This mistake is ruining your creativity
You have a slow creative reflex, and it’s holding you back.
I. Lightning Strike
Okay, tell me if this sounds like a familiar situation: you get an idea. It’s brilliant, it’s exciting, it’s going to be your big break as a writer. You can already see the five-star reviews, hear the cheering fans as you walk onstage to accept your Pulitzer, feel the weight of your finished book in your hands.
Or maybe it’s not that dramatic; it could just be a sudden flash of inspiration.
You’re motivated, you’re excited, you’re ready to bring this idea to life. No longer will you watch from the sidelines as others write their literary masterpieces; no, you too will seize the reins of your destiny, harness the power of the muse, and ride into literary superstardom.
But then the spark begins to fade. This shiny idea starts to look more like a dusty dollar store trinket. You second-guess yourself. After all, it would be foolish to act on intuition and emotion—you need to analyze this fleeting moment of inspiration until it’s completely lost its magic, and you’ve lost your interest.
I’m sure you know someone who’s had a great idea for a story, or claimed they have, and never done anything with it. Maybe you are that person.
Here’s the thing: inspiration is cheap.
It’s great, it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s not what makes an artist an artist. The difference between an amateur who never finishes anything and a professional who consistently makes great work is the way they respond to inspiration.
You could be struck with history’s greatest idea for a novel, but if you never do anything with it, you might as well never have had it in the first place. The idea’s potential will go unrealized. And the only thing to blame is, well, yourself.
But these flashes of inspiration don’t have to be for nothing. Your ideas shouldn’t remain trapped in the confines of your mind, never seeing the light of day, never able to be enjoyed by other people.
Before we get to the cure, we need to understand the ailment.
II. The Problem
It can feel good to get inspired, to daydream, to think about how great the story in your head would be if you really did make it into a book, to fantasize about the acclaim it would garner and the Nobel Peace Prize you would receive after your writing united the world with its undeniable brilliance. But that feeling is pointless unless it leads to action.
Imagination is the backbone of fiction, but it can also be your downfall as a writer. If you’re an artist, you probably have a pretty good imagination, and you can use it to construct a million false realities and hypothetical futures in which you’re successful and fulfilled, without ever doing the hard, practical work of figuring out the steps it takes to get there and taking them.
Coming up with ideas, designing potential book covers, drawing character art, all these things can become substitutes for doing the actual writing. Your creative urge may be satiated, but you haven’t made any meaningful progress. You’ve become addicted to ideation, not true creation.
Now, I’m not saying this from a place of total authority and detachment. I experience this, too. I’m still learning how to decrease the gap between inspiration and creation. The ratio of ideas I have to things I actually make is… embarrassing. Having written nine novels isn’t nearly as impressive when you take into account the hundreds of other book ideas I’ve done exactly nothing with.
This is something a lot of writers deal with, especially aspiring writers with a million ideas and no finished projects.
III. Creative Reflex
But there’s a solution to this problem. It’s straightforward, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
It’s to develop a fast creative reflex. You need to seize inspiration when it strikes you and use it to propel yourself into the creative process. Don’t wait for the idea to lose its luster. Don’t overthink it. Don’t waste time planning and daydreaming.
If you have a fast creative reflex, the time between inspiration and creation will be short. If, like me, you tend to be excessively deliberative and analytical, that response time will be much longer.
But like physical reflexes, your creative reflex can be improved by training. The best way to develop a faster creative reflex is to work on projects with a quick turnaround time. Short stories, flash fiction, short-form videos, anything you can start and finish within a few hours.
Sometimes, it pays to have a slower and more thoughtful approach to starting new projects, especially when it comes to something as big and time-consuming as a novel. You can work your way up to a longer project by quickly iterating and improving your creative reflex with shorter works.
If you want to write a novel, but you’re feeling writer’s block, one of the best things you can do is jump into writing a completely new short story. Treat it as an exercise, an experiment. Don’t overthink, just create. Do it again. And again. You’re training your creative reflex and weakening the barriers between inspiration and creation. Soon enough, you’ll find you’re ready to start writing that novel.
Not every artist has a fast creative reflex. Or if they do, it may just be for a season. At different times in your life, you may find this approach to be invaluable, or completely unnecessary. But if you find yourself creatively stuck, this is what it takes to get unstuck.
It’s important to act quickly on inspiration because it’s a fleeting and unreliable thing. Of course, if you’re serious about writing, you’ll have to write even when you don’t feel inspired. But if you have that feeling, if you catch a glimmer of that spark, why wouldn’t you use it for all it’s worth? It makes the process more exciting, and it usually means you can produce work faster.
A moment of inspiration can be an onramp into a flow state. The flow state is something I could probably make a whole video about, but in short, it’s the neurological phenomenon of locking in on a project. You can lose track of time and work at a faster rate than usual. It’s a state every artist wishes they could be in at all times. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works, but having a fast creative reflex can help you slip into that state much more easily.
If you have an active imagination, you’ll end up with way more ideas than you can ever bring to life. The point here isn’t to pursue every creative whim that comes to you. If you did, you would end up scattered in a million directions, failing to make significant progress on any one project.
So instead, focus on one idea at a time. Choose whichever idea calls out the most loudly to be created. Whichever shines the brightest, whichever you can’t stop thinking about. It doesn’t have to be the perfect idea, it doesn’t have to be big or flashy, it just needs to speak to you.
Jump straight into making it, and forget everything else until it’s finished. Forget external incentives, forget other ideas you have, forget the sneaking suspicion this project might be an exercise in futility. Your job is to catch the spark of inspiration and hold onto it for dear life. By the end, you may find that spark has faded into a dull ember, but you must finish it. Even if it’s terrible, you must finish it. Because if you don’t, you’ll perpetually be stuck in this liminal state between inspiration and creation.
When we make note of an idea and take no further action, we’re deferring creativity to our future self. We’re assuming that they’ll have the motivation to take that seed and grow a tree out of it.
But that assumption could easily be wrong. You don’t know what state of mind your future self will be in—you don’t know what new ideas they’ll have to prioritize.
When I was younger, I had all kinds of ideas for books and films that I was really passionate about, and too much of the time, I would jot these ideas down and trust that I would eventually get around to bringing them to fruition.
Want to guess what happened to those ideas?
Nothing. They’ve sat around filling up pages in notebooks and Word Docs for years.
I wish I had spent less time planning and dreaming and more time creating. Hindsight highlights the massive difference between having ideas and executing them. Even if they didn’t turn out as masterpieces, I’m so much prouder of the projects I took the leap to make and finish than the ones that remained in the pre-production phase.
So I’m trying to learn from the past and improve my creative reflex.
I’ve spent the past five years working on my latest novel. That is… way too long, in my opinion. If those five years had been spent consistently and tirelessly working on crafting this book, that would be fine. But over the past five years, I’ve found myself stuck repeatedly, caught in the trap of analysis and overthinking.
I’m lucky that I’m still as passionate about this story as I was when I started—maybe more so, in fact—but I very easily could have lost motivation over such a long period of time. There was an entire year in that five-year period where I didn’t write a single word of the book. Granted, I was working on several novellas in the interim… but still.
If I were a less experienced writer, less sure of my ability to eventually finish it, there’s a good chance I would’ve given up. I don’t want that to happen to you. And I don’t want to go through that kind of process again.
This very piece is an example of this concept in action. I suddenly got the idea of ‘creative reflex’—a succinct way of phrasing something I’ve been thinking about lately, something I’m trying to implement in my own work. Usually, when I get an idea for a video, I’ll add it to my database of video ideas and continue with whatever I was doing. This time, in the spirit of the idea itself, I latched onto that moment of inspiration and didn’t let go. I wrote most of this piece in one sitting—or standing, technically; I was standing to write. I’m not doing a lot of fancy editing with the video. I’m shrinking the time between ideation and creation, training my creative reflex to be faster.
The ultimate goal of developing a fast creative reflex is to make creativity second nature. You’re building a habit out of getting inspired and quickly turning that inspiration into something real. You’re building momentum with smaller projects that will carry you forward into bigger ones.
The more you hone this skill, the more prolific you’ll be, and the closer you’ll get to becoming the artist you dream of being.
If you want to put this idea into practice right now—which you should—set a timer for 30 minutes and just write something. It can be the first idea that comes into your head, or one you’ve had sitting in a notebook for months. No judgement, no second-guessing, just write. It probably won’t be great. That’s fine. That’s kind of the point.
Then the next time you’re struck by a new idea you love, don’t file it away and forget about it. Pick up the pen or put fingers to keyboard and start writing.
You can watch the video version of this post here. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
My latest work
I’m currently editing Catalyst of Control, my dark sci-fi novel coming later this year.
I am watching your Youtube video right this moment, happy to connect😊