Creative block: what hides behind the blank page

“It used to just come. I’d sit down and the ideas arrived faster than I could write them down. Now I sit in front of a blank screen and wait. For three weeks now.”

That’s how a designer with a deadline breathing down her neck might describe it. Or a writer who has been opening the same document for months. Or a composer who sits down at the piano every day and gets up half an hour later without having played anything worth writing down. For people who live from creating, the blank page is more than an inconvenience. It is a threat to their livelihood, their identity and often their self-respect.

Creative block is usually talked about as a lack of inspiration — as if inspiration had gone on holiday and will come back eventually. But when you talk to people about it for longer, it turns out that inspiration has almost never really left. Something else is standing in its way. In this post I’ll try to show what most often hides behind the blank page and how you can return to work without having to force yourself.

A block is not laziness

The first thing people in a block often say about themselves is that they’re lazy. That they should just sit down and work. That others have more discipline. This explanation is understandable, because it offers a simple solution: try harder. But for most people it doesn’t work, because it misses the point.

Lazy people don’t torment themselves in front of a blank screen. They don’t sit for hours at an instrument. They don’t feel guilty every time they think of an unfinished project. People in a creative block do exactly that — they often try harder than ever before, only the effort doesn’t turn into work. That isn’t a lack of will. It’s a sign that some force inside them is pulling in the opposite direction.

In the vast majority of cases, that force is some form of fear. Fear of judgement, of disappointment, of the work falling short of expectations, or of it revealing something you don’t want to show. Fear rarely shows itself as fear. More often it appears as tiredness, distraction, a sudden urge to tidy up, or a feeling that “today just isn’t the day”.

What happens in the brain when you play

In 2008 the researchers Charles Limb and Allen Braun offered a lovely insight into what happens during free creation. Six professional jazz pianists played on a special keyboard inside a functional MRI scanner — once a memorised melody, once an improvisation. During improvisation, activity in parts of the frontal lobe linked to monitoring and evaluating one’s own behaviour quietened markedly, while areas associated with internally generated, self-initiated expression became more active.

The study is small and shouldn’t be over-interpreted. But it fits well with what creative people describe themselves: in the moments when the work flows, the inner evaluator falls silent. It doesn’t vanish, it just stops interfering. And the other way round: when the evaluator is loud, when every move comes with the question “is this good enough?”, creating stalls. Not because you don’t know how, but because creating and evaluating are two different modes of functioning that struggle to run at the same time.

What hides behind the blank page

When I explore with people what lies beneath their block, several layers usually emerge. At the top is the visible symptom — the blank page. Beneath it are layers that a person often doesn’t notice until they stop and look.

These layers aren’t equally thick for everyone and aren’t always in the same order. For one person the critic is loudest, for another the fear of the public, for a third simply that creating hasn’t been enjoyable for a long time. But they are almost always connected. Fear feeds the critic, the critic feeds perfectionism, perfectionism kills play, and without play creating is just work that has to be done.

Fear narrows your view

In 2008 the researchers Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu and Bernard Nijstad brought together a quarter of a century of research on how mood affects creativity. They found that creativity is most enhanced in pleasant, energising states that draw us towards something — curiosity, enthusiasm, joy. States that are tense and geared towards avoidance, such as fear and anxiety, were linked to less creativity.

That makes sense if you think about what fear is for. In our evolutionary history, fear served survival: it narrows attention to the threat, switches off exploration and prepares us to flee or fight. In danger, that’s no bad thing. Creating, however, needs exactly the opposite — breadth, curiosity, a willingness to try something that might not work. When you’re afraid, the brain is set for safety, not discovery. And nothing is less safe than a new idea nobody has tested yet.

For creative people who are already successful, fear is often joined by the pressure of past achievements. I wrote about how success becomes expectation in When success becomes expectation: the fear of the next work.

The critic who arrives too early

Every creative person needs a critical eye. Without it there would be no editing, selecting, polishing. The problem isn’t that the critic exists. The problem is when it gets its turn.

In people who are blocked, the critic often stands at the door before the idea has even come in. It judges every word you write the moment you write it. It compares every chord with the best thing you’ve ever done. It holds every sketch up against the work of someone you admire. This voice didn’t come from nowhere — I described in more detail how it forms out of the relationships we grew up in in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from, and you’ll also find a short explanation in the knowledge base under the inner critic.

In a well-known 1985 study, the psychologist Teresa Amabile asked young writers to write a short poem. She then gave some of them a list of external reasons for writing to reflect on — money, recognition, impressing teachers — and others a list of internal reasons, such as the pleasure of playing with words and the satisfaction of self-expression. When they wrote a second poem, independent judges rated the poems of those who had thought about external reasons as less creative. Just a brief reflection on who would judge you and what you’d get out of it was enough for creativity to drop.

From this follows a simple but important insight: creating and evaluating are two phases that are best kept apart.

Perfectionism and the first draft

If the critic is the voice, perfectionism is the rule that voice enforces: the work must be good from the very first line. The first draft must sound like the finished product. The first sketch must be the one that goes into the exhibition.

Anyone who has ever finished anything knows it doesn’t work like that. First drafts are almost always clumsy, too long, full of dead ends. Their job isn’t to be good. Their job is to exist — so that there is something on the table that can then be edited. The perfectionist, however, skips this intermediate step and demands that the piece be born directly in its final form. Because that’s impossible, nothing is born at all.

It helps to recognise the thoughts that come up while you work — “this is stupid”, “nobody will read this”, “I used to be better” — as thoughts, not facts. I described how to do that in How to notice a thought instead of following it: an introduction to cognitive defusion. It isn’t about silencing the thoughts, but about not letting them decide whether you carry on.

What a block sounds like from the inside

In a session, a conversation about deadlines often hides something entirely different. A conversation with a composer who for months hasn’t been able to finish a commission might sound like this (composite, not a real person):

“Every day I sit down at the piano. And every day I get up empty-handed.”
“What happens just before you get up?”
“I play something and immediately hear what’s wrong with it. That it’s banal. That someone’s already done it.”
“Whose voice is that?”
“…My professor at the academy used to talk like that. Every time I brought him something.”

At that moment the block appears in a different light. It isn’t just a lack of ideas. It’s an old relationship that is still sitting in the room. Once that becomes visible, we can ask whether this voice still needs so much space — and what the composer would play if it weren’t there.

In relational family therapy, which I’m training in, we pay particular attention to internalised relationships like this. The voices that judge us were once external: parents, teachers, mentors, older brothers and sisters. There’s more on this in Your inner voices were once outer ones. When you recognise them, you don’t have to erase them. But you can start talking to them differently.

Play as the way back

If fear, the critic and perfectionism close the door, play often opens it again. The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote in Playing and Reality that it is in playing — and perhaps only in playing — that a person is able to be truly creative. He didn’t mean only children. He meant that in-between space in which you do something without purpose, without judgement, simply because you’re curious what will come of it.

You’ll find a short explanation of this concept in the knowledge base under play. For creative people one thing matters most: play isn’t the opposite of serious work but its precondition. Many creative people remember that they started because something amused them — strumming, doodling, making up stories. When creating became a profession, play slowly disappeared. And with it, often, the very thing that made the work good in the first place.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called the state in which a person becomes completely absorbed in an activity flow. He described how self-consciousness disappears in it — you don’t think about how you look, what others will say or whether you’re good enough. Flow can’t be summoned on command. But you can create the conditions that make it more likely: enough challenge, enough safety and as little inner judging as possible.

An exercise: twenty minutes of bad work

This exercise is meant to take the floor away from the critic for a short while and let you play again. You can do it today.

1. Set a timer for twenty minutes. No more. A short, limited time is less frightening than an open day you have to “make the most of”.
2. Explicitly set yourself the task of making something bad. The worst song, the most clichéd sketch, the clumsiest opening chapter. The goal is for the work to be bad — that way the critic has nothing to do.
3. Don’t stop and don’t correct. If you notice the thought “this is stupid”, tell yourself: “Yes, that’s the task” and carry on.
4. When the timer goes off, put the work down and don’t judge it. Not today. Save it in a folder called “playground”.
5. Write one sentence about how it was. Not how good the work is, but what you noticed in yourself. Was it easier than you expected? Did you smile anywhere?

It often happens that a small idea worth pursuing hides inside the “bad” work. But that isn’t the point of the exercise. The point is for your body and brain to experience again that creating can be safe. If the critic won’t leave you alone during the exercise, also try Two columns for the inner critic, in which you write its accusations on one side and, on the other, the answer you would give a friend.

When a block isn’t fear

It wouldn’t be fair to claim that fear lies behind every blank page. Sometimes the answer is elsewhere — and then it’s good to recognise it, so you don’t try to solve the wrong problem.

Exhaustion. Creativity needs energy. If you’ve been working for months without rest, sleeping too little and living from project to project, the blank page may not be a psychological obstacle at all, but simply a sign that your reserves are spent. Then no exercise helps; rest does.

Low mood and depression. If the block comes together with a loss of enjoyment in things outside work too, with changes in sleep and appetite, with a sense of hopelessness or worthlessness, it’s no longer just a creative problem. Then it makes sense to consult your GP or a psychiatrist. If thoughts of not wanting to live appear, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 in Slovenia (every day, 24 hours), and in an emergency 112.

A fallow period. All creating has its seasons. After a big project it’s normal for there to be no new ideas for a while — just as a field needs rest after the harvest. That isn’t a block, it’s a rhythm. The problem only arises when you experience this emptiness as proof that you’ve lost your talent and try to fill it by force.

The wrong project. Sometimes the work won’t come because you don’t really want to do it. A commission that doesn’t fit what matters to you, or a direction you’ve already outgrown. Then the block isn’t an enemy, but a message.

What to remember

• A creative block is rarely laziness — more often it’s a sign that fear is pulling in the opposite direction to desire.
• Creating and evaluating are two phases; a block often begins when the critic comes in too early.
• Perfectionism demands that the first draft be a finished piece — so nothing gets made.
• Play isn’t the opposite of serious work but its precondition; you return to it in small, safe steps.
• If the block comes with exhaustion, loss of enjoyment or hopelessness, see a doctor — the answer then lies elsewhere.

If you’d like to talk about it, I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.