The other day, I was sitting there, staring at the screen. You’ve seen the number of blogs I’ve written about writer’s block, and I was genuinely in an incredibly horrible creative…funk. The screen remained blank, to say the least, and I tucked my urges to write away in the corner of my head where they would forever reside in all their diminished glory. I walked away feeling more frustrated, with a creeping sense of guilt and dread as I thought I was “losing my creativity”.

The same thing happened two days later, when I tried writing a piece for my historical fiction assessment. I spent an hour and a half staring at the same old blank screen, unable to muster up the courage to write a singular word, and then shut the laptop, ticked it off my list in the pretence of motivated work and didn’t start again.

That dread intensified.

But, in my experience, I found a common denominator.

Even as I was walking away from my laptop in the pretence of motivated work, some part of my brain urged me to open ChatGPT, write a piece, memorise it and regurgitate it onto my exam paper. And that REALLY cemented the idea that I was losing my creativity.

It was a vicious cycle, really. We’d be doing a creative writing exercise, and the first urge to pop to my befuddled head would be to use AI. It’s less effort and produces great writing pieces. And then, in the case I WOULD commit such a crime, I just felt like a terrible person.

So about four days ago, I had a little cry about it. I didn’t want to use AI to write, yet my subconscious told me it was less effort. Yet, when I looked at my blank screen after not using AI to write, I felt worse about not being productive, about not being able to summon that easy imagination I had as a child. Which then further led to thoughts of every writing piece having to be PERFECT and how I was utterly failing to meet that goal, which led to shutting my laptop. So, like I said, a little cry.

I decided I would sit down for ONE DAY and write 10 minutes. Just 10, tiny little minutes. That I did attempted to do in yet another pretence of motivated work. It amounted to nothing, and I cooped up in a corner of my couch, slouched like a humpback whale, and drowned in a pool of negativity.

But when I talked to my mother about it, she said, try writing five minutes a day.

Ignoring the fact that that venture wasn’t going too great.

Thus, in my misery, I read some articles- first time in a long, long time, and found out, that no one “loses” their creativity. It’s a mindset, fostered by burnout, perfectionism, partly our overdependence on AI when it was only meant to be used as a tool, and of course, growing up.

I decided to do something then. Instead of being curled up in a corner of my couch like a humpback whale, I sat outside, in the backyard on a wonderful, windy summer evening, having mystical thoughts of being the emotional main character in a small-town Netflix movie. I can promise you; nothing happened the first day.

Then the next day, we went to the beach. Admittedly, there was less beach and more walking up the stairs and hiking through a nearby lookout point, but yes, beach. It was FUN, even though, on the few downsides, I was sweating buckets thanks to the wondrous Sydney heat, and the flies seemed to take a particular liking to my skin. Point is, I came back home, tired, exhausted, content and fulfilled, supplemented by a movie night, BUT most importantly…

For the first time in quite a while, I wrote. Without feeling horrible, without feeling stuck.

Now, I don’t know if I’m going to go back and delete all of it. If I think it’s terrible and decide to write something completely new- even if that takes a week more, I know I’ve regained the motivation to write. To want to express, to put emotion into something, to share that with someone else.

We spend so much time on our devices- we’ve got the Internet, AI, those funny YouTube shorts, an Instagram reel- but all that, although important, although helpful, in my experience, takes away from our imagination. From the innate creativity that we all think we don’t possess or have lost- but maybe, all it takes is a little change of perspective.

AI has become such an integral part of our lives- but it was never meant as a replacement. It was meant as a tool. It’s amazing when you need to study for science, or practice for an interview, or generate marking feedback on your papers- but using it as a replacement for what you can already do just because you’re feeling lazy that one day can negatively impact you- it did for me.

If this has happened to you, and this isn’t just for writing, really, for anything in general…

Remember that creativity doesn’t go away- it’s just waiting for an avenue. Try learning something new- sitting there playing a riff on a guitar that you haven’t touched for years, baking a cheesecake. Exercise, lounge in the backyard (and this has really helped me the absolute MOST), look at the hibiscus you’ve planted in the front, enjoy the wind of a summer evening, stare at the sunset and pretend you’re the protagonist of a film- it doesn’t matter. But somewhere along the way, you’ll find inspiration, a little sense of joy, from the smallest things around you, and once that dormant creativity latches onto that realisation, it flows without having to force it.

I think, most importantly, get off your devices. It doesn’t have to be weeks, months or even days- majority of our lives, studying, communicating, happens on our devices. But, for a few hours, for even a single hour to start out, you’ll find that spending time away from them opens your mind up to other ideas, to bigger goals- procrastination decreases, frustration decreases, that niggling urge to check your phone or stay in bed doomscrolling disappears.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to write even “five minutes a day”. To convince yourself that it’s okay to produce something “bad” without deleting it- it was and is hard for me.

So maybe, starting from the peaceful, simple things is what we all need instead.

And maybe you’ll find that that inspiration, that childish imagination was there the whole time after all.

Signing off…