Get Started #4: Turn Down the Pressure

This article is for: Everyone!

One day, my wife, who makes audio art, was trying to think up a proposal for an exhibition—one that she really wanted to get into. Although she is a very creative person, with far more ideas than I have, she was stuck—she couldn’t make anything work. So, reluctantly, she gave up, and decided to submit nothing.

Then the very next day, she got the idea she needed!

This got me thinking: what had happened? Why had the inspiration come only when she’d stopped wanting it?

My conclusion was:

Although creativity loves constraints, it does not like pressure.

Because she so badly wanted to get into that exhibition, so she was pressuring herself to create a good proposal—and her usual abundance of ideas left her. Once she took off that pressure, the problem vanished!

You may well have experienced this yourself: times when you’ve squeezed yourself too hard, or felt too squeezed by circumstances (like a too-tight deadline), and a poem just won’t happen.

So in this article, I give several tools you can use to reduce pressure and free yourself up.

Constraints good, pressure bad

First though, let me explain what I mean by pressure versus constraints.

'“Constraints” means setting yourself limits that launch you—

and they are superbly useful for stimulating creativity.

I like to imagine your creativity as being like a horse in a pasture. Most of the time, it’s content to stand around and munch grass, because, hey, who doesn’t like relaxing and eating?

However, if you show this horse a fence, it loves to jump over it! It remembers the joy of leaping, of flying through the air, of getting somewhere new, and it launches itself.

That fence is constraint in action: a motivating, energizing limit.

It’s the difference between my saying to you, “Write a poem,” and my saying, “Write about a gift you received as a child.” The extra limits start your thoughts much better.

“Pressure,” on the other hand, stops you in your tracks.

Imagine if, when you showed the horse the fence, you also told it once of these things—or all of them:

“Horse, are you sure you’re good enough to jump this fence? Last time you tried, you didn’t make it. I’m afraid you haven’t got what it takes.”
“Horse, on the other side of this fence is a giant trap, and if you don’t jump well, you might get horribly hurt!”
“Horse, please, please, please, please jump this fence. It matters so much to me for you to jump it, and I might never get over it if you can’t make it. Just don’t make any mistakes, OK?”
“Horse, horse, you’ve got to jump this fence right now! Don’t stop to think, or plan, or get yourself ready—just go, go, go, horse, it’s too urgent!!”

Now, how does the horse feel after you tell it those things? Does it approach the fence with glee and exuberance?

No sirree! It would rather turn around and go back to chomping grass, because you’ve put it under too much pressure.

Creativity loves to be challenged to leap, but it hates to be told it has to, or that the task ahead matters too much. That takes away all the joy, all the freedom to play.

So, when you’re blocked, it may well be because you’re pressuring yourself.

Fortunately, you can combat this situation:

Here are eight tools in three approaches to get your creativity back online.

First approach: Take away the source of pressure

This one seems pretty obvious: if you have a pressure problem, get rid of the pressure!

There are certainly many ways to do this, and to some extent they depend on what kind of pressure you’re under. So if your deadline’s too tight, can you just extend it?

However, most of the time it’s not outside forces that exert the burden on us, but ourselves.

For example:

When we are expecting too much of ourselves
When we care so desperately about creating a particular kind of outcome—such as a “good” poem—that we shut down our abilities to play, explore, and experiment
When we deluge ourselves with negative self-talk, undermining our confidence.

In these cases, if you can recognize them, you can try to stop those mental patterns. Here are two tools to do that:

Tool 1: Reframe what’s happening.

Take the same situation, but look at it in a new way.

Let’s suppose you’ve put too much pressure on yourself to do well, and the poem doesn’t seem to be working. How can you reframe that?

You could:

Remember that most poems actually don’t work out, and that’s OK—there’s always another chance.
Remember that you can learn something from each poem attempt, and everything you learn will help you another time.
Remind yourself of similar struggles that other poets had, who also felt their work was no good. It’s not just you—this happens to everyone! (I tend to think of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, commiserating with each other!)
Remember your level of experience and learning. If you’re still fairly new to poetry, is it fair to expect brilliance of yourself?

I suppose it’s rather like turning the horse around, and reminding it there are other fences, other good parts of the field, other ways to be a good horse

Tool 2: Challenge your thoughts

I think most internal pressure comes from negative beliefs about ourselves and our writing—that’s we’re not good enough, that people will judge us, etc.

But those fears and insecurities are wrong—and you can prove it!

In this method, you dig out those beliefs, make them explicit, then come up with all the evidence you can to disprove them.

It’s a powerful technique, and though it does take some time, I recommend it. I explain it fully in this article, so I won’t do it in depth here. But it can actually make long-term changes in how you view yourself and your writing.

Second approach: Lower the fence

Instead of reducing the pressure to get over the fence, try making the fence easier!

Anything you can think of that will make it easier to get going on the poem can do this. Here are three of my favorites.

Tool 3: Break the task down into smaller pieces of writing

When I wrote my poem “The Place of Spreading Rock” for the Writing the Land project, I started by writing not a poem, or even a draft, but short phrases on individual index cards. Only later did I add phrases together to make a draft.

This is what I mean by breaking the task down: at first, write just parts of the poem, not all of it.

Or even, as in my poem, parts of sentences, not whole ones.

An alternative is to write just freewrites or messy prose: anything that might eventually go towards your poem, but is not trying to be the poem yet.

Then, later, you can sort through what you’ve got, select the promising parts, and try putting them together.

Making drafting into different stages like this makes each stage less demanding—in other words, a lower fence.

Tool 4: Write in small chunks of time

If you write in only short bursts, it’s much harder to expect so much of yourself.

Can you make a great poem in only 15 minutes? No—it’s impossible!

So short writing times can in fact make you feel freer again, because each time, the fence you’re trying to jump is only tiny.

Again, I’ve written about this much more in this article.

Tool 5: Find a starting point from outside yourself

If you’re stuck getting ideas inside yourself, why not get some help from outside?

Look for a phrase or an image in some other place, that you can borrow and use as your beginning. It might be:

A line from someone else’s poem
A song lyric
A news headline
A phrase taken at random from a book.

Doesn’t really matter what: just dip into other places for language that isn’t yours—and that therefore you can find and borrow without pressure.

Third approach: Rediscover the joy

Finally, a great way to battle negative feelings is to wash them away with happy ones.

In the case of excessive pressure, your delight in creation has been swamped by worry and doubt. So help yourself by doing something to get it back!

Tool 6: Play a game in the draft

Try setting yourself a fun, silly challenge in what you’re writing. For example:

Use exactly five words that begin with “p”
Use the name of your first lover/pet/boss somewhere in the draft
Write exactly four lines that use only monosyllabic words
Use every letter of the alphabet at least twice.

These games distract you, and give you something playful to focus on. They can work really well!

Tool 7: Do something fun first

Come to your writing in a positive, confident, mood, by doing something that always makes you feel that way.

You could go for a walk, listen to music, talk to your cat, make bread, read a poem—anything, so long as you’re pretty sure it will make you feel good.

Then go straight into writing.

Tool 8: Write something easier first

Lastly, if one piece of writing has too much pressure on it, try working on another one:

One that you don’t care about as much; or,
One that you already feel is working well.

In the first case, you’re reminding yourself of what it’s like to write just for fun. In the second case, you’re reassuring yourself that you can do it, have done it, and will do it again!

So, next time you’re blocked, try using one or more of these tools, and feel the pressure fall away and your creativity leap again.

Next Steps

Think of a poem that you’re blocked on, and see if you can work out, How are you putting yourself under pressure with this poem? How much are you expecting of yourself? What are you telling yourself about it?
If you find you are making pressure for yourself, choose a Tool from the article, and give it a try.
If it works, wonderful! You’re done.
If it doesn’t work, try another. Not every tool will work for you—and some might work one day, but not another! Keep going until you feel the joy come back into the poem.