The Creative Habit

The Creative Habit is a dancer’s blueprint to making creativity a habit, which she’s successfully done for over 50 years in the entertainment industry.

You can’t be creative on command. No one can. Not even the world’s most genius writers, musicians and painters. So how do they keep churning out hit after hit? Simple: they show up to work, every day. And then they accept that creativity itself ebbs and flows.

But whether they work or not is not up for debate. Inspiration or not, they put in time. Motivation or not, they create. Until doing the work has become a habit that feels as natural as breathing.

One thing you can do that’ll tremendously help in building such a habit is to design a starting ritual for yourself. Stravinsky played the same fugue by Bach every morning. I make a cup of coffee before I sit down to start writing. Twyla herself gets up at dawn, grabs a coffee and then hails a cab to the gym.

It doesn’t matter what your starting ritual looks like. As long as it signals you “it’s time to go!” it does the job. Pick something, set it up and start your creative habit today.

Every time you start a new, creative project, you can take a simple cardboard box, write the name of the project on it, and then put all of your resources and materials into the box. Whatever you need to complete the project goes in there.

Why is this helpful? A couple of reasons:

It represents a commitment to the project. As long as the box isn’t empty, you still have work to do. It shows you how far you’ve come. Even if the project stalls, you can always open the box, look inside and see what you’ve done already. It keeps everything you need neatly organized in one place.

Of course the box doesn’t do the work for you. It’s just a means of preparation and a token of your creative process. But it’s still helpful.

It doesn’t even have to be a box. You can use drawers, a folder, or even organize your stuff on your computer. As long as it creates order and commitment, it’ll work.

This trick comes from one of the most famous authors of all time: Ernest Hemingway. Combined with your starting ritual, it’ll really help get your hands, feet, or whatever you use to create your work, moving. If you leave your work right in the middle of something, where you exactly know what you want to do next, picking up again will be really easy. For example, Hemingway would always finish his writing sessions in the middle of a sentence. That…