Writing Lessons & Advice: Boosting Creativity
One of my Christmas presents in 2024 was a Tome Writing Toolkit, a computer-based and user-customized resource that guides and encourages aspiring writers through the process of novel writing. Three different toolkit options are offered, each with varying levels of feature access, but each offering starts with a quiz that helps tailor the toolkit to meet the user where they are in their writing journey. This may just be me, but I already felt enlightened with a clearer vision of my potential story and my writing process in general from the first few days with my toolkit! I’m eager to continue the developments! I may share some progress as I see fit and possibly even some tidbits of what I’m learning, which brings us to the reason for this post.
One of the first things my toolkit tackled was nurturing creativity, a highly essential piece of any artistic project/expression. I almost feel dumb for not explicitly considering this in my original strategies to overcome writer’s block! While those aren’t terrible things to try, no tips, tricks, or lessons will get you very far without creativity on reserve. We often speak of creative juices flowing or drying up, but the better writers can’t/don’t wait around for the peaks and streams to come to them. They keep the juices on tap through habits and activities that help cultivate their ingenuity.
Creativity-cultivating can be subjective from person to person, but whatever it may be for you, the ultimate goals are to foster inspiration, creative freedom, and thinking more or less within your daily life. My Tome toolkit lesson mentioned how Charles Dickens walked at least twelve miles a day “with the intention of letting his mind wander and observing the happenings of the world.” For me, certain prompts offered by Reedsy via email every week often inspire me. Other suggestions include but are not limited to:
Taking time to read other fiction
Taking daily walks with no phones, music, or conversation. (Miles walked is up to you.)
Watching a movie or television without other distractions
Journaling regularly
Meditating
Diverging from routine
Collaborating with others
Daydreaming-- another personal habit of mine
Engaging with other, non-writing creative outlets--like pottery, drawing/doodling, doing puzzles, etc.
Stimulating your senses-- for instance, smells or tastes of mint/peppermint, citrus, or eucalyptus can boost creativity and/or focus. Also, color psychology suggests surrounding yourself with the color blue. Audio recommendations for these purposes include instrumental or classical music, nature or ambient sounds, and white or brown noise.
Indulging curiosity--learning, exploring, trying new things, staying open-minded
Working with challenges or limitations--for example, some of my favorite Reedsy writing prompts have encouraged writing a story using xyz line, or from xyz perspective, or not using xyz words.
My Tome Toolkit has various famous writers' quotes interspersed throughout the lessons and modules. A fitting one from Stephen King says: ‟Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.” I think by some intuition we know that creativity is something fluid--like water--hence coining a term like creative juices. However, one thing about most liquid bodies is that they can run low, dry out, or dehydrate. If in our power, we take active measures to remedy or prevent the situation. We won’t often wait for some kind of natural or automatic replenishment. We find and make time in our days to actively write. But some time and space should also be given to active pursuits of creativity too. That’s how creative juices are maintained.
Hope the encouragement to pursue creativity is more help (or even better help) in finding/keeping writing inspiration and staving off writer’s block!
What do you do to cultivate your creativity? If you want to discuss your habits, activities, or other topics you want me to cover in the future, you're welcome to reach out to me in the comments, web chat, or socials!
Sources/further reading
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