Getting Around Creative Obstacles

You’re writing, composing or painting — doing any work that employs your creative intelligence — and you run into a wall. You can’t see how to proceed. What to do?

“When I hit a wall, I usually stop and do something else,” noted the singer-songwriter Carole King. “This effectively turns the problem over to my subconscious mind, which keeps working on it under the radar. When I return to the task, my subconscious has often solved the problem before my ego has time to assert control.”

King is describing a technique I‘ve used successfully throughout my writing career, and so did my friend and mentor Elleston Trevor, the British novelist who wrote “The Quiller Memorandum” and “The Flight of the Phoenix.”

Elleston advised that you forget about the project entirely and let your already-programmed unconscious mind work on the problem without flogging it.

To that end, he recommended any semi-automatic activity that would keep you busy without absorbing your attention — driving, shaving, mowing the lawn, that kind of thing. The old saying about “sleeping on the problem” taps into the same wisdom.

And then, sooner than you’d think, without conscious effort, the detour around to your creative roadblock simply appears before you.