Embrace and Overcome Creative Blocks, with Roxane Gay

(ethereal music) Headspace Studios. Hello, I am Roxane Gay, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and welcome to Thursday. Today is my last day guest hosting, and I want to thank you so much for hanging out with me this week. I hope you feel a little more hopeful about creative possibility. I hope you're feeling excited and I hope you're ready to introduce creativity into your life. As a writer, there is nothing more invigorating than finding something you want to write about, something you love. Finding that flow and losing yourself in the creative process. I think this probably goes for any kind of art. But likewise, there's also nothing more frustrating than when you hit a creative wall when you are dealing with writer's block or any kind of creative block. It has happened to me and recently it has certainly happened to my creative friends. If you are creative, it's inevitably going to happen to you. And so today I am going to share with you from my years of experience, how to embrace creative ruts without judgment and try and find inspiration again. So I think I'm at the tail end of years of creative drought and it's been incredibly painful and incredibly frustrating. Not only to me, but to all of the editors waiting for my next several books. So I know of what I speak. Certainly the primary thing that I, now that I've had lots of time to think about it, that caused a creative sort of rut that I'm in, is burnout. I published a lot over several years. I was working nonstop and eventually the well does run dry. Creativity is limitless, but sometimes you need to replenish. You know, I started to notice that I was feeling burnt out when I would dread having to write something or when an editor would commission something from me. And I knew that I probably had something to say, but I didn't quite know what that thing was. I didn't know how to access it. Just sitting and staring at the computer for hours at a time, writing lots and lots of really bad writing, and knowing it's bad and feeling completely helpless. It has been challenging, but I'm starting to feel creative stirs again. I think that we can have all of the creative aspirations that we want, and sometimes life gets in the way no matter who you are, no matter how your life is set up. You know, unexpected tragedies happen or you know, grief can be overwhelming sometimes. You know, we go through breakups, we go through actually good things like marriage, which is also in its way a very pleasant distraction, but a distraction nonetheless. And so it's a question of how do we balance the realities of our lives, good and bad, with the needs of our creative lives? And I think most of us are always searching for those answers. I...