I have a tradition of working on a new fiction project every year. I start on September 11th and go until the end of the year. It was something I started on 9-11 when I felt overwhelmed by the useless sense of destruction and the repeating loop of the tragedy on tv, so I sat down and started working on a novel. I rarely publish these works. It's mostly for me and maybe a few close friends.

But it has me thinking about this idea of creative habits and the bigger notion of creative momentum. So, I want to share an older blog post. I didn't write a new one this week, in part because I just finished my first draft on my novel. And after hitting 65k words, I didn't feel like writing about education.

Creative Habits Are Hard to Develop

Creative work is frustrating at first. Sometimes it’s the “tyranny of the urgent” that gets in the way. We have pressing demands that call upon our attention. For me, it’s grading. I’m teaching four courses this summer and I can easily justify focusing on student feedback before sitting down to write. Often, it’s some kind of home improvement project.

Other times, it’s fear or insecurity. That tiny voice keeps telling you that your work isn’t good enough and you’re simply wasting your time. You feel like you don’t know what you are doing and you constantly ask yourself if you’re doing it the right way.

A dominant question is, “Am I good enough?” And often the answer is “not yet,” which can feel like it might actually be, “not yet and maybe never.” Things feel slower. You haven’t hit that place of creative fluency where you can spend hours lost in a task. Everything seems difficult. The quality isn’t quite there, either. Everything takes a long time. Progress seems painfully slow. You don’t have the capacity or the stamina. Everything seems new to you – but not in that cool, exciting novelty kind of way. You feel lost. In other words, the early stages in your creative journey can feel like the first few weeks of getting into running or weight-lifting or yoga. It’s painful. It’s confusing. Everybody around you seems to know what they are doing.

Sometimes you get up in the morning and you just don’t feel like getting to work.

Over time, though, you build momentum and if there’s enough momentum, you end up creating something epic. Over time, as you create more and more work, you become competent and then skilled and eventually prolific. But it all starts with momentum.

What is Creative Momentum?

In the short video, I share the basics about what creative momentum is and how it’s different from creative habits:

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If you're interested in learning more, please check out the Creative Momentum Journal I created with Matt Miller two years ago. If you want to buy the hardbound version of the journal, you can purchase a physical copy here or you can get the digital download here.
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Dr. John Spencer

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