How did you get your creativity back?

Ever since I learned how to read I started writing. When I was a kid the only two things I was genuinely passionate about were reading and writing. I can’t remember a time I didn’t write until I stopped.

It’s been a decade since I wrote anything and in this past decade I’ve had to force myself to even read. I’ve tried writing prompts over the years, tried writing little paragraphs but I can’t get over this mental block I’ve had for so long. When I was younger my mind exploded with so many ideas and I rarely finished a story because I had so many ideas. Now I can’t even start one. My mind is blank every time and it feels like a chore.

I still enjoy and love reading don’t get me wrong, usually when I find myself immersed in a book I really enjoy I wonder why it took me so much effort to start it but it becomes a cycle and I really only read like a couple books a year these days.

All I want really is that feeling of passion I had as a kid/ teen. I’m not sure if I’m meant to be a writer or if I’ll ever be any good but the why I want to write is really just that. It’s the only thing in my life I’ve really felt so much pride and joy doing and all I want is that back. For those who spent many years not writing what were some things that helped you?

in writingby divebars5G

90%

26d

TransportationOk3086

25d

It's on the morbid side.

But I thought about how didn't have really any thing to show for my life yet (32 yrs) and I had a semi mid life crisis. I grabbed my old work from a box it'd stored it all in. Went through it, remembered how much it used to mean to me. How creative I used to be. I was unstoppable back then. I used even inspire people around to push harder and dig deeper.

And then I become very aware of my mortality at that moment. I could die tomorrow with so much regret. Knowing I let my fire fade. I'd become complacent. I'd given up essentially. I use to live by this quote my 8th grade English teacher said to our class the first day, "Leave a legend."

And I just reignited in that moment. I refused. I just refused for my 9-5 job and playing video games to be all I ever did. And I just went for it. Started redoing my story. Been working on it non stop since July last year. And now I'm like 80 percent done with my rough draft and it feels good to be myself again.

Memento Mori☀️🌜

divebars5G

25d

I love this ( not loving the hardship that came with but how you turned it into something so positive ) and really resonate with the whole I don’t have anything to show for my life. This past year has been super hard on me with that aspect. If you don’t mind what’s the story about?

TransportationOk3086

25d

My book in a nutshell is a story about a latino queer man growing up and dealing with a lot of childhood trauma he experienced and how it’s affected his life, friendships, relationships and his mental health. It’s pretty grounded in reality. It’s 1st person so you’re in all his thoughts and feelings from child to adult. I essentially wanted to write a book to help people who feel the same way, or experienced the same things as my character to feel seen and significantly less alone. I hope I’m able to do that.

Your post sounded a lot like me too. It resonated with how I felt last year. In my opinion, the moment will come for you. The reason I hit the low that I did was because I lost everything honestly lol. Had a huge fallout with my ex friend group. My sister too. We no longer speak. I burned those bridges. There were no distractions anymore. Just me.

And i started to think about what really mattered to me. Your moment will come, that moment you feel ready again. I think it's great to remember who once were but on the flip side you need to remember that now life has really happened to you. You've learned so much you didn't know before. Admire and embrace the present you and everything you've overcome. You're so much more wiser than you ever were, that's really just as special and important as your younger self.

With my book, I feel like I was meant to write it at this point in my life. It's so much better now because I can apply my life experience into it now that I didn't have at 15 yrs old. It had to be now, at 32. I know it will happen for you too, because you're already thinking about it so much, OP.

No_Bed_2177

26d

Some things that worked for me was finding a medium that I really liked to read, like comics.

Then I'd find a genre I really enjoyed, find out which tropes were done well and which ones weren't.

I'd start reading all the trashiest ones because I'd feel compelled to re-write them, essentially just making fanfiction.

I'm not really looking to become published, so all writing is done for my sake, I guess, and it works for me.

MyLittleTarget

25d

Self insert fanfiction has been great for me. Just giving myself permission to make the most Mary Sue character ever and write the tropiest thing I can think of has made a lot of difference. She is literally Jedi!Barbie, and the whole story is wildly self-indulgent, and I'm having so much fun. It gets real ridiculous sometimes, but I'm just playing with dolls, so it doesn't matter.

Maybe someday I'll do some original work again, but for now, we practice while wreaking havoc in a galaxy far, far away.

(Oh, and the trigger for all of this was reading the Republic Commando series. I fell in love with the lot of them, and I was off to the races.)

Minimum_Apartment_46

25d

I would love to read Jedi Barbie, personally. Actually it would be amazing if someone made a science fiction novel where a Barbie-esque girl is the chosen one and saves the galaxy.

MyLittleTarget

25d

My stakes are nowhere near that high. It's mostly an exploration of how much portal fantasies would suck if you're neurodivergent. But that would be fun to watch/read. I love it when the MC is a super girlie girl, especially if it's just a character trait and not a focus of the story.

dinerkinetic

25d

I am a huge fan of "this fantastical wonderful thing/these fulfillment tropes won't actually make you all that happy" stories (and autistic), so that sounds pretty dang cool to me

divebars5G

25d

This is such a great idea tbh

Imaginary-Stranger78

26d

I feel this in my very soul. Writing is the one thing that has never left me even if there were times I slacked at it. It's just apart of me. You ARE a writer at the end of the day and if you wanna get that joy back just do it. It'll come back, maybe not like how it was but in short spurts that's when you just sit and write or jot down notes. I always keep a notebook and pen in my bag just in case or download the Google docs app. Read more, watch TV in the genre you like and little by little that spark/desire will return.

PositivelyWritten

26d

Do you do all your writing by hand? Just curious. I’m always torn between hard copy and digital.

Imaginary-Stranger78

26d

Not usually. I used to write a lot by hand when I was younger but getting older (30s) wrists start to hurt BUT I make exceptions for those works that need world building or when it's just quicker to write out than to type.

I'm mainly typing (digital) I did it alot on computer for a series beforehand (as well as hand writing a 'book bible' for it) most days I find it easy to write in Google docs for other I'm doing and I have plenty works on that.

It's all about seeing what works for you! I suggest testing the waters if you can. Bring a note pad thats big enough to fit anything you carry or if your car and have Google docs on your phone for those spur of the moment ideas.

PositivelyWritten

26d

Writing really is something that never leaves your heart — even when not writing. You sound like a true writer to me. Did something happen 10 years ago? Suffer a loss or traumatic event? Get negative feedback? Something seems to have derailed you on a soulish level. Go back there and figure it out. Forgive. Heal. Pray through it. Write from that place. Then the dam will break again.

divebars5G

26d

I don’t really know what happened tbh. I think it was an accumulation of things. I stopped writing consistently when I was around 17/18 and I’m 27 now. It sounds stupid but it started with a ton of insecurity and self hatred. I hated that the only thing I was “good at” was writing and I wasn’t even good at that in my mind. So I convinced myself it was all pointless. I think that was really the turning point for me and even when I know deep down it’s dumb to think that way life also got a hold of me and I’ve been dealing with a lot of depression and lack of motivation on everything since.

PositivelyWritten

26d

You’re probably depressed because you’re not writing. Your true self is being repressed. I’m not surprised this happened during that age bracket for you. Young people/young adults go through such an attack on their identity. If it’s attacked enough, we can adopt lies about ourselves. Perhaps you adopted the lie/false belief that you weren’t good enough and so others probably would think the same??
This is an expression of “imposter syndrome.” I’ve found the real enemy in life (the devil and his minions) would love nothing more than to silence the truly talented, authentic writers. To me, what you’ve been through (the attack on your identity), validates you have a gift to write. If you can believe that, you can write fluidly again. If I might encourage you with one final thought…. You were created by God, in His image, and He is an extremely talented Creator. So you have deep creativity hiding inside you that the world needs. I hope this helps and that you find your release to write again. :)

divebars5G

25d

Thank you so much for this positive and uplifting message! I would like to think maybe I am meant to be writing.

Nezz34

25d

Hmm......maybe in general:

Cut things that unnecessarily drain your time, energy, and happiness. Distance yourself from people who wear you down and out. Buy a dishwasher, if you can. Listen to what you want to listen to. Say no to stuff you don't wanna do.
Study up on topics that you care about and/or that interest you. Think about stuff you see in the news or in history, or your life experiences. Sometimes strange interests inspire story idea: search and rescue dogs, arctic hysteria, hobbyist geneologists who help solve murders, bizarre domestic terrorist militias, killer plants...whatever. You can open your mind to just casually gaining knowledge of a subject and then slowly those different articles start to knit themselves into a story.
Go on adventures and be with enthusiastic, exciting, supportive people.
Help someone with their thing.

I don't really know if it's possible to recapture exactly the feelings we had as kids and teenagers. That white-hot, super bright enthusiasm we have for the things we love partially comes from so many things being "new" to us and having not had our dreams checked by reality yet. It's a hard thing to re-create as a constant state (the way it was when we were younger), but I think we can revisit that joy as adults when we're hanging out with great people and dogs.

Oh yeah, #5---no pressure! Pressure just buckles it.

And #6. Protect yourself from the sort of pain a lot of adults just take on without a fight. Don't let people's nonsense break your spirit. Run from that crap. But also embrace the depth of adulthood--maybe that's an appreciation for small things, ability to perceive nuance, or explore multiple ideas at once. That kind of stuff can lead to really nice writing sessions that may not be quite the highs we had as kids but that are great in other ways :)

acheloisa

25d

Are you depressed? Losing your joy and passion for things you historically love is a symptom of that. How about your work or relationships, are you stressed and drained all the time? Do you sleep enough, drink enough water, and eat decently? Are you always scrolling on your phone? For me, creativity is something that flows easily when there are no barriers, but can just as easily be blocked by other things like what I listed above.

It's also a muscle. Or perhaps a skill is more accurate. You can practice it, get good at it, and also lose it if you stop using it for a long time. A creative exercise I like when I feel like no ideas are coming to me is to sit down and rapid fire off 20 or 30 ideas in one or two sentence chunks. They can be trash ideas, they can even be plagiarism, you just have to do it as quickly as you can without thinking about it too hard. That gets my brain feeling warmed up, and once I'm done I like to pick 5-10 of them and expand them into paragraph long summaries even if they suck.

Whatever you decide to do, you just have to make yourself do it. It will suck and be hard and not fun for the first bit, but once you start building habits again it will get easier and more joyful for you.

CadenceHarrington

25d

I'm in the exact same boat, and I even joined this subreddit to try to reignite the spark. As for reading, I still can't sit down and read anymore, but I listen to Audible on my drive to and from work now, when I'm doing chores, and before I go to bed. I think that's the way to go if you can't find the time or desire to sit down and read. I don't think it has the same impact though; I do love it, but I don't remember names as easily as I feel like I did when I read. I find myself repeating people's names to myself to remember.

Sometimes, when I just sit down and start idly typing away, I can find some random string of thought that pulls me along and spins out a small sliver of a story, but I have a hard time sticking with it. The same problem I always had as a kid too. I'm much better at essay or article writing than sticking with a plot unfortunately, as much as it pains me to admit it. Maybe I'll finally get this brain kicked into the right gear for that one day. I still try. I hope you sort it out too, since I know you'll be sad if you never do.

Edit: Lord, I felt inspired and launched Scrivener, decided to edit the file name and accidentally deleted my last work! Great way to start haha.

Dale_E_Lehman_Author

Self-Published Author

25d

Do you have any sense of why you're not able to get back into it?

I went through a ten year period of not writing fiction after an agent I was working with turned out to be a con artist. The betrayal hit me harder than I realized. For a long time, anything I tried to write sounded like garbage, at least to me.

I got back into it only when I got an idea for a mystery and told myself I was going to write it no matter what. It also helped that I'd had an opportunity to do some non-fiction writing and get paid (a little) for it. It was mostly a matter of getting some confidence back and rediscovering that the writing process could be fun again.

Darkness1231

25d

As a young man I wrote poetry, then some short stories. Next I became a programmer. Turns out, coding scratched the very same itch as writing poetry and stories. Retired now, and I'm writing stories again.

What are you doingnow; What is different from before; Are you doing anything that addresses the itch to write? What did you used to write?

Reread your stories. Do it with your more mature viewpoint. How much editing will be required? If it is HUGE, then just rewrite the story. Good advice I got sometime back was "write it again, the first time was practice"

Next, read anything related to that genre. Anything at all. Do some searches for similar works, that are free to read if necessary. Check your local library's website.

Made some effort on the above? Cool. Now think about the characters from your old stories. What would they think of our Post-COVID world? What changes might have happened in their story? Which of them will be better off, and which won't.

Good Luck

Hlorpy-Flatworm-1705

25d

Television and movies. I chock it up to the feeling when Hank Hill has a dream about his friends wife and it becomes a huge ordeal but in reality, he was just bored with work. Sometimes, getting out of your element helps a great deal. I invested in The Screenwriter's Bible [i got it from ThriftBooks, lightly used for hella cheap] and now my brain analyzes movies and I can take the way Id recreate movies into my writing. Maybe you also just need a little diversity. :)

honestlyjustatroll

25d

Boredom with life and weed help me get back into it. Once I understood that writing and creating is the only thing that gives me life meaning, things become easier.