Freeing Up Your Mental Space is REALLY Important for Creativity

Sometimes I get burned out or depressed—and when that happens, it’s a whole lot harder to work on a creative project.

I talked about this at length last fall, when a towering workload at my Japanese university job combined with a ninety-minute commute and having to check the final formatting on MFA Thesis Novel left me feeling overwhelmed, constantly pushing myself to the limit, and crashing hard on the weekends when I wanted to work on my secret new novel project.

All told, I felt overwhelmed and too damned busy.

I’ve written about the double downsides of being busy before: the first one’s obvious, but the second one’s something we often forget:

1. When you’re busy, you have less time to do your creative work
2. When you’re busy, you feel burned out, and have less mental energy to do your creative work well

It’s the second one that I want to talk about today.

 

Being Creative Requires Thinking and Mental Space

I’m a big planner when I write: I like to make an outline, jot down notes, and know a good portion of what I’m going to write before sitting down at the computer.  Usually, this translates into a lot of time thinking about the idea and how it might work—running through scenarios, thinking up jokes, fleshing out a scene or a character, etc.  This puts me in a better place to have the bones of a story or essay already prepared so that when I start the actual writing, I don’t have to worry.

This thinking and planning time is insanely important, but people often overlook it when talking about the creative process.  Many writers especially will brag about how many words they wrote that day, try to churn out an entire novel draft in the month of November, or make an overly big deal about how long they spent at their computer each day.

Here’s the problem, though: None of these achievements is worth anything if the writing sucks hard.

For me (and, I’ll guess, for most writers and other creative people), taking time to reflect on a project makes it easier to solve problems and map out a plan, thus making my actual time at the laptop more productive. In that sense, the thinking time should actually be added on to the writing time, because both contributed to the process of creating the finished product.

And that thinking time can take place anywhere: in the shower, lying in bed in the morning, when I’m driving, when I’m walking, or when I’m reflecting at the end of the night.  This allows me to be working (in a sense) on a project more often because I’m thinking about it and gathering ideas even when I’m nowhere near a computer or pen.

 

Burnout Makes Creative Thinking Time Impossible

If you agree that free thinking is an essential part of the creative process, it makes sense that you’d want to make time for it, right?

The problem is that when I’m busy, especially over a long period of time, I find that my mind is constantly jumping around to the different things that are making me busy.  This could be Day Job stuff, personal commitments, deadlines related to my writing work, a life problem I don’t know how to solve, or a problem in my personal life.

All of these things take up my mental space, so when I have that bit of free time in the shower, lying in bed, or driving somewhere, I find myself thinking about these other things, rather than my creative project.

The result is that while I’m better able to sort through all the other things I have going on (because I’ve been devoting mental space to thinking about them!), I don’t spend time thinking about my writing project.

This means that if and when I do sit down at the computer to write, I haven’t done the background planning that I need to be successful, and the writing time will be slower, less productive, and overall lower quality than if I’d been able to plan it out.  (Assuming, of course, that I’m able to set aside any writing time at all—see list item #1 above!).

 

Freeing Up Your Mental Space Pays Off Twofold

The great thing about being less busy is that not only do you have more time to spend on your creative work, you have more mental energy to spend thinking about your creative work, so the payout’s twofold. Not only do you have more actual time to do your creative work, the time you do spend on it will be more productive because you’ve been able to plan more of it out.

This, I’m starting to realize, is the secret to doing more and better writing, and one that’s held me back over the past several years of just being too damned busy.  I’m realizing that I have to set my life up in such a way so that I’m not dashing around to work on things that aren’t writing, and that I can’t be weighed down by the worries and stress that comes from being busy. (For example, I probably shouldn’t have a busy Day Job…)

Becoming more aware of this over the past few weeks has made me think more about where my life and work are going, and how both writing and earning bill-paying money fit into my long-term plans.  It’s also made me think more about setting aside time for thinking in my daily routine: for example, by taking regular breaks, taking time to reflect about new ideas, setting aside longer stretches of time to contemplate in the evenings, and most importantly, not pushing myself to the limit.

If you’re having trouble with your writing or other creative work, you might consider making more time for thinking.  When do you do most of your thinking about a project? Do the ideas come to you randomly, when you’re doing something else, or do you like to set aside time for strategic thinking and notetaking?  Most importantly, how do feel when you sit down with your creative work and haven’t taken that thinking time?

I’d love to know your thoughts, so leave me a note in the Comments below!