Refilling the Well

Today has been a stressful one at the day job. I do medical transcription and I’ve had problems stacked on top of problems today. The transcriber enhanced background noise on a doctor so I couldn’t understand him, I did transcription using a hand-held recorder, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing, etc.

With the demands of work and family, our lives are stressful enough.  Our creative journey shouldn’t be.  When you start to approach your creative endeavors with a sense of dread or feel stressed out about them, you need to take a break.

Take a step back.  Get out of the house.  Get out of town, if possible.  Don’t worry about work or anything else.  Recharge.

When you come back to it, if you still feel stressed, you need to evaluate what’s going on.  Are you trying to make money from it too soon?  If so, back off on that and give yourself more time.  It’s also possible it’s not the right form for you.

The good thing about creativity is it’s highly individual.  Even among writers, no two people will do it the same way.  You don’t have to continue with something that isn’t working.

The stress could also be a sign that it’s time to evolve.  When I started writing, I started with poems.  It wasn’t necessarily the form of the poem itself that I thought would be easy — far from it in many cases — but it was that the form was shorter than anything else I knew of at the time.  Later on, I evolved to short stories, then novels, articles, and — now — nonfiction books.

If you’re not changing and growing, you’re stagnating, which is another reason for stress to come up in your creative life.  See if you can find out where it’s coming from and what steps you need to take to change it.

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