Creative Ruts and Inspiration

I've been in a rut.

Perhaps it is a matter of creative depletion—that is, a thorough exhaustion of creative juices that seemed to be rushing for several weeks, then came to a sudden halt as they were slurped up by a pervasive lack of motivation and inspiration. The problem is that I model much of my productivity, and my idea of my own productivity (oh, my metacognitive contemplations are supernumerary, but that's a different story), around my concrete products of creativity. If I crank out a couple of poems, take a bunch of photos, and work on a website all in a week or two weeks, well, that was a productive fortnight to me. Yet if suddenly the keys don't seem to type out the right words, or everything looks really unremarkable in the viewfinder, I am instantly devoured by a crippling mental (and physical) lethargy that makes me wonder if I have ever amounted to anything, or if I will ever in the future.

To many, such thoughts are, of course, irrational. But I have an obsession with productivity, which is ironic considering my often procrastinatory listlessness and last-minute work ethic. My point is I have been in such a creative rut for the past week. I feel uninspired, unmotivated, and that in turn drives my desire to produce something, anything, even further. The more I do nothing, the more I feel pressured to do something.

Yet such ruts are natural, I suppose. They come and go. They are the byproducts of excessive overworking. That's the problem with "creative" lifestyles. Their quality hinges upon the whims and vagaries of one's own delicate mind. There is a widespread obsession with "inspiration". Where do you get your inspiration from? How were you inspired to write that story? What inspired you to take that photograph?

We rely too heavily on inspiration, and when there is a(n inevitable) cessation of such moods of inspiration—for they are indeed moods, that is, affective changes that then produce an effect on cognition—we immediately feel that we are in a rut. We are uninspired. We are unmotivated.

Writer's block is a good instance of this. If you write,  then you know that cranking out one poem or one story can take 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, a month, two months...it's really quite indefinite. A couple weeks ago, in a surprisingly long-lasting bout of inspiration and/or creative motivation (I think there is a difference), I wrote four rhymed, evenly-metered, 100+-lined poems in less than a week, which was a feat for me, seeing as inspiration tends to run on a short fuse, after which it is nearly impossible to write a poem—or any type of creative writing, for that matter.

But that's the problem. I wait on inspiration to do my writing and many of my other productive tasks and hobbies, and frankly, when you want to actually be a writer or be an artist or whatever, waiting on inspiration for each creative occasion would mean that I could probably write a full novel in the span of 5 lifetimes. And seeing as I presumably have only one lifetime...well, inspiration isn't very reliable.

I think that's the hardest part of creative endeavors, especially with writing—sitting down and forcing yourself to write, even if you think you have "writer's block" or that you have no inspiration. It's too dangerous to rely on something so tenuous, fleeting, and elusive as inspiration. You can't be an artist if inspiration is the only driving force.

It sounds entirely anti-creative and anti-artistic, but it is true. Sure, something inspired the spark of that novel or that poem or that painting or that photograph, but inspiration isn't what actually carried out the piece to completion.

So I am trying to come to terms with this so that a blank page isn't so glaringly and depressingly stark to me, and so that I don't feel bad when each word I write comes out as reluctantly and slowly as the remaining toothpaste in a nearly empty toothpaste tube, and you are forced pinch the sides with vain determination.

I apologize for the chaotic nature of these rough, unadulterated thoughts, but I had to put them down somewhere, and seeing as I hadn't updated this place in a while (ironically because of this said rut), I thought I'd brush away some cobwebs and shelve it here. Uunsurprisingly, of course, in the middle of the night, when questions of personal deficiencies and creative ineptitude seem most palpable and most troubling, but alas, such is the life of a hypersensitive and obsessive thinker.