Building habits and committing to work at a given activity daily creates a condition I call "Creative Inertia." The creativeness and excitement we feel toward a project and the level of action we take toward it can be accelerating or decelerating depending on our inertia. Fortunately, we can make a conscious decision to change direction (if decelerating) and start building inertia in the opposite direction.
Here's a personal example.
I accomplished a great deal in March. Many improvements were made in my software, I wrote in my journal and my blog nearly every day. The "creative inertia" was on my side and I was sailing along nicely.
Then, I lost my inertia: I traveled to Laguna Beach the last weekend of March. I made the most of the trip, mixing both business and personal activities...a nice break from my regular routine. The following week, my wife was on vacation, so I only worked a "light" schedule.
Last Friday, the time to get back to work arrived...but it was Good Friday...one of those lackadaisical kind of days. Then, of course, Easter weekend came.
By Monday, I
should have been rearin' to go, but I wasn't. I plodded through what I had to do all day on Monday, but, honestly, my heart wasn't in it.
What had happened?
The days of being off had created a certain "Inertia" of relaxation. Like trying to stop a large stone rolling down a hillside, changing the "natural" course of things was now going to require monumental effort.
So what did I do? I took a deep breath and prepared for the monumental effort necessary.
On Tuesday, I set the alarm for 5:00am. I forced myself out of bed with no snoozing allowed and got to work. Before I knew it, I was "back into it" and happily working and creating again. I've done this every day this week and NOW, the Inertia has changed course the other direction. I'm using the inertia to my advantage and it would take monumental effort now to STOP these work habits.
What are the implications of this for an artist?
Simple. Create every day. Make it a habit. If you don't, the effort required to get started again becomes monumental. If you do, the effort required to stop becomes monumental.
Incidentally, in writing, I've found that the MORE I do it, the MORE I have to say. It's only in times that I've lost my creative inertia that I find myself "running out" of ideas.
I suspect artists who feel terror at the thought of a blank canvas are those who haven't built up their creative inertia by practicing their craft every day. Every artist I know who paints daily feels overwhelmed by the number of ideas they have in their heads that they want to put on canvas.
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