Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Creative Scarcity: How to Get Through Artist Mental Road Blocks with One Simple Exercise

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Every now and then all artists find themselves in a situation where their creativity suffers from overwork (exhaustion) or artistic mental blocks whatever their source may be. Well, here’s a simple exercise that should resolve any issue you may have where you find your creative spark diminished or non-existent.

In previous articles, I discuss the nature of creativity, the overflow of creativity, as well as the “living album” – a tool or vehicle for presenting one’s artistic creations in a dynamic manner in relationship to one’s growth as a creator over time. As a complement to those articles I thought it would also be useful to discuss the opposite or negative side of the coin of creativity, that is, what can one do when one’s creativity is lowered.
Barring illness, injury, or substance abuse this exercise is not intended to assist those of us who have undergone one of these extreme conditions. In each of these cases, the best remedy will always be rest or a highly successful recovery program of your choosing. But for the remainder of us who seem to have hit a road block to our creativity this exercise may appear simple at first, but I assure you it is easier to read about than it is to do.

Exercise
Instructions: Create 10 – 50 ideas in your creative field and never use them.

That’s it. I know this exercise recommendation seems extremely disappointing, but this exercise has always worked for me and continues to do so to this day. In fact, the album I’m currently working on is the product of this specific exercise. As of this moment, the album is about 70% complete and is approaching its completion very rapidly. Aside from this new collection of music, I have 3 other albums planned for publication over the next 2 to 3 years. And yes, I have this exercise to thank for this level of output and planning.
Explanation

The first objection to this exercise will be the obvious. If I’m undergoing an artistic road block, how can you expect me to come up with 10 – 50 new ideas, I can’t even come up with one. And that’s the first reason you’re probably experiencing a mental road block, you’re setting your target too low for creating an abundance of new ideas or innovations for old ideas.
Try setting a much higher target like several, a dozen, or many more new ideas, concepts, leads, techniques, motifs, etc. to help you come up with that next great project to work on. Besides it’s much easier to find one great idea in a dozen or more ideas you’ve come up with than it is to find one by creating them one at a time, examining them, only to determine that it’s not what you were hoping for.

This is the quickest way I know of to create new concepts and innovate old ideas in high abundance, thereby overcoming your seeming limitations on creative thought. This exercise all by itself helps you to do 4 things:
1. Unjam the free flow of life force in your body and mental processes, so that it’s available for concentrating your creativity on new artistic creations.

2. Overcome musical and artistic “one-it is,” which is an obsessive fixation on a creative concept or musical composition effectively preventing you from producing further creative concepts or innovations.
3. It also teaches you to aim through your targets instead of at them, so that you produce more work in less time and with less effort because your creative process becomes more playful and less pressured, while opening a creative frontier of unexplored ideas for you to discover. New ideas will come to you easier, the more you get into the habit of creating ideas.

4. And finally, it frees you from the illusion of an artistic mental road block. Creative scarcity produced from an artistic mental road block is a symptom of another problem and is not the problem itself. This exercise bypasses the need to deal with the underlying problem on an immediate basis, so that you can continue on your creative path. The underlying problem is primarily psychological or emotional and must be totally resolved in order for you to completely remove the cause of your artistic mental road blocks.
Part B

As a Part B to the exercise given above I’d like to address the possibility that your artistic mental road block can sometimes be the result of creative overwork, overrun, or exhaustion. In this case, planning regularly scheduled vacations or exploring new creative outlets can be another technique for overcoming an artistic mental road block. Where the mental road block is not caused by an unresolved psychological or emotional issue, the resolution may be as easy as recharging one creative “juices” by getting away or exploring new creative avenues for artistic expression. The basic idea behind this approach is that by opening yourself up to a different artistic perspective you can return to your creative medium with a pair of fresh eyes and techniques unlike those commonly found in your field.
I hope you’ll give this exercise a chance and try it out whenever you experience an artistic mental road block to see how it works for you. I have no doubt that you will be greatly benefited by this technique and that your creative work will increase in output and improve in quality. Let me know what happens after you use this exercise for a period of time. I’d love to read about your experiences in the comments section below.

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Related Music:

The Effort of Years

The Time Has Come
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Marc
http://stereothesis.com/



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