“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
― Ray Bradbury
I’m the type of person who pursues creative endeavors in cycles. I’ll have the urge to draw for two weeks straight and be utterly obsessive about it, then I’ll suddenly drop it to take up photography for a few weeks. Whatever it is, I’m hyper-fixated on that single creative endeavor until it doesn’t hold my interest anymore. Then I’ll move onto my new muse of the moment. Eventually I do come back to my old muses but it takes time. Maybe most creatives do this too, or maybe I have undiagnosed ADHD. That’s a very real possibility.
The variety of projects that my desk has seen is staggering. Yesterday I decided learning more about calligraphy would be a good idea so I’ve been drawing letters non-stop. Before that, it was beading and making bracelets for a week. And before that, it was writing. The list of my creative pursuits is endlessly long.
You’d think this type of chaos would breed a “jack of all trades and master of none” mentality and skill level. Surely I’m an amateur at some of these things, like beading, but I do try to master what I work on. It might be in short bursts, in slow cycles, as I’ll eventually get back to all of my creative endeavors; it might take me a million years to master something, but I try. I like to think of myself as an “eventual master of all”. Just give me more time, I swear I’ll get there.
Not only is my creativity cyclical in that way, but the nature of creativity itself is cyclical. Creativity feeds itself. All of my muses feed each other. There’s the idea that the more input you have, the more output you can achieve. I find this to be generally true, but I also think all of your creative endeavors count as input and output. While beading, writing, and drawing aren’t even remotely the same, doing one benefits all. I find that my mind gets more ideas when I stuff myself full like Ray Bradbury references in the above quote.
The wider my palate is the more varied my creativity can be. While I was making a bracelet the color palette of the beads struck an idea into me for a drawing, a color palette I wouldn’t normally draw with. These unexpected connections happen to me often. The ideas happen without any real effort on my part too; it’s like my subconscious is making these creative leaps for me and I go along with it like the dutiful little idiot I am.
If you’re feeling stuck with your creativity, perhaps it’s time for you to add a different muse to the mix. The more you add, the more you create an endless cycle of creativity. It might derail your goals of being a master at one skill, or at least delay that goal, but you’ll simply be an eventual master like me.