve learned to your own work.

Georgia O’Keeffe is another artist whose process I’ve sometimes sought to translate to writing. O’Keeffe committed to her daily routines, which changed throughout her life. In New Mexico, she was an early riser and would spend the first hour of the day walking in the desert, getting to know her painting’s subject intimately. Because she painted many landscapes and pictures of the natural or artificial world around her, O’Keeffe allowed the world around her, it’s lines and compositions, to romance her and inspire her. Walking. Watching. Imagining. And then recreating to the best of her abilities what she saw and how it made her feel.

O’Keeffe was so devoted to the act of seeing and transposing those sights and feelings that she would do zoomed in series or portraits based off photographs like her series “Jack-in-Pulpit.” This commitment to showcasing is not new to authors. We work tirelessly to create experiences and images in our readers’ minds.

Taking a page out of O’Keeffe’s faithful routine and process, try writing a scene or passage of your story in a series, getting ever closer to the heart and emotions of the scene. O’Keeffe was okay with working slow and focused on the intention she had around her painting. The size of the canvas. The brush she’d use to make her almost invisible finite strokes. All of it was an intention and choice for her. More and more, due to the collapsing weight of capitalism, writers are forgetting intention and trading it for publication—what sells, what’s hot, what’s trending. We rush to a shrinking finish line instead of taking a breath, a pause, and stepping back to look at our work and what we are really trying to express to our readers. Then slowly, intentionally doing it for no one else but the reader and ourselves.

The final artist I want to consider is one I’ve only learned about over the past year: Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Tate is a citizen of the Chickasaw nation and a classical composer, best known for fusing classical composition with a blend of Indigenous storytelling, language structure, and music to create a particular style of Indigenous classical music.

Tate’s process is one of community. He will often reach out to family members, friends, and people from other tribes to listen to their stories and talk with them about the themes circulating through the piece. Tate asks of his work to speak in dialogue not just with other musical pieces but with communities he is speaking to and interacting with. Tate then thinks deeply about the construction and logistics of the piece. What is he composing for and what instruments are at his disposal?

One of the most powerful things that Tate’s process has shown me is a way of writing a story that does not shut people out but welcomes them in. I, like many writers, write for myself, but when it comes time to publish, I do not want my stories to isolate, gatekeep, or push readers out of anything but themselves. The next time you are about to start a new story or are stuck, instead of shutting the door and locking the world out, pick up the phone, leave your house, and let the world in.

Tate and the rest of the artists here can teach us to listen, to slow down, to look with our whole hearts out and to create in the same way, fully and passionately. That way, maybe, we can reach someone in all this noise and suffering.