When I’m not writing articles for blogs or websites, I write fiction. It’s something I’ve done since I was very young. I used to write poetry and then short stories and now my focus is writing novels. None of my novels are published yet, but with a bit of luck and perseverance you never know what might happen.

I’ve been working on my most recent novel for quite a long time now. Actually, I’d stopped working on it because I didn’t know what to do next. I was kind of stuck. I’d been stuck for months and months and hadn’t worked on the novel at all. I haven’t even been thinking about it.

Recently, I decided to cut some of the noise out of my life. I listen to music constantly and whenever I cook I listen to the news online. I cut some of my music listening out and started cooking in silence and suddenly the characters I’d been writing about came back to me. They started creeping back into my head and I knew exactly what should happen next in the story. Now I’m back to working on my novel. All I needed was the time and space in my mind to start thinking about it again.

Respect Your Creativity

Give yourself the free time and a quiet space to pursue your creative endeavors. Allowing yourself the time to be creative is just one of many ways you can show yourself respect. Whether you knit, or play the guitar, or write poetry, you need to find a space in which you feel completely comfortable being creative in order to nurture it.

Ask for space. If your creative pursuit demands quiet, don’t be afraid to ask for it. Lock yourself in the bedroom and put a do not disturb sign on the door. You don’t have to be in there long. If you can manage even 30 minutes a day that would be good. Give yourself the time to think and create.

Pursue your creativity daily. Remember my Do Something Everyday post. The same is true for this. Mark out a time in the day when you can create. Everyday at that time, tell your family or whoever your living with that you can’t be disturbed for 30 minutes, and go into the room you’ve chosen. If you have small children, you might have to wake up earlier than them or wait until they go to bed at night before you can have time to do something. You may not get a whole lot done each day at first, but as the days go by you’ll be able to get more and more done.

Treat yourself well. Part of the problem I’ve had recently with working on my novel was that it doesn’t make money. I should be doing the writing that makes me money not wasting my time with this. That’s what I kept telling myself, but it was always there in the back of my mind, nagging at me.

So what if it doesn’t make you money. Does it make you happy? If the answer is yes, than you deserve to pursue it and develop that part of you.

Photo by silver.and.gold