About Inspiration, Staying Inspired and Nourishing Creativeness

As a blogger it is vital to keep the posts coming regularly; the more often the better. Search engines and their algorithms raise active blogs in search results higher than those that are rarely updated.

But the fact is that nobody can be creative 24/7. Creativeness has a nasty habit of appearing all of a sudden and then you are overwhelmed with ideas of what to write or say, what kind of photographs you should take for each blog post, etc. And then, just as suddenly, follows the period of emptiness when you can’t think of anything to say, no matter how hard you try.

Creative people have different ways of dealing with the sudden peaks and lows of creativity; some write notes and make schedules, others just get to work, open a document and start spewing words onto it, or grab their camera and run outside to look for scenes to capture. I find the latter practice to suit me better. When I get an idea I have to materialize it immediately, even if it’s just one sentence. I need to get the main point on paper after which I can then start building a story around it.

Some people get ideas in weird places. For example J. K. Rowling got the idea for the Harry Potter books on a train. But I don’t really come up with ideas while going about my everyday life. I like a calm place, preferably with a view, where I can literally sit myself in front of the empty page and think "what do I have to say today". Sometimes I need to search online for inspiration, but it doesn’t usually take me more than one word or a picture to find something to write about. For example, for this post that word was ’inspiration’. It got me thinking.

And then there are periods when coming up with ideas for a blog post is hard. Like really hard. Moving to Estonia made these ’low points’ even worse than normal for me: When the surroundings changed from rugged and inspiring to tidy and uninspiring I couldn’t be less bothered to write. The only positive thing is that at least I know when to expect these writers' blocks: winter in the North is one of the most uninspiring phenomena in the world. It’s dark and cold, all of the energy you have goes into surviving from one day to the next. There’s not much head-space for creativity between November and March up here, which brings great challenges to people who, for example, blog for a living.

I have noticed that when you feel uninspired and not motivated to write it’s best to just have a break. Allow yourself to take the time off and concentrate on something else for a change. This usually works for your benefit when the ’creative muscle’ returns rested and you find yourself coming up with an abundance of content ideas.

Recognizing that these uninspiring times come and go, I like to use the creative periods to my full advantage: I write as much as I can and create multiple posts per week and save them as drafts so that I can finish them up and post them while having another one of those writers' blocks.

Unfortunately winter around here is so long that I don’t know if I can ever come up with enough posts to cover the whole uninspiring period. Another issue is taking pictures: I have plenty of posts waiting to be published and great ideas of what sort of photos I want for each post. But it's impossible to realize these photo sessions when it's dark inside and out, and nature is literally dead.

At the moment I’m concentrating on the little things in life that make me happy, and it has worked quite well so far; this Autumn hasn’t been as bad a disaster as the previous one, and I can see that my more positive mood affects my creativity as well. When you keep  up the positivity you nourish your creativity at the same time.