Getting Unstuck

What can we learn from creatives about the inevitable potholes and pitfalls that can block our creativity?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

| Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

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All of us, at some time or other, feel like we are ‘stuck’ on a problem, a project, or some other activity.

The mathematician Dan Rockmore sums it up, neatly:

All problem solvers and problem inventors have had the experience of thinking, and then overthinking, themselves into a dead end. The question we’ve all encountered—and, inevitably, will encounter again—is how to get things moving and keep them moving. That is, how to get unstuck.

But when taking up the issue of getting unstuck, we need to start with the other end of the cycle: what is the baseline that forms the backdrop behind getting stuck? What is the state of mind that is disrupted when we are pulled off track and blocked? I choose to characterize the opposite of stuckness as stickness: which is to say, sticking to the routines that channel your work.

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One of the insights widely shared by creative people is unsurprising: creativity is honed by long hours of persistent, day-in, day-out work. The best writers generally have very set writing schedules, and an ardent desire to stick to it.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote about his routine in a letter to his wife:

I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten.

Other creatives of all stripes tell very similar stories. Denise Shekerjian interviewed forty MacArthur Fellows, from the broadest imaginable range of fields: political science, history, the arts, and sciences. The consistent thread is the willingness, no, the eagerness, of the Fellows to do the work in support of their own ‘peculiar talent’. She synthesized their insights: