Scheduling Creativity
November 12, 2008
I can’t fit creativity into my schedule even though my brain seems to think otherwise. I haven’t written a single word for Nano but I do have lots of ideas.
Working from home is a dream-come-true but it is also a bit of an ironic nightmare. When you work from home, you are always at work. Free time is work time, especially when assignments are constantly looming in your laptop.
Perhaps the best approach would be to create a creativity schedule. This may be counterproductive since I really have to be inspired to be creative. Maybe I should introduce an inspirational activity into the schedule.
Do you have any suggestions for striking the creative spark? I’d love to read some ideas.
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Write Anything 
I just wrote a short piece on a writing prompt that deals with this issue. Check it out: http://mymuseandme.blogspot.com/2008/11/write-on-wednesday_12.html.
I have several writing prompt sites I go to weekly to help keep the creative juices flowing:
Musing Mondays
Write On Wednesday
Totally Optional Prompts
Fictional Friday
These really help!
Great questions! I have gone round and round on this one—haven’t landed anywhere yet!
The trouble for me is not finding time to get out a creative thought (posts and articles come “easy” enough); rather, my problem is carving out the chunk of time necessary to put my hands to a heftier work.
I also work from home, and I think work is work no matter where you do it–just because I’m working from home doesn’t mean I have hours to spare. Finding time in the schedule is impossible without canceling something else.
So the question for me is this: What needs to go so that more creative time is available? (And then, how can I protect that time so it doesn’t get sucked up by something else?)
When you find the answer to all this, PLEASE tell me! My writing projects await!!
For me reading books, and watching movies makes me think of story-telling, and then reading and watching political stuff gives me ideas about issues and questions that would be cool to tell.
To find time, I started out setting myself a 15 minute word war a night and just wrote flat out based on any prompt I had, leaving my internal editor in the dust.