What to do when your creative well runs dry

Tips for coaxing creativity out of yourself when you can't seem to find it anywhere

Shira

Feb 28, 2025

Welcome (or welcome back) to my writing journey!

How are you all doing?

A well outside a house — Photo by Frans van Heerden

This post is not about writer’s block.

What I’m going to talk about is something different.

I’m sure we all know the feeling of trying to think of something to write about but simply not being able to come up with an idea.

Creativity is an elusive thing, and there are many things that can impact it. During times with a lot of stress, for example, your brain is so busy being in sink-or-swim mode that it simply doesn’t have the capacity to be creative. Being in emotional turmoil can also greatly affect your creativity. When there is so much going on, you don’t have the bandwidth to create.

Many people use creative pursuits to get through these challenging times, but they often work on things they were already working on before. That’s different from what I’m going to talk about. Continuing something is usually easier than starting something new.

I happen to be blessed with a wonderfully active imagination, so I usually have lots of ideas all the time (whether or not they’re good is another story entirely). However, having an idea that will support an entire book is a tall task, and most ideas I have need to be combined together in some way in order to be able to do so. Maybe you’re like me. There are also people who don’t have ideas as often, but when they do, they’re amazing and can absolutely support a book. Maybe you’re like them.

Regardless of which type of person you are, there are times in our lives when we’re inevitably going to have trouble being creative. There are going to be times when the ideas don’t flow and nothing works.

In this post, I’m going to try to address what to do in those times. There is no easy fix, and because every person’s difficulty will be caused by different things, the proper solution for them is going to vary immensely. There’s no right answer, only what works for you. Here are some ideas for things you can do when you’re struggling creatively.

Have running lists of characters, settings and situations

In a previous post about my writer’s notebook, I said that in the ideas section I had a page dedicated to each of these three important story elements: characters, situations, and settings.

There are a few projects I have worked on over the years but never finished, so I started my lists with the elements of those stories so I wouldn’t forget about them. Then I spent ten minutes a day, for three days, thinking of new ideas for each page (one day each). It took me a while to get into that kind of creative mode, but I came up with some really great ideas and I now have two book ideas that I’m absolutely burning to write.

I already have a project I’m working on, so those two ideas will have to wait, but now I have material to write about in the future. I no longer have to contend with the thought that I’ve only had this one good idea and I’ll never have another one ever again.

Another benefit of having those lists is that I can mix and match those characters, settings, and situations and come up with a whole host of very different ideas, even if they share the same basic elements. If I have 10 entries per list, there are 1,000 possible combinations. That’s 1,000 story ideas!

If you’re having a hard time creatively and you’re struggling to come up with new ideas, having ready-made lists of them can be incredibly helpful. It takes away the stress and allows you to just get down to writing, instead of trying to force yourself to come up with an idea when you’re creatively depleted.

Try not to put so much pressure on yourself

I’ll use an analogy to explain this one. When you’re waiting to fall asleep, but it’s not happening, the worst thing you can do is try to fall asleep. Doing that will pretty much guarantee that sleep will elude you for the rest of the night.

Why? Because you’ve now given your brain something to actively focus on doing instead of letting it relax and wind down, which is the way to fall asleep. Also, by thinking about trying to fall asleep, you’ve now put pressure on yourself and are causing yourself stress because you need to be asleep. That stress further awakens your brain which pushes you further from sleep.

The same is true for creativity.

When you’re struggling to be creative, the worst thing you can do is try and force your brain to go into creative mode. By doing so you’re giving your brain a task to focus on other than creativity, while attempting to use the creative side, but instead you’re just taking up all of your brain’s capacity with the effort to be creative, not the creativity itself.

You’re also putting a ton of pressure on yourself, and not the good kind. When you stress yourself out because you’re not able to be creative, that’s going to snowball. You’ll feel bad about yourself for not being creative, which will lead to you being stressed about needing to be creative so that you can stop feeling bad about yourself, which will lead you to try really hard to be creative which won’t work because you’re stressed and overwhelmed by how bad and stressed you feel, which will make you feel even worse, which will make you more stressed, and on and on and on in a vicious cycle that will have no positive results.

Instead of doing this to yourself, try stepping back and taking a deep breath. Believe that you have a creative spark in you and that it hasn’t abandoned you. Don’t sweat the fact that you don’t feel creative right now, and have faith that you will be creative again in the future. Be kind to yourself. You will be ok. Let your creativity come back to you and don’t try to force it.

Revisit your Why

Your creative struggle could also stem from forgetting your reason for writing. Your Why. The thing that motivates you.

If you don’t know what your Why is, you should take a minute to think about what it could be. What is at the center of your desire to write? Why are you doing what you’re doing?

This is not the same thing as your goal. That’s your What. It answers the question “What are you trying to achieve?“ Your Why is the answer to the question “Why is that your goal?” or “Why do you want to achieve that?“ It’s the thing that provides you with the reason to write and the motivation to do it even when it’s hard (if you want to read more in depth about having a Why, I wrote a post about it a while back. You can find that here).

If you’re struggling creatively, it may be a good idea to return to your original reason for trying to be creative in the first place. Thinking about that reason can inspire you and return the wind to your sails. Even if it doesn’t immediately help you start creating again, it can help bring you back to the pure place where you started and free you from the shackles you might’ve unknowingly been bound in, such as people’s expectations of you, the need to see immediate success, the fear of failure, or anything else. This will help you stop putting so much pressure on yourself, so that your mind can be free to create in peace, without needing to worry about the results.

Take a break and work on other projects

This is the most obvious of the solutions.

If you’re having trouble with a certain project, take a break from it, let it sit, and come back to it later.

If you work on one thing for too long there’s a chance it will stagnate in your mind. It’s like working on a puzzle for too long, or searching for a specific lego piece. After a while your brain just kind of breaks down, and you won’t be able to find what you’re looking for even if you’re staring directly at it. Your eyes have glazed over, your brain has stopped perceiving, and no amount of effort will help you get where you’re trying to go.

The advice I was always given in those situations is to get up, take a walk around the house, come back, and then see if you can find what you were looking for. It always worked.

The problem is that your brain has become overstimulated to the point of numbness, which has stopped it from being able to perceive in the way you want it to. Walking away and doing something else has the benefit of refreshing your mind and getting rid of the overstimulation.

By letting it do something else for a while, you allow it to rest. Then, you can return to work with fresh eyes, and find the thing that was under your nose all along.

Taking breaks is really important, and that includes taking breaks from projects. If you feel that you can’t figure out how to move forward with a story, take a breather and work on something else. The length of the break will vary from person to person and from project to project, but whenever you feel that enough time has elapsed, go back and see if you feel differently. Do you see a way through your story now that you couldn’t find before?

You may also find that while working on another project you’ll start having ideas pop randomly into your mind for the story you’re letting sit. This happened to me with my current wip. I was shocked that while writing a Substack post I suddenly thought of an insanely good plot twist for my novel. I immediately stopped writing the post and made a note of the idea so that I wouldn’t forget it. I still felt like I wanted to let my wip in progress sit for another couple of days and let me tell you, I got so many ideas over the course of those days that when I started working on my novel again I felt transformed. All of a sudden I understood the path I wanted to take through the story in a much deeper way, and I saw the entire book in a whole new light.

Have you ever felt like your creativity has dried up? What did you do? Did it help?