Creative Goo Article -Rick Benzel

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nine ways toescape fromcreativityhalting goo

gettingunstuck

By rick benzel, M.A.

Every artist gets stuck from time to time in creativity-halting goo. It canhappen at any phase of your work: when youre beginning a project, in

the middle, or close to completion. The goo can overcome you in manydifferent ways it can prevent you from finding an idea, or cloud yourmind when choosing among many ideas, or pull you downwards into acreative void.

Whenever it happens and whatever form it takes, creativity-haltinggoo is frustrating, energy draining, and harmful to the self-esteem of thecreative mind. It feels like a sticky poisonous tar that envelops you. Nomatter how much you try, you simply cannot escape from the gooey spotyou have gotten yourself into and your creative work stops dead in its

tracks.Keep in mind that there are times when losing your creative momen-

tum is not because you are stuck, but rather that you are entering a valuablephase of the creative process referred to as an incubation period.During this time, your mind unconsciously processes new ideas andfeelings that will eventually drive your project forward. Many creativepeople actually nurture such incubation periods, letting themselvesremain fallow for days or weeks without trying to force ideas. They stoppainting, writing, composing, dancing, acting and instead sit back and

attend to other business in their life, all the while letting their uncon-scious intelligence gently process images and thoughts in the back-ground, without any attempt to track them.

How can you know if you are in an incubation period or a gooeymess? Actually, the most telling cues come from your body. When you


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incubate, your physical being is at ease. You feel calm, in a relaxed stateof mind without nervous energy or anxiety. You eat and sleep well, andhave no problems performing the other work of your life. You enjoyfriends, reading books, going to movies because behind the scenes,your mind is hard at work considering.

When you are stuck, your body also lets you know it but in verydifferent ways! Your mind races, your stomach hurts slightly (or a lot),and your muscles become tense. The goo on your mind and body weighsyou down, and at the end of a day, you feel like you need an expensivefull-body massage. When you are stuck in goo for several days, yourstress level mounts and often transforms into anger towards yourself orthose around you.

Being stuck is no way to be creative or to live. It saps your energy,your vitality, and your joy in creating. While artists and creators cannotget rid of all moments of stuckness, the solution is to minimize theireffect on you. You need to learn techniques that allow you to break outof the sticky mass that holds you back, leading you back to health andproductive creativity.

In this article, I present to you nine approaches that I have found tobe useful in getting unstuck. They synthesize a range of ideas and tech-niques that I have used with my clients, as well as with myself. Think ofthese approaches as a toolbox that you can open whenever you needsomething with which to pry yourself free. Keep in mind that you mayencounter various types of stuckness. Try out different techniques andsee which are best for each individual situation.

The Reframing Approach

This approach to getting unstuck is based on the psychological con-cept of reframing a problem, which means learning how to changeyour view of the problem. Given that your reality is shaped by yourthoughts and interpretations, reframing is based on the concept that youcan abandon negative self-talk, replacing it with positive statements andattitudes that lead you to a more fruitful interpretation of the moment.

Consider the following situation. You have just spent a week writinga chapter of your novel, but now youre stuck. Somehow your protago-nist has ended up in a position that doesnt make sense for her character.You begin to curse at yourself, upset that the last week feels like wastedtime. You cant figure out how to salvage the chapter you worked so hardto write. Your mind is going blank and the goo slowly begins to ooze allover you, making you feel like an author whos been tar and feathered.

Many writers, painters, and other artists who invest large amounts oftime on a project experience this type of gooey remorse. They becomeso invested in an idea that they find it difficult to accept when it doesntwork and they become stuck trying to salvage the idea although theyknow it is taking them down an unproductive path.

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107rick benzel, M.a.

This is when reframing can help. Rather than cursing yourself andviewing the experience as wasted time or as proof that I lack talent(both of which are nothing but thoughts you place in your own mind),why not reframe the experience in a way that inspires your creative

juices instead of draining them? You might say to yourself, This plottwist is a great one; let me save it for another character later in thisbook. Or you could think, Wow, what a great idea for another story.Or perhaps you can tell yourself something as mild as, Well, I guess Iknow my character better now. Ill rewrite this chapter and learn fromthe experience.

Reframing is an extremely valuable tool for artists who feel frustratedand stuck at the beginnings of projects. If you believe you are goingnowhere, it often indicates that your inner critic is halting you from try-ing out ideas because you fear making a mistake. It can be useful toreframe your early work entirely, viewing whatever you do in the con-

text of This is a good start for my project and I can always come backand revisit it, rather than thinking, I dont think this is the right startfor this book (painting, song, etc.) so Im not going anywhere until I canget it right.

It is always useful to remember that you can alter your thoughtsabout many situations. You can feel angry, frustrated, tired, upset withyourself or you can transform your feelings into patience, understand-ing, and self-respect for the efforts you make.

The Marcel Proust Approach

The great French writer Marcel Proust (18711922) is known for astyle of writing called stream of consciousness, in which he poured hisfeelings out onto the page like water over a dam. Prousts novels are longextensions of his thoughts and memories, with thousands of wordsdevoted to the smallest of incidents. For example, in his famous novelRemembrance of Things Past, Proust devoted 30 pages to simplydescribing rolling over in bed at night.

For creators, the value of the Marcel Proust approach to stream ofconsciousness lies in the fact that when you are stuck, you need torelease your mind from rules and formulae so you can open yourself upto fresh ideas. If you are at an impasse when writing your novel, stopthinking about writing your novel per se, and begin writing just aboutanything. If you are painting and dont know what color to use next, stopthinking about painting the piece in question and head for a new canvaswhere you release all preconceptions into a stream of consciousness ofcolors and shapes. If you are choreographing a dance, go off into a studio

and simply dance your head off using whatever movements occur to youin the moment.

Stream of consciousness allows you to reconnect with your innermostfeelings and thoughts, a veritable brain dump that lets your creativity


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hang out without regard to correctness, appropriateness, or brilliance.You simply lay all your thoughts bare and in doing so, you let yourselftap into authentic feelings and ideas that arise from deep inside you. Byrelaxing yourself into stream of consciousness, your mind easily andquickly floats from one idea to another, surging in feelings and memoriesthat often contain the seeds of the solution to your stuckness.

The Marcel Proust approach is similar to what you may already doin your journaling or in the morning pages associated with the book,The Artists Way. All three methods are aimed at the same phenomenon:releasing your mind from your inner critic that halts your creative work that little voice that claims a certain passage you are writing is stupidor that your painting is ugly. As Proust taught us, its very creative tosimply let your mind spill out, and even your ramblings can turn into aworld-renowned piece of literature.

The Pottery Approach

When I was 25 a few decades back, I decided to try pottery as a formof artistic expression. I signed up for a summer course at a small potterystudio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Within months, I was sitting at thepotters wheel, throwing vases, sugar bowls, and pitchers. During thistime, another student potter suggested that I read a book calledCentering in Pottery, Poetry and The Person, by M.C. Richards, whichhas turned out to be one of my most inspiring reads.

In Centering, Richards uses the potters wheel as a metaphor for life.When you try pottery, you quickly learn that if you do not center the clayon the wheel, it is nearly impossible to pull the clay up into a balancedobject. For Richards though, centering clay means far more than simplyplopping it down in the middle of the potters wheel. Centering also musttake place in your mind, in your feelings, in your entire physical being.In talking about knowing how to center, Richards wrote:

Wisdom is not the product of mental effort. it is a state oftotal being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, forsurvival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition,for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who weare, come into a center with their forces, come into an experi-ence of meaning that can voice itself as wise action.

When you are stuck, it often means that you are not centered in yourbeing. Your inner artist is at odds with something in your life that doesnot support your art. Something is awry that tilts your clay that is,your ideas, your projects and you will not be able to get unstuck in thesame way that a potter is not able to fashion a nicely centered pot.

The Pottery Approach is thus oriented towards finding ways to centeryourself. Perhaps you need to meditate, go for walks every day, or havea talk with someone who is causing you emotional pain. Perhaps youneed to create a nice spot of color on the wall at which you can stare to

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re-center yourself. Whatever you do to get centered, your goal is to beable to approach your artistic endeavor by being fully there mentally,emotionally, spiritually, sexually, physically as one integrated, wiseartist. When you are in this state, you will be capable of working withyour creativity in the same truly blissful way that potters work, becom-ing one with their clay as it spins around the wheel, their hands becom-ing the pot and the pot becoming their hands. In short, when you andyour art merge into one beingness, there is much less opportunity toget stuck because all of you, including your inner critic, become onewith your art.

And if you cannot find an activity that centers you, I highly recom-mend taking a pottery course!

The Buddy Approach

Creativity-halting goo can sometimes be thick and viscous, and get-ting out of it on your own is just not possible. Your inner artist is goingnowhere, spinning its wheels, like a car stuck in mud or snow.Sometimes you need a buddy to get unstuck, a colleague who canpush or pull you out, by listening to you and perhaps by sharing someideas. Simply talking about your creative block with another person isoften enough to get you going again because in the process of articulatingyour ideas to someone else in a non-judgmental conversation, you canoften stumble upon a fresh way to explain your concepts or an insightyou didnt have before.

The Buddy Approach is best done with a partner who is, like you, acreator and thus can understand the artistic difficulties you may be goingthrough. It is best not to choose a family member or spouse based simplyon the fact that he or she knows you well. This can backfire, causingmore problems than it solves if you do not like the advice the persongives you. Instead, select as your buddy an artistic peer, someone whodoes the same type of art as you or even someone who works in anentirely different art.

The Buddy Approach is useful for several reasons. First, your col-leagues comments and listening provide an outside view of your workthat can be beneficial when you are lost in your own ideas. The buddymay see the proverbial tree through the forest that has become yourmind. Secondly, a buddy can help you silence your inner critic, by beingmore sympathetic, encouraging, or just plain honest in telling you thatyour ideas are fine, keep working. Finally, if you are willing to listen, abuddy may have suggestions to enhance your own ideas or that provideyou with solutions to your creative problem.

Many artists are reluctant to share their work with others before it iscompleted, and that is understandable. However, there are times whenthere is nothing better than a colleague or friend whose shoulder youcan lean on in a time of need. Artists who shy away from making com-


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munity with others may be missing out on the valuable resources thatother artists can provide. One way to combat a reluctance to talk toother artists is to take a class. Even if you decide not to share your ideaswith others, you can listen to other people sharing ideas and vicarious-ly partake in an extended buddy system that supports you in the back-ground.

The Matrix Approach

When your getting stuck involves indecision or an inability tochoose from among what seem to be too many good ideas, the best solu-tion may be the Matrix Approach. This solution is based on resorting tologic to evaluate your ideas and choose the best one according to a setof criteria you develop. The name of the approach refers to the fact that

you construct a matrix or grid, with rows and columns in table format.In each column, you write one of the ideas you have, and in each row,you list one of the criteria that will help you decide the best choice. Forexample, if you are writing a non-fiction book and you are trying todecide whether to write a book based on, for example, 7 steps to betterhealth, 30 days to better health, or 10 secrets to better health, you wouldneed a matrix consisting of 3 columns. Then in the rows, you would listcriteria such as names of competing books in Row 1, spin-off opportu-nities for each title in Row 2, the editors preference in Row 3, and soon.

The Matrix Approach, in theory, can help you get unstuck by simplychecking off which column and row intersection makes the most logicalsense. Then you can count up the Xs and see which decision wins.However, given that art is not science, the Matrix Approach oftenrequires a level of subjective analysis and feeling that might lead youback toward your quagmire. You could end up with a grid that has Xseverywhere and youre back at indecision.

Nevertheless, the Matrix Approach can prove useful when you havea large number of choices because, at the very least, it can help you

eliminate a few lesser choices from the crowd so you can focus on justthe one or two best ones. In this way, the Matrix Approach can help youget out the quicksand a little faster and without as much pain as youmight have experienced.

The Spiritual Approach

In the last decade, the role of spirit in creativity is resurging, as moreartists are turning themselves over to a higher power to direct their

work. For some people, the higher power is embedded in a religious tra-dition, while for others, their spiritual approach is rooted in a profoundrespect and appreciation for human creativity within a mystical cosmos.Whichever the case, a spiritual approach to overcoming stuckness sug-gests that you stop thinking about your creative problem and simply give

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yourself over to whatever higher power you believe in to provide youwith the answer.

It is of course impossible to ascertain if the spiritual approach worksbecause a higher power truly exists and answers the prayers of artists, orif there is something about releasing your worries into the cosmos that

allows fresh ideas to come to you. Perhaps it is a combination of the two.What counts is that the spiritual approach seems to help many peoplefeel that their creative work is linked to forces in the universe that guideus into a more harmonious, peaceful existence. By releasing their cre-ative blocks into the ether or to their worshipped God, they lighten theirown anxiety about creating, which may indeed be an opportunity fornew creating to occur.

If you are not religious, or are agnostic, your spiritual approach neednot be any more than going up to a mountain top and contemplatingyour creativity as you sit among tboulders that have been on this earthfor millions of years. I often go camping at one location in the SierraMountains in California where, at 12,000 feet, I experience profoundinsights into my place in the cosmos, which reinforces my love for thecreativity that I possess.

The Reward Approach

The Reward Approach can be an effective method to get out of stuck-

ness when the creativity-halting goo is thin and leaves you with a senseof power over your situation. This approach requires you to be brutallyhonest with yourself in evaluating whether your stuckness reflects factorsthat you can control if you truly wanted to. For example, we all expe-rience times when we simply dont want to get to work; we would ratherwatch TV or go for a walk than feel the pain of writing, painting, or prac-ticing our instrument.

But in these types of situations, if you are truthful with yourself andare able to admit that the problem has more to do with your own nega-tive attitude or your laziness, you might realize that this is the right timeto adopt the Reward Approach. As the name implies, you simply offeryourself a reward for committing to get your work done or for achievingcertain milestones along the way to total completion.

For example, you might make a contract with yourself that for everychapter you complete on your novel, you will allow yourself a nice dinnerat one of your favorite restaurants, and you wont go to that restaurantunless you do complete the chapter. Other rewards could be buyingyourself a desired piece of clothing, or a night out, or that new electron-ic device you desire.

So many of us are not good at abiding by contracts we make withourselves. It is easy to tell yourself, I know I said I was going to worktonight, but Im just too tired. The problem is, of course, if you let your-self off the hook day in and day out, you accomplish very little towards


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program for your specific stuckness i.e., the nature of your goo, itsthickness, stickiness, how deep in it you are, and so on. A creativitycoach is trained to analyze your concerns and problems, and to workwith you to devise solutions that get you out of the quagmire and backinto happy, productive creating again. A coach can help you decidewhich of the approaches above or many others they may have createdthemselves might work in your situation. You can find creativity coachesat www.creativitycoachingassociation.com, which lists coaches avail-able to artists and creators in many locations throughout the world.Coaches can also work with you by email and phone, so you are neverfar away from having professional assistance available to you to analyzeyour creative problems and propose solutions to get you unstuck.

Rick Benzel is a creativity coach, writer, and editor in Los Angeles witha passion for helping all types of artists get unstuck. He enjoys brain-storming with creators to help them develop, articulate and organizetheir ideas. His coaching practice has helped writers, screenwriters, andvisual artists. He offers various workshops in the Los Angeles area, a

one-day brainstorming Inspiration Tour, and 7- or 10-day retreats inFrance. He is the creator of this Anthology and the founder and Publisherof Creativity Coaching Association Press, the publisher of this book. Hecan be contacted at [email protected] or at his website,www.personalcreativitycoach.com.


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Creative Goo Article -Rick Benzel