10 things you can do right now to get creating again in midlife
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
When you started out in our 20s, you wanted to be an artist, and you set out to make your mark. Problem was, you were goddamn terrible at it. You didn't have the technique or the skill to match your style.
So you worked hard to get better. Slowly, step by step, you honed your skills and built a practice, striving towards that infamous 10,000-hour mark of mastery you’d heard so much about.
While you were doing this, you were also living your life. Perhaps you met someone, perhaps you made a family, bought a house, settled on a job to help pay the bills. Perhaps you’ve been single like myself but still had to deal with working that 9-to-5, trying to make your art grow as you grew older. Regardless of where you’re at, responsibilities came at you and you did your best to balance these with your art.
Then, slowly, you felt imbalanced and began to lose touch with your art. As you grew into your 40s, life got the upper hand over your art, it seemed. Creating anything at all seemed like a struggle. Until it wasn’t a struggle at all—because you left it behind.
For us, not creating hurts. It hurts like fucking hell.
You miss it but what can you do? You have no time at all. And when you do have time, you just want to relax and be away from the noise and the stress.
Oh sure every now and then you go back. It feels amazing! You think to yourself, “Why don’t I do this more?!”
And what's worse is not only do we feel this and experience this but our partner, our family, our friends, and our coworkers feel it too.
I'm here to tell you that the problem is not because you are a bad artist and especially not because you’re a bad person.
It’s because blocks build up over time, and the more time that we spend away from what we love doing, the more difficult it seems to reconnect with it consistently.
Much like I wrote about in my previous post about creating a consistent writing practice, you have to simply begin. Cut through the overthinking and overworrying bullshit that all of us artists go through and just do it with a small, simple, and easy step. Just one step to start you out.
The following prompts may seem ridiculous or simplistic at first as you scan the table of contents but keep in mind that these are meant to get you creating instantly and are not meant to be works of art. They’re not a consistent practice but the very seeds of one.
It doesn't seem very sexy to put on your running shoes if that's your only step but it's a vital step in a whole journey to begin a consistent workout practice.
You can begin again. Just start right now.
Right.
Now.
1. Doodle
The first thing you can do right now to get creating is one of the easiest. Set a timer for five minutes and draw whatever comes to mind. Don’t have a pen and paper? Use the notes app on your phone.
Don't let the critic in your mind stop you. Draw whatever comes to mine without judgment.
We can get blocked if we fall into what’s called an all-or-nothing cognitive distortion—if we can’t make important or powerful or meaningful art, we can’t create at all.
This goes for time as well—if you can’t carve out at least an hour or two a day to create, we’re not really creating. You’re bypassing those cognitive distortions to get right to doing what you want to do—create. Blocks are 99% all about your mindset.
That’s my doodle up there. I drew it between breaks of writing this post. All throughout this post, I’ll be doing every single one of these prompts. Yes, those too.
2. Write one sentence
Another easy thing you can do to get back in good with your muse is to write one single sentence. Pen and paper or typed in a note app in your phone. Or spoken as a voice memo.
Pro Tip: Do this for seven days in a row to create a flash fiction story.
When you start with one sentence, you start with the beginning of a story.
This exercise is a metaphor for this entire blog post—taking easy, small steps to help you gain momentum and confidence to do more.
Here’s mine:
One day, all the chicken spontaneously combusted.
Not Dostoevsky I’ll admit but an intriguing beginning to a story (albeit a sad one for the chickens).
3. Create a musical phrase
You can do this in several ways. You can pick up an instrument and play whatever comes to mind. You can open up a music making app on your phone or computer.
Don’t play an instrument? Pick up a pair of spoons and play to Soundgarden’s Spoon Man for inspiration (be sure to rock out at the spoon solo).
What I'm trying to hammer home is that you can create at any point in your day and it's easier than it's ever been. Technology has given us the ability to create art at will literally in the palm of our hand. We should be creating every single day.
How come we don’t? Mindset. Expectations. Ego.
I wrote a two-chord progression on my acoustic guitar. No lyrics, just the music. My fingers hurt a little, reminding me that I need to play more to build up my callouses.
4. Mess with your selfie
Use a photo or social media app to create filters of a selfie of yours. Make it weird. Make it cool. Make it dumb. Add text. Add stickers and different filters. Make it childish and foolish.
The idea here is to silence that secret snob that we as artist all have in our heads and just be childish.
Be a misfit. And what is being a true misfit? Being comfortable looking like a fool! Our inflated sense of worth may be one of the reasons why you’re not creating as much.
Because as we've read, it's not because this stuff isn’t available to you, but perhaps because of your mindset about what an artist is.
This is especially true if you've been working on a project with continuous edits, especially in a longer form, like a novel or a film. And there's nothing wrong with this, it's a vital part of the process.
The problem comes when we've spent too long away from creating for creating’s sake. This is a great way to refresh your mindset and get you to doing what your heart and spirit truly missed doing—creating with curiosity, wonder, and imagination.
I think I did a good job with my selfie. I felt kinda like a teenager, messing with all these filters. Perhaps I’ll start TikToking.
5. Dance
The next way to get you creating right now is to get up and dance.
But most of you aren’t reading this. You guys jumped to number 6 if you’re scanning or just hopped around to every number except this one. Your loss.
So to all those who stayed, get up and dance!
If you’ve got company, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and dance there. If you're on a crowded train car or bus, bob your head to the music. Shake your head, rock your shoulders, sway your hips.
In our ancient past, dance was a vital part of our culture. Dance was used in rituals and rituals were what kept them connected to their myths and each other. They danced for transitions, coming of age, the cycles of the season, marriage, and death. They danced to celebrate life, to stay healthy, and to feel good.
Even though we like to dance, this is difficult for us men in a post-modern culture that doesn’t teach us to do this anymore. The only times that I ever danced was when I was drunk until one day a couple years ago.
I’d rented a cabin for a few days in the western burbs of Illinois as a way to unplug and get back in touch with nature and myself. Without a tv and with very limited reception, I decided to put on some music.
Then I felt the urge to dance. First it was just stuff I picked up from dance videos, but then it became something new, something outside of my control.
That’s when I felt for the first time my body leading my mind. I was swept up in the music and it freed something in me. I was creating with my movements, expressing through my muscles. It was the best I’d ever felt and it was spiritual, God-like. I’ll never forget the song—Brian Eno’s “Song No.1” performed by Laraaji.
(That being said, I won’t be showing you a pic of me dancing. You guys will just have to use your imagination. Or don’t. Please don’t.)
6. Shoot a video
Shooting a video is another great thing to get you connected with your muse. Go to a camera app, aim it at something, and hit record for 15 seconds. Then hit play and watch it. What do you see? What do you hear?
When we look at life through a lens, it gives us a feeling of reverence. It means we're taking a video for some reason. And let me tell you: everywhere around you is a reason to record a video.
Whether it be nature or children playing or your partner cooking dinner or some random people walking down the street, life is beautiful and it needs to be encased in a frame of some kind.
I shot a 15-second video of a tree outside my window. And I heard some birds chirping. I noticed how green the leaves were. And as soon as I saw that, I wanted to put some piano music to it. That's what’s called tinkering, and I’ll talk about that next.
7. Edit that video
Upload the video to the app and just start messing with it.
You can put music to it, you can use filters. As artists, we wear different hats. We are filmmakers when we do this, so act like a filmmaker.
As soon as we are given a representation of something, artists want to tinker with it. That's the basis of what an art is and what it means to us.
It's all there right there for us to capture and tinker with. And it's as simple as shooting something, looking at it, and understanding how we can make it better through our own perspective.
I took my 15-second video of a tree and found some random music. And when I smashed them together, it created something rough but with potential. Most importantly, it created a feeling. And this was something that we’ve done our entire lives.
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8. Write a haiku
If you’ve been doing these challenges one by one, here’s one with a bit more oomph.
A haiku is a style of Japanese poetry that’s composed of three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables.
I don’t hate blank free verse poetry but whenever I read it, it feels like playing tennis without a net. I’m not saying that iambic pentameter is better, but when you try to write something with a syllabic structure, it gets the brain juices flowing (sorry, bad metaphor. Now you can’t stop thinking about your brain having juices).
We have to be challenged and not just create because that's the other half of the equation. First we create and then we edit. What are challenges that we can put in front of us?
An art form is like a puzzle our mind makes that we then try to solve.
Here’s my haiku:
My stomach’s empty
I could use something fruity
A smoothie is great
9. Make believe
This next thing to get you creating again right now in your midlife—it’s not for the weak. Oh sure, you danced a little bit ago, but this? This is not for the timid. In fact, it will push the very boundaries of your reputation as an adult and possibly your own sanity.
Ready? Take two random objects and make them talk to each other for two minutes. (Yes, two whole minutes playing make believe).
Now, I’d like to remind you that I am not a scientist and have absolutely no data whatsoever on whether this will help your creative blocks or not. But I guarantee it will be fun. And even enlightening.
We all possess storytelling qualities. It's part of who we are as myth-making creatures, it's part of who we are as meaning-making creatures. And I’d also like to say that deep down, we are still dreamers. We are dreaming misfits who just want to create. And misfits are fools. Big, dreamy fools. Embrace your misfit!
I did this with two pens, a red one and a blue one. And they had an enlightening conversation about how they both had black ink, even though one was red and one was blue.
And then the red one got mad at the blue one for some reason, but the blue one was perfectly fine and was understanding and eventually they became friends.
(I'm a grown man that just wrote those sentences. If I can do it, you can do it. Be a misfit!)
10. Build something
The final way to get you creating right now as a midlife man who's too busy or doesn't have enough time is to build something.
If you have some Play-Doh, go to it. If not, start building something for 10 minutes. Take stuff out of your kitchen or den. Build a shelter for your cat with cushions. Build a wall with your stocked toilet paper. If you have a garage, hammer a nail into a board and call it a coat rack.
Don’t make art with these things; build something physical.
Building something is baked into our history as builder creatures, but it’s especially important to keep in touch with this part because so much of our lives is now being built for us.
No one builds their houses anymore. We don’t make our shoes or clothes. And so by simply doing this, we're reconnecting with that builder part of ourselves. And building something from scratch is absolutely amazing.
I built a few pyramids with my Kanoodle game. I love these mind puzzles. They’re tactile, colorful, and challenging. I highly recommend them!
~
I hope I showed you a few things you can do to help you get creating again in midlife. And as I was finishing the first draft of this post, I realized that it kinda sorta had a structure already.
Look: I began with doodling as the first thing and then finally building something as the last. You can't build something without a plan and you can't have a plan without having an idea and you can't have an idea without having a doodle of it.
I didn't mean to do this on purpose, but it's a great point: every project begins with something very, very small, easy, and slight. A doodle, a dance, a picture. Starting small in your art not only will lead you to building them but the process itself will help you.
It's almost like we're not so much creating anything but getting out of the way of what wants to be created and simply helping it.
Of course it’s much more complicated that this. There's 1000 other steps you have to do to go from creating nothing to having something.
But it begins with one simple, easy step first.
You can do this. So get to it.
I want to hear from you, guys
Please take a second to comment below on what things you created and how they felt.
