When it comes to planning for a creative project - whether that's working towards a specific goal or more simply setting aside that time to hone your craft - putting in place a very strict structure can sometimes work against you.
It can leave you feeling stifled and frustrated, send you off course without realising and even deepen an impending period of creative block.
Read MoreMaking your creative projects a priority can be an important step in building tangible progress and that helps hugely with motivation and staying power. It shifts your mindset into taking your art more seriously and makes it less of a battle to squeeze time for creativity into your day-to-day.
Read MoreWhen we're working on something long term, that nobody else gets to see for a long long time, when it's just us and the blank page, or sketchbook, or wherever - is it still important for us to measure our achievements, to celebrate those tiny, incremental wins along the winding path of a creative life? And for those projects which are purely personal, the ones we do to learn a new skill, or to relax at the end of the day - is the progress irrelevant or even meaningless to the process itself?
Read MoreI don’t believe in creative block. Here's what I do believe in: the difficult business of showing up to your art, again and again and again. When it feels easy, when it feels hard, when it feels impossible. Finding the rhythm and the repetition in this process is the key to shutting the door on creative block and getting the work done.
Read MoreAfter making good progress for a few solid weeks, I finally got the ‘fear’ with my current writing work-in-progress.
The fear for me comes in a few different forms, but this time it was the sheer overwhelm that comes when faced with the scale of crafting a whole novel.
Read MoreSetting habits and building positive routines is something I'm really interested in this year, particularly as a way to find a more realistic and practical solution towards achieving a goal. New year's resolutions are easy to give up - we fall at a hurdle a few miles along, we get discouraged by our progress and give up, or we just run out of
Read MoreBusy lives tend to make for less time in general, we have to squeeze our creativity into little pockets of spare time, or steal moments here and there in between packed schedules and stressful priorities.
With such little time to devote to creating, the need to actually achieve something can sometimes feel unbearably important, and can even overtake the original intended enjoyment.
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