How Forcing Consistency is Making Creativity Harder
In order to improve at a skill, you have to practice. And practice. And keep practicing.
A creative practice benefits your wellbeing and enjoyment of life, and its purpose, but it’s not something you have to do everyday.
There’s always conflicting opinions of what it takes to be a ‘good’ creative. We’ve seen this ‘advice’ repeatedly. Most of it nearly impossible for the majority of people who don’t already make a comfortable living as a creative. And even those who do sometimes struggle with the consistency of an every day practice.
Whether it’s writing an hour a day (at 5am if that’s your only window), slogging through The Artist’s Way, cramming all your creative time into a two-week retreat in the mountains to ‘get back that spark,’ or drawing every day no matter how you feel, where you are, or what is happening in your life.
Enforcing the idea that a consistent practice has to be a daily one is impractical at best, and potentially harmful to the point of people abandoning their creative self altogether at worst — something we have seen numerous times, and experienced.
So what does consistency really mean?
A daily practice is great if it’s sustainable for your life. It’s not always easy, but it’s often more feasible if you make the practice small enough and give yourself grace when life gets chaotic and you step away for a few days (or weeks — it’s your practice after all). Incorporating a practice into your routine is a lifestyle change, and it takes trial and error to find what works for your life and creative goals. But, that routine does not have to be daily. Ever.
If your goal is to become a better writer and finish a novel draft in six months, that is achievable without writing every day. The more regularly you write, the easier it will be for a habit to form, even if your habit is two hours every Sunday. It’s also a better way to build that into your life rather than burning out by trying to cram that into a three week window. (Someday we’ll talk about the positive and negative facets of the now-defunct National Novel Writing Month in regards to speed-running through a full draft in 30 days.) However, only you can learn and know and adapt to your best routine.
Picking a daily routine to build consistency works for some. But forcing a routine on someone who isn’t ready for it, without backup, without acknowledging the pitfalls and difficulties they’ll face, without a secondary option, is setting them up for failure (and we’re not just talking about a creative practice routine now).
A sustainable creative practice is one you enjoy doing (even when it’s hard), that fulfills you (even when not everything does), that works your mind and body in a way that feeds your overall wellbeing (even though at times it seems frivolous and indulgent to tend to anything other than the basic ‘essentials’ of surviving your day to day life). That may not be achievable or realistic to do daily until you’ve calibrated your life to accept this routine, and its effects, as necessary. That’s not a small block to overcome. Worrying about the perceived ideal of being a ‘consistent artist’ while building this can make you want to quit.
Quitting is what this busy world, over reliant on tech and selling and consuming and productivity, wants you to do. Creating a false narrative that makes you feel guilty or unworthy of finding ways to express yourself through art, music, design, cooking, textiles, photography, etc. feeds into the global consumerist idea that we exist to produce, consume, spend, and repeat. And to do it loudly, publicly, so the algorithm knows what our hopes and insecurities are.
That kind of idealized consistency narrative harms every aspect of what a creative practice needs to be in order to support you as a human. A practice is just that: practice. Even when you’re an expert, you still need to warm up, to keep trying new things, to flex those creative muscles to stay limber in your field. But you also have to learn to listen to your body, your mind, observe your own habits, needs, goals, and align them in a way that feels not only doable but something you want to try to make happen as often as possible — even if that currently is only five minutes a day, twice a week.
All progress is good progress (though it’s not all linear…). All practice is meaningful practice. But only when you’re doing it for you. And you alone get to decide what consistency looks like for you.
Need support figuring that out? Sticking with it? Reminding you that your practice is for your benefit and not that of any algorithm?
That’s what we’re here for.
