4 Principles Creative Professionals Live By

As a working creative, there’s no feeling quite like when you’re writing or designing, and you hit that elusive flow state: time and space melt away and all that’s left is the creative act itself. 

But being a creative professional in the creative industry can sometimes be a challenge. We often don’t have control over when inspiration strikes. In a perfect world, everyone would be inspired by their work and driven by their purpose 100% of the time. But even the most exciting projects have lulls. Some of the boldest ideas have setbacks. Experienced professional creatives can find themselves in a rut. 

So what do we do when creativity doesn’t flow as freely as we’d like it to? It might seem counterintuitive, but having a set of principles to refer back to can be helpful in getting those creative juices flowing. Sounds boring, I know. But I swear it helps – and other creative professionals tend to agree.

Here are four principles anybody looking to get more creative can lean on:

Every successful professional creative will give you this advice. When you make your living as a writer or an artist, you can’t sit around waiting for inspiration to come knocking on your door. You build habits. Some examples of those might be:

• Daily exercises, such as sketching, writing, or brainstorming, to keep those creative muscles active.
• Experimenting with new techniques, tools, and mediums to expand your creative toolkit.
• Keeping a journal or sketchbook to capture ideas, thoughts, and inspirations as they come.
• Collaborating with other creatives to gain different perspectives and feedback

For some, these might be rituals. Whatever they are, these are personal actions you take consistently to show up and do the work, whether or not you’re feeling inspired. 

If a habit is a personal action you repeat consistently, a process is a framework that guides the actual work. If you’re aiming to write more, your habit might be to sit down at your desk at 8:00 am and write every day for one hour.

Your process might be: generate X number of ideas for the week, write as many outlines as you can, do a first draft, wait a week, do edits, wait 3 days, then do your final edits. 

This process is a system. It’s repeatable, reliable, and keeps you accountable.

Creativity isn’t linear. Oftentimes, our best creative work happens unexpectedly. So every morning at 8, we sit down to write. And what does creativity do? It starts giving us our best ideas right before bed!

Or we’ve finished an outline and we’re starting a first draft and it whisks you down a path you hadn’t considered and completely changes the entire piece.

These are the lightbulb moments that drive creative professionals crazy. Especially if they’ve already presented outlines to the client who signed off on them. 

So what do you do? Do you keep to your habits and processes or do you go with the flow? Whenever you can, you do both. You follow that muse because it will often lead you to your greatest work, but you stay disciplined. 

Go into the unknown, indulge the mystery, be surprised. That is why you’ve built those habits and processes in the first place – so you can ride that wave. 

But sometimes, you need to know when to stop. When to stop revising a draft, when to stop riding these mini creative waves that are just distracting you from the real work, when to stop endlessly fiddling. 

Sometimes you have to get your work out even when it’s not as good as you feel like it can be. Sometimes you might not like it, but everything you do just makes it worse. There’s a moment when you have to leave it alone, put it in a drawer for a while and come back with fresh eyes. 

Learning when to say no to yourself is the hardest thing a creative person will do. 

So, while it may sound counter intuitive, adding structure to the creative process can help us from feeling stuck, and get creativity flowing when we actually need it.