Got the post-holiday blues? Reignite your creative spark

by Leo Wiles
16 January 2015

Feeling flat, stale and uninspired is nothing new after a break, but it can get your work year off to a miserable start until you readjust. The good news is, you can easily rekindle your creative urge – and fire up your writing. Here are some of my favourite strategies.

Leave your comfort zone Shake up your normal routine. Change your environment. Try a different café, use a different route, browse different sites to avoid falling into the same old thought patterns.

Look beyond what you’d usually read. Bypass the usual suspects on the newsstand and grab a few mags or newspapers that you’d never normally pick up. New material can give you great new perspectives and inspiration.

Give yourself an art attack Indulging yourself with an afternoon, day or evening at the opera, a play, a new film and or gallery can help get the juices firing.

Play copycat. Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson was renowned for typing out Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works when working as a lowly copywriter to understand their styles before forming his own.

Explore your city and its inhabitants. Close your social media apps and go rub shoulders with strangers, friends – even your family. It’ll really help put your finger on the social pulse (the real social pulse).

Freshen up the info coming in. Could you get new ideas from the ABS? Should you review your Google email alerts? Do you need to subscribe to some new trade mags or newsletters? Could you brush up on industry journals, studies and research papers? Doing so will place you at the front of the pack instead of mopping up ideas from other publications’ features or news stories.

Take time to remember why you write. For me, it was the desire to communicate by telling inspirational stories. My hope was to motivate readers to believe they too could lead bigger better lives financially, physically and or mentally.

Find a like-minded audience. I don’t mean a room full of relatives who think that every word you write is pure Pulitzer. I’m talking about creating a Meetup group in your area or joining other writers and or journos to bounce ideas off.

Write it down. Great ideas tend to hit when I am in bed so I have a pad and pen, (old school I know), so that I can jot down that seed of an idea rather than lose it.

Got a bad case of the post-holiday blues? What do you do to yank yourself out of a creative rut?