For the artist who has seventeen unfinished canvases, a notes app full of ideas, and somehow still nothing to make
There is a specific kind of awful that comes with creative block.
It’s not like being tired, or busy, or uninspired in a temporary, fixable way. It’s sitting down to make something and feeling like the part of your brain that knows how to do that has just… gone offline. You’re still you, you still care about your work, but the connection between wanting to create and actually being able to create has been severed somewhere you can’t quite locate.
If you’re reading this, you probably know exactly what I mean.
I’ve been an artist and a business owner for a while now, and creative block has visited me more times than I’d like to admit. Sometimes it lasts a few days. Sometimes it stretches into weeks where I sit in front of a blank canvas or an empty document and feel nothing but a low hum of frustration and guilt. The guilt is always the worst part, isn’t it? The feeling that you should be making things, that other people seem to manage it just fine, that you used to be able to do this without thinking so hard about it.
What eventually pulled me out of it, reliably, repeatedly, almost every single time, was journaling! Not as a creative practice in itself, but as a way back to my creative practice. A kind of side door into the house when the front door is locked.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
Why creative block is rarely actually about creativity
The first thing worth understanding about creative block is that it’s usually not a creativity problem. It’s a feelings problem wearing a creativity costume.
In my experience, block tends to show up as a symptom of something else going on underneath. Burnout. Fear of what other people will think. Grief, sometimes, even the small everyday kind. Comparison to other artists. The lingering anxiety of an unresolved situation that has nothing to do with your art at all. The creative part of your brain is remarkably sensitive to all of the above, and when it senses something is wrong, it shuts the door and refuses to let you in.
Which means that the solution to creative block is rarely purely creative. You can’t always paint your way out of a block by forcing yourself to paint. You can’t write your way out of writer’s block by sitting there and staring harder at the page.
What you can do is go and look at what’s actually happening underneath. And that’s where journaling comes in!
The journal as a diagnostic tool
Before journaling ever became a creative tool for me, it was a diagnostic one.
When I feel blocked, the first thing I do now is open my journal and just… report. Not perform, not try to write something worth reading. Just report the situation as it actually is. Something like: I haven’t been able to work on anything for the past week and a half. Every time I sit down to paint I feel immediately like I want to close everything and go watch TV instead. I feel disconnected from the work. I don’t know whether that’s because I’m tired or because I’m scared the new piece isn’t going to be as good as the last one.
That last sentence, the one that showed up while I was supposedly just “reporting”, is almost always where the real information is.
Journaling externalizes the thoughts that are running on loop in the background of your brain, usually just below the level of conscious awareness. Once they’re on the page, you can actually look at them. You can ask follow-up questions. You can find out whether what you thought was a creativity problem is actually a fear problem, an exhaustion problem, a comparison problem, and knowing that changes what you do about it.
Here’s a few prompts for when you’re feeling blocked and want to diagnose why:
- When did I last feel genuinely excited about my work? What was happening in my life at that time?
- What would I make right now if I knew nobody would ever see it?
- What am I afraid this piece of work is going to say about me?
- Am I blocked, or am I burnt out? What is the difference for me personally?
- What am I avoiding by not creating?
You don’t have to answer all of these. Find the one that draws you in most and start with that.
Getting the noise out of your head so there’s room for ideas
Here’s something I notice about creative block that doesn’t get talked about enough: it often isn’t emptiness. It’s the opposite of emptiness.
The blocked creative brain is frequently absolutely packed. Packed with to-do lists and half-formed thoughts and anxieties and the thing someone said three days ago that you’re still annoyed about and a mental running tally of every responsibility you haven’t yet fulfilled. There’s no room for new ideas because every available space is already occupied by noise.
This is where the classic morning pages practice comes in, and where it genuinely earns its legendary status among creative people. The concept, popularized by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, is simple: first thing in the morning, before you do anything else, you write three pages longhand. No editing, no reading back, no filtering. You just keep the pen moving until the pages are full. It doesn’t matter what comes out; the point is to empty the mind of whatever accumulated overnight so you start the day with a little more breathing room.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m not consistent with morning pages, and I don’t think you need to be either. Some weeks I do them every day, some weeks I don’t touch them. But when I’m in a block, they’re one of the first things I come back to, because they work. Not because they magically generate creative ideas, but because they clear enough space for ideas to eventually show up. Think of it like doing the dishes so you have room to actually cook something.
Journaling to reconnect with why you make things
One of the quieter and more insidious effects of creative block is that it makes you forget why you started. You’re so deep in the frustration of not being able to make things that you lose sight of what making things actually means to you, what it feels like when it’s going well, why it matters enough to be this upset about.
Some of my most useful journal entries have been the ones where I just write about a piece of work I made that I loved. Not a critical analysis of it; just a memory. What the room felt like when I was making it. What music was playing. The moment it stopped being a struggle and became something alive. What I felt when I looked at it and thought, yes, that’s it, that’s the thing I was trying to get to.
Writing those memories down isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. It’s a reminder, documented in your own words, of what’s possible. It’s evidence, for the version of you that’s currently convinced she’s lost it forever, that she hasn’t.
Try these prompts when you need to reconnect:
- Describe a piece of your own work that you’re genuinely proud of. What made it feel right?
- Why did you start making things in the first place? When was the very beginning?
- What does creating feel like in your body when it’s going well? Where do you feel it?
- What does your art give you that nothing else quite does?
- If you could make absolutely anything, with no constraints (time, money, skill, audience expectation) what would it be?
That last one is a particularly good one. The answer often points toward what you’ve been holding yourself back from, which is frequently where the block actually lives.
Using your journal as a sketchbook for ideas
Journaling doesn’t have to stay in the realm of feelings and processing. Once you’ve done some of that work, or even alongside it, it can become a genuinely generative creative space.
I use a section of my journal almost like an idea sketchbook. Not for actual sketches (although there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that), but for half-formed concepts, random images I can’t stop thinking about, questions I don’t have answers to yet, combinations of things that don’t obviously go together but feel interesting. These entries are messy and unpolished and often don’t make complete sense even to me when I read them back. That’s entirely fine, because that’s not the point.
The point is to give your brain a low-stakes space to think out loud. When everything you create has to be finished, has to be good, has to be shareable or sellable or at least defensible, the creative brain tightens up. The journal, by its nature, is not that. It’s the place where you can think in fragments without having to turn them into anything.
Some prompts that help me in this mode:
- What have I noticed this week that I can’t stop thinking about?
- What would I make if I had to use only things I could find in this room?
- What’s an idea I’ve dismissed as “too weird” or “too much” that might actually be worth exploring?
- What’s a question I keep coming back to that I’ve never tried to make something about?
- If this block had a colour, a texture, a shape, what would it look like? What would the opposite of that look like?
That last one sounds a bit abstract, I know, but I’ve genuinely started pieces from answers to questions like that! Sometimes the way in is through metaphor rather than logic.
The permission slip journal entry
This is something I started doing during one particular block that I was struggling to shake, and it’s become something I come back to regularly.
I write myself a permission slip.
It sounds a little silly written out like that, but stick with me. A lot of creative block is rooted in unspoken rules we’ve accumulated about what our work is supposed to look like, who it’s supposed to be for, what it’s allowed to be. Rules that often aren’t even ours, they came from a teacher, a parent, an off-hand comment someone made once that lodged itself somewhere and stayed.
Writing a permission slip means writing out, explicitly, what you’re giving yourself permission to do. It might look something like: I give myself permission to make bad work. I give myself permission to try something completely different that doesn’t fit with what I’ve done before. I give myself permission to not know what this piece is about yet. I give myself permission to find this difficult and keep going anyway.
The effect of putting that in writing is hard to explain until you do it, but there’s something about seeing it written in your own handwriting that makes it feel more real than just thinking it. You’re making a record of it. You’re not letting yourself take it back.
A few practical notes on actually doing this
Journaling advice can feel a bit overwhelming if you’re not someone who already has an established practice, so here are a few things I’ve learned from actually doing this rather than just theorizing about it:
You don’t need a beautiful journal. I know that’s ironic coming from someone who hoards aesthetic stationery, but genuinely, the journal you actually write in is better than the one you’re saving for when you feel worthy of it. A cheap spiral notebook works. So does a notes app, if that’s what you’ll actually use.
You don’t need to write for long. Ten minutes is enough to get something real onto the page. If ten minutes feels like too much, try five. The habit matters more than the duration, especially at the start.
You don’t have to read it back straight away. Sometimes it’s useful to, especially if you’re trying to track patterns in your creative rhythms. But sometimes the value is just in the writing, in the getting it out. You don’t have to do anything with it afterward.
Write like no one is reading, because no one is!The journal is the one place on earth where you can be genuinely, ungenerously honest with yourself. Don’t waste it writing something you’d be comfortable showing someone else.
Be patient with it. Journaling as a creative practice works slowly and then all at once. You might write for a week and feel like nothing is shifting, and then one morning something will crack open and you’ll have more to make than you have time for.
The block is not permanent
It feels permanent. I know it does. When you’re in the middle of it, it can genuinely feel like this might just be who you are now, someone who used to make things.
You’re not! The block is not a verdict. It’s information, and it’s asking you to look somewhere you haven’t looked yet.
Your journal is a good place to start looking.
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