Sustaining Creativity Day After Day

When I started Blaugust with a creative writing idea, I failed to account for how draining spontaneous creativity is day in and day out.

It takes intentional effort and practice to sit down every day and tell your brain, “Okay, create something now.”

Unfortunately, I don’t practice that every day, so coming up with something entertaining and meaningful from a random writing prompt in 30 minutes or less turns into a frustrating chore very quickly. There’s a skill to switching into creative mode that isn’t always intuitive for me, and certainly isn’t habitual right now.

I also quickly became uncomfortable with how personal they were. I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s always supposed to be a facade covering my real self on this blog, and I don’t particularly like my inner thoughts and feelings leaking out too much.

So I hit the eject button on creative writing for the time being. The main purpose of blogging is to entertain me. Not having fun + not learning something + not getting paid = I could be doing something else with my time. Like playing Dwarf Fortress.

That’s not to say there isn’t value in practicing the chore of creating something every day when you don’t want to. It’s just that I’m not a working artist, or particularly want to become one. It’s far easier for me to generate an income through software development.

Writing down a few idle thoughts about something, on the other hand, is less troublesome. You just have to stop before it goes on too long.