I should have written this post almost two full months ago. The draft is saved here since then.

I’m having trouble with my writing, what startled me. I was used to write a lot, mainly in portuguese. Seriously, almost daily. But I never saw the writing as some kinda of creative work.

For me, writing was always about expressing your thoughts in a clear way. Like you and your buddy in some pub, drinking a beer, and you start talking about some subject until you make your point. It was all.

What I thought we need, then, to write well?

Good thoughts and good linguistic approach. Just that. No creativity involved.

But in the last few months, I stucked. I stucked hard. I couldn’t even think about sitting and writting. That led me to think about creativity after all. I’ll analyze some possible causes for my slump and I hope that you’ll identify something valuable.

A long time ago I watched this TED talk, where Elizabert Gilbert talked about the relationship about the artist and the art itself. Where does inspiration come from? What about creativity?

 What can interfere in your creative job?

I don’t know. I’ll start for what Elizabeth told in her TED talk, about the “success curse”.

And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called “Eat, Pray, Love” which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I’m doomed. Seriously — doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, “Aren’t you afraid — aren’t you afraid you’re never going to be able to top that? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to keep writing for your whole life and you’re never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?”

Sad, huh? Believe it or not, that could be the cause of my slump. No, I’m not a multi-millionaire with a book that turned into a successful Hollywood movie, but I did write a piece of text that stood out. To say the truth, I don’t even think that it was one of my best works, but after I saw public reaction, I got a little shocked. And a bit panicked: how the hell I’ll be able to live up with that?

I took some time to start writing again and I didn’t publish any of it. It stayed in my personal journal.

But, a past success was not the only cause. One important factor that people usually take for granted is that you have to create space in your life for your craft. For the last few months, I’ve been so damn busy that I couldn’t dare spend 30 min on writing one text. Yeah, it’s sad because my lack of priority, but that happened.

What do we have until now?

1. You have to create space in your routine, in your life to produce something valuable. And it has to be quality time; in another words, it has to be in the moment of the day you’re most productive; not late in the night, when you tired and all you want is bed.

2. It’s good to be aware of the success curse (that can happens without a huge, absolute success; a relative one is enough). Keep doing what you’re doing, don’t stop. Even if you don’t want to publish or show to other people your work, keep producing.

Now I’ll add :

3. Keep the basics running. We hugely underestimate the power of good food, good sleep and exercise. Our body is not a machine and although we can rationalize that we don’t need so much sleep or spending time working out, it is necessary.

Those is the kind of things that you do even though your brain is telling you to not bother. Do you know why? Because when things start spiralling out of control you don’t realize the mess is happening because you’re not doing the basics. It’s so simple that we take for granted.

So, to produce good work, make sure that your body is running well, that you are well fed and loved (yes, dating matters a lot. Why do you think that there are so many love stories out there?).

4. Make use of a good environment

Sorry to disappoint you, but you’ll not produce a masterpiece surfing around on the internet or while you’re watching television. Search for a quite place (for me works better in the morning) and build a distraction free environment.

For the writers, I recommend this software, the OmmWriter; it’s paid (really cheap) and there’s a free version. It is basically a full screen editor, with a beautiful and peaceful background, with smooth melody running, improving a lot your experience while you write. Take a look.

What about you, any tips to offer? I’d love to hear them.