The Cost (& Reward) of Creative Immersion

Creative Hibernation: Week 2

It’s Week 2 of Creative Hibernation!

Are you feeling cosy yet?

New to Creative Hibernation? Catch up on previous posts and view the whole series here »

---

Welcome back, hibernators.

In last week’s post, I wrote about all the reasons our creativity craves (and benefits from) the occasional period of downtime, and how taking a step back can help gain the perspective you need to:

• get unstuck

• rekindle your motivation

• take an objective view

• refuel your creative reserves

I hope you had a quiet, unhurried, daydreamy week, in which you completed the enormously important task of intentionally doing… nothing.

Or, at least, nothing urgent, nothing pressured, nothing ‘productive’, nothing stress-worthy — because none of those really belong in the same sentence as ‘writing’.

Instead, I invited you to gently and curiously observe how it felt to:

1. Put your WIP down for a minute and step away from all the plans and deadlines and word counts and literary angst.

2. Follow your creative urges, if and when they came a’calling, in whatever form they emerged.

The aim here was to make creative space in your brain — uncluttered by all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and ‘have tos’ and ‘arghhhhhs’ that might otherwise fill it up.

So, how’d it go? How’d it feel? What did you learn?

And, more importantly, what the heck do we do now?

Well, this week we’re going to move onto the next stage of creative hibernation, in which we immerse ourselves in the world of our WIPs and start sending out some reconnecting tendrils…