Dear you,
I know you haven't made anything in a while. Maybe it's been days. Maybe it's been months. Maybe it's been so long that you've started to wonder if the creative part of you has simply gone — packed its things quietly while you were busy surviving, and left without a note.
I want to talk to you about that. Not to fix it, because I don't think it needs fixing in the way we usually mean. But because I have been where you are, and I have learned some things about this particular kind of stuck that I wish someone had told me earlier.
First: This Is Not a Malfunction
The creative dry spell is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is not evidence that you were never really a creative person, or that the gift has been revoked, or that you have used up your allocation of inspiration and there is no more coming.
It is a sign that something in the system needs attention. Sometimes that something is rest — genuine, unscheduled, unproductive rest, the kind that our culture has made almost impossible to take without guilt. Sometimes it is grief, which takes up enormous amounts of creative energy even when it is quiet and unnamed. Sometimes it is fear — the particular fear that comes when you have made something that mattered and now you have to make something again and what if it doesn't measure up.
Sometimes it is simply the natural rhythm of creative life, which moves in cycles the way everything in nature does. There are seasons of output and seasons of fallow. Both are necessary. The fallow season is not failure. It is preparation.
What Not to Do
Do not force it. I know this sounds counterintuitive, especially if you have deadlines or commitments or a creative practice you have been trying to maintain. But forcing creative work when the well is genuinely dry produces something that feels forced — to you and to the people who receive it. The work knows. The audience knows. And you know, which is the worst part.
Do not compare your current silence to someone else's current output. The comparison is false in every direction. You do not know what that person's silence looks like, or what they are not showing, or what it cost them to produce what you are seeing. Comparison in the creative life is almost always a form of self-harm dressed up as motivation.
Do not decide that the silence means you are done. The silence is not a verdict. It is a weather pattern. Weather changes.
What to Do Instead
Fill the well. This is the phrase that has helped me most in the dry seasons. When you cannot produce, you consume — but intentionally, selectively, with attention. You read the books that have always moved you. You listen to the music that reminds you why music matters. You go outside and pay attention to the world with the particular quality of attention that creative people have — the noticing, the wondering, the asking what if and why and what does this remind me of.
You give yourself permission to be a receiver for a while instead of a giver. This is not laziness. It is maintenance.
You also do the small things. Not the big creative project that feels impossible right now — the small things. A single sentence in a notebook. A melody hummed in the kitchen. A photograph taken of something that caught your eye. These small things are not the work. They are the kindling. They keep the fire from going completely cold while you wait for the conditions to change.
And you wait with patience rather than panic. Panic constricts. It tightens the very channels through which creativity flows. Patience opens. It says: I trust that this will return, because it has always returned, because it is part of who I am and not something that can be permanently taken away.
What I Know About You
I know that you are still a creative person even when you are not creating. The identity does not depend on the output. You are a writer even when you are not writing. You are a musician even when you are not playing. You are an artist even when the canvas is blank.
The gift is not in the making. The gift is in the way you see, the way you feel, the way the world lands on you differently than it lands on people who are not wired the way you are. That does not go away in the dry seasons. It is simply resting.
Come back when you're ready. The work will be there. The voice will be there. The particular thing that only you can make — it is still inside you, waiting for the conditions to be right.
I believe that. I have seen it be true too many times to doubt it.
With love, Emy J
Emy J is a writer, musician, and creator based in Ottawa, Ontario. She makes things for the soul who wears many colors. Visit emyj888.com.