25 ways to get UNSTUCK

prompts for navigating creative stagnation

There's a certain type of silence that descends when the creative current stops flowing. Not the generative silence of contemplation, but the hollow quiet of a system that has forgotten how to move. You sit before the canvas, the page, the screen—and find yourself in conversation with… absence.

We've all been citizens of this country. Maya Angelou would write streams of nonsense just to maintain the illusion of forward motion: "The cat sat on the mat, that's that. Not a rat." Bowie adopted William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, literally slicing lyrics and rearranging them to spark new associations, trusting chance to reveal what intention had obscured. Beethoven filled notebooks with musical fragments, discarding or even burning drafts that didn’t meet his standards—not from shame, but from the understanding that sometimes destruction is the precursor to creation.

The mythology around creative blocks suggests they are aberrations, temporary failures of an otherwise reliable system. This is backwards. Blocks are not bugs; they are the natural breathing rhythm of the creative process. They arrive not as punishment, but as information—signals that something in our relationship with the work has crystallized into rigidity.

The more I've sat with my own resistance, the more I've come to see creative blocks as just one face of a larger phenomenon. The same patterns that keep us frozen at the screen show up everywhere else: the job we won't apply for, the conversation we keep postponing, the decision we circle for months without actually deciding. Creative paralysis is just the most visible symptom of how we relate to uncertainty, risk, and the terrifying freedom of choice.

I started noticing this while working on THE DAILY 5—my ongoing exploration of what it means to become conscious co-creators of our own lives. Every time I thought I was examining something specific (how I make decisions, why I avoid certain conversations, what stories I tell myself about failure), I kept bumping into the same underlying architecture. The voice that whispers "you're not ready" when I sit down to write is the same one that says "maybe next year" about the bigger life changes I know I need to make.

Once you start seeing these patterns, you can't unsee them. And more importantly, you can't stay stuck in quite the same unconscious way.

The territory of stuck is not empty space. It is densely populated with all the things we are not saying, not making, not risking. It contains every project we've talked ourselves out of, every impulse we've deemed too small or too grandiose. In this landscape, the question isn't how to force movement, but how to create conditions where movement becomes inevitable.

What follows are not solutions but invitations—twenty-five doorways into a different kind of relationship with creative resistance. They assume that you are already whole, already capable, already in possession of everything you need. The work is not to acquire something new, but to remember what you've temporarily forgotten.

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Somewhere in your consciousness lives a work you've never allowed yourself to seriously consider. Too weird, too personal, too ambitious, too simple. Search for the creative impulse that exists before you edit it for audience, market, or respectability.

What would you make if judgment were impossible? Write down the project that feels "too weird," "too personal," or "too impossible." That suppressed desire contains creative fuel.

Excellence is often the enemy of existence. Give yourself permission to create something genuinely, intentionally bad. Think of it as a form of rebellion against the perfectionism that has convinced you that nothing is better than something imperfect. Bad work teaches you about your own standards by violating them.

When you imagine making something bad, what specifically scares you? Write about what "failure" would look like, sound like, feel like. What would happen if someone witnessed your worst work?

Hunter S. Thompson typed out entire pages of The Great Gatsby to feel Fitzgerald's rhythm in his fingers. I especially love this form of apprenticeship. Choose a piece of work you love and reproduce it badly, imperfectly, in your own medium. Notice where your instincts deviate. Those deviations are the beginning of your voice.

Before you learned what was cool, what was marketable, what was serious—what captured your attention completely? The things that fascinated you at ten years old contain the DNA of your aesthetic preferences, unfiltered by social conditioning. Dinosaurs, fairy tales, space travel, secret codes. These weren't childish interests; they were your first encounters with the mysterious.

Dig into your childhood fascinations. Write about what made you lose track of time as a kid. What did you collect, study, pretend to be? How do these early obsessions connect to what you're trying to create now?

The crowd in your head is probably louder than any real audience you'll ever have. Shrink the room. Imagine making something for one specific person—living or dead, known or imagined. How would you delight them? What would make them laugh, cry, think? The more specific the target, the more universal the resonance often becomes.

Blocks are often cover stories for decisions we're not ready to make. Are you avoiding committing to an idea? Abandoning a project that no longer serves you? Changing direction entirely? The work may be stuck because you are. Clarity about what you're actually avoiding can unlock movement in unexpected directions.

Scarcity breeds resourcefulness. If you had to finish something today—not perfectly, just finish it—what would that look like? Sometimes the fear isn't failure, but the endless possibility of revision. Deadlines force closure, and closure teaches completion.

Write about what you'd be willing to share if you absolutely had to. What would "good enough" look like?

Anne Lamott's "shitty first draft" principle applies to all creative work. Make the version you would never show anyone. Pour in all the self-indulgence, melodrama, pretension, and rawness. This isn't the final work; it's the compost from which the real work grows. Privacy is the prerequisite for honesty.

What would you make or say if consequences didn't exist?

Every artist you admire has faced this moment. Research their blocks, their failures, their periods of doubt. Write about how their failures connect to their eventual successes. Your struggle connects you to a tradition, not isolation.

Creative work requires not just inspiration, but energy. What depletes you before you even begin? Social media scrolling, cluttered workspace, unfinished conversations, pending decisions? Creativity is sensitive to environmental factors. Sometimes the block isn't in the work—it's in the conditions surrounding the work.

Write about the gap between when you feel energized vs. depleted in your creative practice. What patterns do you notice? What is your energy asking for?

Shel Silverstein wrote "A Boy Named Sue" as a joke. Johnny Cash turned it into a classic. Bad ideas are not failures; they are raw material. List three genuinely awful approaches to your project, then investigate what makes them awful. Often, the terrible idea contains one element that, refined, becomes essential.

Try writing the horror version, the romantic comedy version, and the children's cartoon version of what you're working on. What elements survive across all three versions?