Over the last few years, I’ve come to realize that my creativity has its own cycles. Or, as I prefer to think of them, seasons.
When I was in the middle of planning my wedding, I found myself gravitating more toward shorter nonfiction writing because I didn’t have the time or mental energy to really dig deep on a novel. When I was coming out of my mid-twenties mental health crisis, I wrote short stories for the same reason. After my wedding, I experienced this burst of creative energy and motivation that expressed itself through a scrapbooking protect instead of in words. Then, that energy shifted and waned as I got newly excited about my novel and threw myself headfirst into that.
As I’ve gotten better and more adept at understanding my own creative seasons, I’ve also gotten better at leaning in to whatever creative work currently compels me. I spend less time on projects that hold less interest and fight with myself less about what I “should” be doing and work on what I want to work on when I want to, without worrying quite as much about leaving things unfinished.
I’m much happier as a creative person—even now, with so much chaos and bad news and uncertainty—than I’ve been in a long, long time.
My current creative season has been propelled by a huge wave of novel writing energy. I’ve felt really compelled to dig deep into some of my larger scale, more ambitious projects—including the manuscript I’m revising at the moment—and devote most of my creative energy to those. I’ve also had a lot more motivation to get serious about the business side of authorship, whether that’s deliberately seeking out resources to help improve my craft or overhauling my website.
On the flip side, I haven’t been nearly as invested in either my short fiction or nonfiction this year, although I did recently complete another revision pass on a short story I finished last fall. As tempting as it was to try and push myself to come up with more articles to pitch or write more flash fiction, I’ve more or less accepted that shorter, one-off projects aren’t part of this season I’m in. There are still a few more places I’d like to submit my short stories this year, but once I’ve knocked those off my list, I’ll be setting those stories aside for now to focus on work I’m more enthusiastic about.
These observations might not mean much to anyone else, but they’re going to dramatically shape the creative work that I do—and the creative play I indulge in—over the coming months. This is a tough time to be creative for a whole host of reasons, and I want to make it easy as possible to do just that. To create, regardless of how futile it sometimes feels.
And if you’re in a similar boat, wanting to create but not feeling the urge to create in the ways that you usually do, or maybe just frozen by so many—or so few—possibilities, might I suggest that you try to determine what kind of creative season you’re in? Given the circumstances *gestures broadly at the pandemic, the election, and 100 other things*, you might be in a season where you just don’t have the energy to create right now. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Or, if you really dig deep and ask yourself what’s interesting you right now, what’s making you happy or moving you emotionally or bringing you peace, you might find that the answers surprise you. You might find that the kind of creative work—or play—that you need to lean into is something different than you expected. Whether you start a brand new project or resurrect an old one, take up a new art form or stick with what’s familiar and comforting, I hope you trust what your gut or subconscious or psyche is telling you.
Then, I hope you begin.
Does your creativity come in seasons? What sort of creative work have you been gravitating toward lately? Leave me a comment and let me know.